Was it because they were rattlesnakes, the baddest of the bad and the kings of this desert? Or was it because they didn’t register me as human? I wanted it to be the former. I was direly afraid it was going to be the latter.

Someone’s foot scuffed the concrete behind me. I turned my face toward the sun and closed my eyes, refusing to let myself look. If I didn’t know, I wasn’t deciding who to tell. If I didn’t know, I wasn’t confirming my loyalties—not yet. Even though really, my loyalties had been decided the moment my unthinking vines had grabbed hold of a little girl whose only crime had been following a delicious scent into the forest where she wasn’t supposed to go.

“I know what the cultural literacy is for,” I said. “I know why they dropped us here so early.”

The person behind me said nothing as they moved to the edge of the pool and sat down. I resisted the urge to reach for their hand. Whoever they were didn’t matter as much as the fact that they were there: they were listening.

“Cats don’t hate mice. They like to chase them. They like to hunt them. They may even like killing them, although I guess most cats like eating them better than they like the hunt itself. Mice are a means to an end. Want a full belly, catch a mouse. So when a mouse gets away, the cat isn’t mad. The cat doesn’t care enough to be mad. If you put a cat in a barn full of mice, some of the mice will always get away. They wouldn’t, if the cat cared more. If the cat knew how to hate.”

Silence. If I hadn’t been able to hear my unknown companion breathing, I would have thought that I was hallucinating.

“They sent us here to learn how to hate. To learn how to think and hold grudges like a human. The cultural literacy isn’t about preserving human history or making sure the universe will remember them. It’s about telling us what form the rebellion will take. We can’t afford to be cats chasing mice. We can’t afford not to care. We have to know how the mice think. We have to…” I stopped, catching my breath, thinking of all the people who’d mocked me or made me feel like I was crazy over the years. All the people who’d seen my insistence that I was from space as an excuse to treat me like I was less than they were.

My own people—my species, whatever it was—had done this to me. Had turned me into a freak among the ones who should have been my own kind, and all so I could learn to hate.

I opened my eyes. I turned. Graham didn’t flinch away. Instead, he slipped his hand into mine and looked at me sadly, nothing but acceptance in his eyes.

“We have to hate,” I whispered.