Anastasia continues to insist, when prompted, that she is a representative of an alien species. It is an unfortunate truth that children can be cruel: her peers delight in triggering this idiosyncratic response, going out of their way to ask her what planet she’s from and whether she will be going back there at the end of the school year. It would be in her best interests to channel this creative energy in a new direction.

If I may be frank, Ms. Miller, while it is against school policy to blame students for their own bullying, Anastasia does not make things easy on herself. I am sincerely concerned about her well-being if she does not find a way to move past this fantasy, and quickly.

Thank you for your time.

—letter home from Mr. Roy Hagar, tenth-grade teacher. Sent November 2012.

Chapter 9

Tucson, Arizona: July 27, 2031

Eleven days pre-invasion

1.

The forest unfolded in a beautiful array of impossible greens and browns, their colors familiar and yet new, like they were coming into prismatic focus. I stood. The air was cleaner than it had ever been, and the taste of it was faintly acidic, like it was eating away the skin at the back of my throat. The sensation wasn’t painful—almost the opposite, a quiet cleansing that would make everything better, if I just allowed it to happen.

“There you are.”

I whirled.

Jeff was standing on a low rise some ten feet behind me, one hand resting on the trunk of an alien tree, a weary expression on what remained of his face. The bandage was gone. So was most of the skin. In their place, he had a twisting mass of vines and roots, some thin as filaments, others thick as garter snakes. They were in constant motion, twining around each other in complicated knots that unlooped themselves as quickly as they had formed.

Breath catching in my throat, I looked down at my left arm.

The skin was gone from the elbow to the tips of my fingers, replaced by a mass of vines thicker than the ones on Jeff’s face, darker in shade and covered with thorns like a blackberry creeper. I raised my arm to the level of my eyes, drinking it in. There were small white flowers with petals like a butterfly’s wings hidden at the center, visible only in glimpses between the moving vines. The thorns smelled sharp and astringent, and I knew they were tipped in some sort of complicated poison, something that would stop hearts with a touch.

“Is this…?” I whispered, and stopped, unable to finish the question.

“Once,” said Jeff. I looked up. He was watching me with sympathy in his still-too-human eyes. “A lot of worlds ago. You and me, we’ll never have this in the real world. Only here.”

“Why?” I couldn’t keep the relief out of my voice; I didn’t even really try. After a lifetime lived in a human skin, the thought of becoming whatever Jeff was turning into—whatever I was turning into—didn’t appeal.