Well, I was about to test that belief. The blooming wasn’t going to stop, and if it was going to give way to the flowering—whatever that was; if it was a more extreme form of what I was already going through, I couldn’t imagine it was pleasant either to experience or to watch. The blooming hadn’t hurt so far. It was pins and needles and itching, and the sensation of my humanity—which I’d never asked for but had always been able to count on—dropping away to reveal the invader underneath. Jeff said we would always look vaguely human, the consequence of sprouting and growing to maturity in these forms, but how did he know? Honestly, how could he know? He had as much information as any of us: his own experiences and whatever he’d been able to glean from talking to people in the forest. But they knew as much as we did. It was a vicious cycle.

What was coming might hurt or it might not. Might leave me recognizable and might not. Honestly, my real concern was whether it would make me dangerous … and whether it would drive away the people who’d been willing to come this far to help me. So I looked at the first bag of blood, and then I looked at Graham, and finally I turned to Jeff.

“If this is what I need, I guess I don’t have much of a choice about that,” I said. “What do I do?”

Jeff wrinkled his nose, clearly uncomfortable with whatever he was about to say. That actually helped. If Jeff, who was shunting off his humanity as quickly as he could, didn’t want to tell me what came next, at least that meant I wasn’t going to be the only one who didn’t enjoy it. I wasn’t going to be suffering alone.

“You drink it,” he said. “That’s all.”

“Wait.” I stared at him. “We’re going full Little Shop of Horrors here? Blood? We’re vampire plants from outer space?”

“Actually, H. G. Wells did it long before those science fiction hacks,” said a familiar voice. I turned. Toni was strolling into the room, David a living wall behind her, a cat-in-the-cream expression on her face. “Finally embracing your roots, are you, Miss Miller? I guess it was inevitable. You’re all going to reveal yourselves as the aliens you are, and we’re going to sit back and watch the world turn against you.”

“You talk like a supervillain, and yet you’re still with us,” I said. “That’s a little self-contradictory, don’t you think?”

“No better place to be than the bosom of the enemy,” she said.