“Tell her about the ‘almost,’” said Graham softly.

Jeff scowled. “I’m not sure she’s awake enough for that.”

“She deserves to know.”

I looked back and forth between the two of them as I tried to determine exactly what it was that they were trying to hide—or not hide—from me. “Tell me what?” I finally asked, gaze settling on Jeff. “What did you do?”

“It’s not what I’ve done, it’s what I’m about to do.” He held up his other hand, showing me a cooler. “We’ve been networking while you were in custody. It was helpful, actually, having you under lock and key. Not because we didn’t miss you—we did—but because it meant we had proof the humans were starting to see us as a real threat.”

“Tahlia mentioned something about passing information along.”

“She found me through a pair of intermediates. She’s a forestry worker, you know, with a botany degree. Currently on indefinite leave from her job due to an undisclosed medical problem.”

Lucas scoffed. “Undisclosed, my ass. She’s green.”

“Which is normal and natural for her,” said Jeff implacably. “She’s been researching our biology for years. She may have been the first of us to know for sure that we weren’t kidding when we told people we were aliens. Having the ability to run invasive medical tests on herself helped. If we’d all had access to fully equipped labs, we might have figured certain things out years ago.”

I didn’t say anything. He was talking around something. The green skin of his right cheek had a darker tint to it that matched the human-looking flush on his right. Whatever this was, it didn’t make him comfortable: not yet.

“Photosynthesis was never going to be enough for plants with your size and energy needs,” said Graham. Jeff almost looked relieved to have the reins of the conversation taken away from him. “Trees can do it, but they have extremely slow metabolisms, and they depend on very specific soil and water conditions. You … you’ve been a plant this whole time, and yet you move as fast as a mammal. You burn hot and have a very high energy requirement. There was no way you could do that and not need something … well, else.”

“We think—Tahlia thinks, and I agree—the human shells we’ve been growing inside have been sustaining us this entire time. We constructed a crude machine from the people we used as our imprints, and that machine was enough to keep us healthy until the blooming began.”

I blinked slowly. “Like the yolk in a chicken’s egg?”

“Very much like,” Jeff agreed. “It was a self-replicating system, until it took too much damage. My system is in the process of shutting down. Yours has failed.”

My stomach clenched painfully. “What does that mean? Am I going to die?”

“No, sweetie.” Graham kissed my temple. “Keep listening.”