“Was that always there?” My voice barely crested above a whisper. I couldn’t take my eyes off that torn place, that green place.

My future.

“It can’t have been,” he said. “I grew up a normal kid, you know? The ‘I am from space’ stuff didn’t even bother people until I was like, nine. I skinned my knees. I saw the dentist. I got sick, I got better, I did the stuff kids are supposed to do. If I’d been green inside, somebody would have noticed. Didn’t you ever go to the hospital?”

Mutely, I nodded. Pneumonia when I was eight; a broken ankle when I was eleven. X-rays and antibiotics and human systems functioning and breaking down in human ways. None of this smooth greenness. None of this impossibility.

“I think it started growing when the signal played. Like we had to hear it for it to take hold of us.” Jeff glanced at the door as he taped his bandage back into place, checking that we were still alone before he nodded toward my elbow. “It still itches?”

It took me a moment to remember that he’d seen me scratching at it in the forest, where I had looked under his bandage for the first time. Only it hadn’t been smooth green skin there, had it? It had been something else, something even less human. Something that could never have been concealed under a simple sheet of taped-down gauze. I couldn’t quite remember what I’d seen—it slipped away whenever I grabbed for it, like my subconscious understood that I wasn’t prepared for the truth—and yet I knew it had been impossible.

“Yeah,” I said softly.

“Is he going to stand with you when the skin tears?”

I flinched. I couldn’t help it. Jeff smirked, and somehow that was the last straw. I took a step toward him, hands balled into fists, fury in my eyes. To my immense satisfaction, he took a step back.

“Graham is none of your concern,” I snapped. “Be as smug as you like. Be as confident in our victory as you want, but be assured, I will protect what’s mine, and I will see them through to the end of this invasion. Do not touch them. Do you understand me?”

“I didn’t threaten your people.”

“You were going to. It goes from ‘They’re useless’ to ‘They’re dangerous’ to ‘Get rid of them.’ You think I don’t understand how this sort of thing works? I come from the same vine you do. I am grateful you got us out of there. I would like to know someone who is like me and understands what’s about to happen. But if you lay one finger on anyone I have claimed as my own, we’re done. Do you understand?”