Page 9 of Overgrowth

The drink service was finished, and most of the plane had settled down to read or nap or drink their tiny glasses of overpriced scotch. The seat-back entertainment centers were on all around us. About half of them were playing movies, recent blockbuster fare edited for content to make them safe for peeping tots who might be seated in the next row over. The other half…

“All these people are watching the news,” I said quietly, bending my head so that I was talking only to Graham and not to the people around us. The ongoing roar of the airplane’s engines made privacy easier to find, even as I couldn’t shake the conviction that we were still being watched. “Did something happen?”

“I don’t know,” he said, voice pitched equally low. “Do you want me to turn it on?”

It wasn’t going to be safe to be on an airplane once our ships arrived: I knew that, with that quiet conviction that was always with me, the conviction from which all the facts and feelings about my species of origin arose. When we took the skies, we weren’t going to share them anymore, and we weren’t going to be checking passenger lists for our implanted scouts. My own people would strike me down as easily as they would slaughter every human in this floating metal box, and they wouldn’t grieve for me after it was done, because a few deaths were the cost of doing business on a galactic scale.

More, maybe, because if I was foolish enough to get on a plane when the signal got louder and the dreams got stronger and the itching under my skin got harder to endure, I would be too removed from my roots to deserve a shot at surviving the invasion. I didn’t know what shape the slapping-down would take, any more than I knew what the ships would look like when they arrived, but I knew that the time for this sort of travel was drawing to a close. It was one of the reasons I’d insisted we go right away, rather than giving Graham time to settle in and rest after his most recent trip.

The other reasons were more selfish: I was scared. The invasion was coming, and my people were coming with it, my wonderful, terrible people, the root of everything I was, the reason I was on this planet. They had sent me here with only the most rudimentary awareness of my nature, and now, finally, they were going to be where I could ask them questions. I felt like a child being promised access to the real Santa Claus, or a religious official getting the opportunity to talk to God. Was my lack of specific knowledge a flaw in my training or a side effect of my having taken the form of a human so young, with a mind too unformed to retain fine details? Or was this all by design?

What good would it do for an invasion to begin with untrained, unprepared scouts stumbling through enemy territory, announcing themselves at every opportunity? I didn’t understand. That, more than anything else I had ever encountered, had me doing what should have been unthinkable, and questioning myself. What if I was wrong? What if I had been wrong for my entire life? What if I wasn’t an alien, just a kidnapped little girl who had been so traumatized by whatever had happened to her that she had shut it all out, refusing to let it color her daily existence?

I might not be an alien at all. Just one more human being in denial, meat for the mill that was now sailing, implacable and slow, through the vastness of space.

“No,” I said, and put my head down against his shoulder. “Leave it off, or put your headphones in if you want to watch. I don’t want to know.”

“You’re going to find out sooner or later.”

“I know. That’s why I don’t want to know here or now. I can wait until it matters, and let it happen then. Right now… it can’t change anything. The FAA hasn’t grounded the planes or demanded we turn back. There aren’t any ships in the sky. Humanity is still in charge here. For now.”

I couldn’t see Graham’s face, but I felt him shift in his seat, twisting to look down at me. The plane was a little more than half full—an artifact of the undersold flights taking off from airports everywhere, I was sure, although that endless, twisting security line might have had something to do with it. Half of our fellow passengers might still be back in Seattle, trapped in the Byzantine web of supposed safety, unable to move either forward or back until the TSA decided they weren’t a threat.

“You’re really worried,” he said. “What are you afraid of?”

“Nothing.” I closed my eyes. “Everything. What people are going to do when the aliens get here. What the aliens are going to do when they get here.”

He stroked my hair. “You’ve been here for years. You haven’t done anything that bad.”

“I jaywalk sometimes.” I wanted to tell him about the way people viewed crowds: how as long as less than seventeen percent of the members of a group were female, the men wouldn’t be bothered by them, but as soon as they hit eighteen percent—or, heaven help us, more than that—they became a problem. How people thought of a crowd that was one-third women as female-dominated, how a group that was one-third Black was thought of as anti-white, and so on, and so on. Everyone in the world is the product of their local culture, the good parts and the bad parts at the same time, and we can’t get away from it.

The culture I grew up with said being an alien invader was a bad thing, and my choices were going to be turning my back on the people who made me or betraying the human race. That was a little worse than jaywalking. That was a little more difficult to see as simple.

Graham let me be an alien because I was an alien when we met, and because, as he’d said, I had never done anything to hurt anyone. I didn’t even squash spiders. I didn’t like very many people, but my misanthropy was the harmless kind, too gentle and reserved to actually cause a problem. I could hate the world as much as I wanted. I was never going to set the thing on fire.

That was going to change soon. I could feel it in my bones, in the strange hum of my blood, which seemed to be getting louder day by day. I left my head on his shoulder, and I left my eyes closed. I knew, without being able to articulate the question, that the time for moments like this was coming to an end. Soon enough, everything was going to change. Whether it changed for the better—whether it was possible for it to change for the better—was anybody’s guess. I didn’t think so, though. I was pretty sure that, as far as the people of Earth were concerned, things were about to get much, much worse.

4.

The forest again: always the forest. There was a time when I could dream of other things, of shoes and ships and ceiling wax, of cabbages and kings… but that time was in the past, covered by a mist of pollen that smelled like honey, sweet enough to lure in almost everything. It was a little shocking to open my eyes and find myself standing there: I hadn’t been sure I could reach the forest when I was on an airplane, hurtling through the sky at such great speeds that even the clouds couldn’t keep up.

It was hard to tell whether this was a vote in favor of the forest being real, or a piece of proof that it was all a figment of my imagination, a construct I had put together to protect myself from whatever it was out there that I imagined was a threat to me. It was also hard to care. I was walking in the shadow of the trees. I was safe.

The nagging itch at the crook of my left arm distracted me from the study of the rippling colors in the bark around me. I scratched at it idly as I walked, looking for the shallow bowl of flowers. They could tell me what to do. The flowers never left the forest, and they always knew what to do.

“H-hello?”

I whipped around, startled, and found myself facing a man around my age. His skin was darker than mine, brown a few shades deeper than his eyes, and his hair was black and straight, flopping down over his forehead. There was a bandage taped to his right cheek, shockingly, almost obscenely white. He stared at me. I returned the favor.

“You can’t be here,” he said.

“I was going to tell you the same thing,” I countered. I took a step back, still scratching the interior of my left elbow. “This is my forest.”

In the distance, a sound like dragonfly wings rattling together, and the thick, oddly spiced scent of honey. The man cocked his head, clearly listening to the sound. I frowned, wary to the last.

“It’s not yours,” he said finally. “It’s not mine, either. It’s theirs. ”

There was a wealth of information packed into that word, possessiveness and familiarity and fear and loathing and yes, hope. Hope that soon, all of this would start making sense, and we wouldn’t be babes in the woods anymore, wandering endlessly, never knowing where any of this was going to end. The forest would end it all.

I looked at him more carefully. He was a stranger. He could have been any man on the street, dressed in his windbreaker and blue jeans. He could have been my brother, differences in complexion and bone structure aside. Something about him screamed “family” to me, screamed it all the way down my spine, like electricity seeking a grounding wire.

From the way he was looking at me, he was feeling something similar. Then his gaze shifted, going to the crook of my elbow, and his eyes widened, more like an owl’s than a person’s.

“You’re like me,” he breathed.

Confused, I looked down. My constant scratching had broken through the skin, tearing it until I should have bled. There was no blood. Instead, a hairline cluster of green, fibrous vines showed through, curled at the ends, like the wires on a scrubbing brush. I stared at them. They didn’t disappear. Cautiously, I reached down and tugged on the longest one.

The pain was immediate and electric, racing through a series of connections that felt like a spider web underneath my skin. I let go of the tendril, and the pain receded.

“You can’t pluck them,” said the stranger. “If you try, it hurts. Don’t worry, though. They’ll get less tender with time.”

I turned my attention from the tendril to him. “What do you mean?”

“Look,” he said. Reaching up, he began to carefully peel away the bandage, talking as he did. “My name’s Jeff. I knew I wasn’t the only one, but you’re all so far away, you were always just voices in the vines. I never thought I’d get to meet one of you. Not before the invasion started. Where do you live?”

“Washington,” I said, lips numb. There were hints of darker green behind the bandage, like whatever he was about to show me wasn’t… human. Like the essential humanity we had been hiding behind for so long was finally getting ready to fall away and reveal our true forms, whatever those might be.

I wasn’t ready. I might never be ready. I had always been an alien, but I had been a human at the same time, able to walk through the world without drawing attention to myself.

“State or DC?”

“State.” I didn’t look away. I couldn’t look away. This wasn’t the time to start running: not if I ever wanted to stop again. “We’re on our way to Maine.”

“We?” He paused in the process of peeling down the bandage. “Is there another of us with you? Will they be joining us?”

He sounded so hopeful, so lonely, that I wanted to lie. Instead, I shook my head and said, “He’s human. He wants to hear the signal in its raw form. To talk to the scientist who intercepted it. We’re trying to figure out…” I stopped, letting the words taper off.

The stranger smirked. “Trying to figure out whether it’s real, huh? Well, don’t worry. You’ll know soon enough.”

He yanked the bandage away.

I sat upright with a gasp, opening my eyes on the cabin of the plane, and on Graham looking at me with open concern.

“Bad dream?” he asked.

I grabbed the inside of my elbow with the opposite hand, feeling the unbroken, still-human skin there, and sagged in relief.

“Bad dream,” I agreed.

Under my hand, my elbow began to itch again.