There was a certain insidious appeal to his words. If we assumed the armada was not going to be on our side, we could join forces with the humans who were inevitably going to form a resistance. We could be the good guys when the dust settled, the new Vegetable Americans taking our oaths of citizenship and helping to make this country great. Although Tahlia was Canadian, so she might not go for that. And according to Toni’s research, there had been seeds all over the world, which meant a lot of countries would need to agree not to punish us for coming from another planet and eating kids before we had the brains to stop ourselves. And—

And people would still taste like summer vacation felt when I was a kid, and I would still know that we were lying to ourselves. The armada didn’t send us here because they wanted to betray us. I might not have a clear idea of why they did send us—not yet—but I knew it had been for a good reason, and I knew we still belonged to them. The forest, with its reassuring rustling leaves and beds of welcoming flowers, was proof enough of that.

No species that dreamt of a place like that, of a communal peace so strong it endured even over gulfs of space and time, could ever throw its children away. We would be alien to our ancestors when they arrived here, as alien to them as they were certainly going to be to us, but we would all be the same in the forest, and we would all have the space we needed to understand.

“I don’t think that’s the case,” I said, delicately tugging my hand out of Graham’s. He looked at me with bewilderment, but he didn’t try to hold me when I clearly wanted him to let go. “They wanted us to be here when they arrived. We’re not just atmosphere testers.”

“If we were, they wouldn’t have needed to send seeders,” added Tahlia. “They could have planted ordinary trees to test the environment here. For all we know, they did. Maybe there’s a strange tree in every forest on this planet, something that shouldn’t be there, comfortably growing, proving the soil here is good for us.”