Outside our retreat, the whole world was looking for us, and for people like us. Our faces—mine, Graham’s, even Senator Davis’s—had appeared on the news a few times, circulated and recirculated through social media. Interestingly, Graham was branded as a possible alien, while the senator was labeled a sympathizer and possible traitor to his own kind. The intel these people were working from wasn’t perfect. And still they didn’t find us.

We were lucky that way. Some folks had vanished from the forest while their bodies were asleep, snatched from their beds while they were defenseless. Surprisingly few of them had been betrayed by their families or loved ones, possibly because, as we went, I was on the more social end. Three whole people—four, if I wanted to count Roxanna—had been primed to notice my disappearance. Most of the people I’d met in the forest hadn’t even had that much.

Maybe that, too, was part of the reason we’d been dropped here so far in advance of the armada. If the flowers in the forest were an accurate reflection of the flower that birthed me, it was easier for them to consume children. They were too small to duplicate a fully grown adult; it would have strained the resources of the root system past sustaining. So we all started out as children, seemingly human, inwardly alien, running across this strange new world with children’s eagerness to see everything, touch everything, learn everything. That was useful. That made us better at gathering the information the armada needed. But even the least social children are likely to have people looking out for them and taking care of them, making sure their daily needs were met—making sure their skin wasn’t falling off and revealing the green ripeness underneath. The invasion had been timed to give us all time to reach adulthood.

It was funny, in a way. The more I thought about the timing of things, the way it had all been laid out and double-designed, the more obvious it became that some things were universal. I could posit a hundred things about not only my own species but all the other aliens we had met and devoured as we made our relentless way across the cosmos. Life spans had to be roughly equivalent for the majority of sapient races, or else our planting season would have been wrong. Biology had to be similar enough to let us adapt, a few fatal allergic reactions notwithstanding.

We were the weeds of the universe, and if we could grow somewhere, then that place was similar to everyplace else we’d sprouted.

I sat at the kitchen table, sipping a glass of blood mixed with orange juice and scrolling through the news reports on my tablet. Another six aliens had been captured. I recognized three of them from their locations, although their faces were too human to be familiar. In the forest, they were miracles of leaf and vine and flower, not glowering bipeds in handcuffs being shoved into the back of government vans.