That had been the house for the past week: lots of judgment, lots of silence, and lots of aimlessness. Senator Davis had moved in full-time, claiming to be able to serve his constituents just as well from Arizona as he could from Washington DC. David and Toni were working constantly on their star charts, convinced that if they could just figure out where the invasion was coming from, they could somehow make it go back.

After the third day, Graham had started hesitantly helping them. I should probably have been hurt by that, but honestly, it had been more of a relief than anything else. He had something to keep him busy while I was outside of his reach. More and more, all I wanted to do was sleep.

When I slept, everything was okay, because when I slept, I wasn’t part of a species coming to take over a world that didn’t belong to us. I was in a world that did belong to us. I was home.

With every passing night, the forest grew grander, the trees straining for the sky like gravity had been rescinded, the dragonfly-petaled flowers growing lusher and denser in their chiming groves. The sound of crystal petals knocking against each other was a constant now, lulling me to sleep and waking me in triumphant peals. There was a language there, something I couldn’t understand and didn’t want to, because it wasn’t for me. What the flowers said when they were alone was theirs. I didn’t need to share it to be grateful for its existence.

// here // they whispered, when I—when any of their bipedal children—drew close enough to converse. // here, welcome. coming, here. coming, soon. // Their language, strange and subtle as it was, was getting easier and easier to understand. All it cost was a few sheets of skin, peeling away while we slept, to be found like dried-out husks at the foot of the bed when the morning came.

We were blooming, all of us, faster and faster all the time. Even Tahlia, who insisted her own blooming was over, replaced by flowering—which seemed like basically the same thing to me, and maybe that just meant my own flowering hadn’t started yet, or maybe it meant I didn’t recognize it. Whatever the nomenclature, the process was definitely accelerating. My own skin was more than half-green, and while there were no mirrors in the forest, I knew I no longer looked even remotely human when I walked there by night. None of us did. As for what we were …

When I opened my eyes, it faded, replaced by a quiet sort of regret, like somewhere deep down, I was sad that I would never be made of twisting vines and trembling fonds. Like my bipedal, almost-human shape was somehow wrong. That was the worst part of all this. The feeling that I was wrong.