Opening the door revealed a long hallway, and the sound of voices drifting back from a central gathering point. I walked toward them, realizing as I did that I couldn’t remember entering the forest the previous night. It had never been a nightly occurrence for me, but I’d never been sharing physical space with two of my fellow aliens before. It was going to take a little while for me to figure out what the new normal was.

I stepped out of the hall into the dining room. Graham and Mandy, who had been stealing bites of egg off of one another’s plates, stopped what they were doing and smiled at me. Jeff, catching the shift in their attention, looked over and smiled. The others—David and Lucas—kept eating.

“Where are Toni and Tahlia?” I asked, heading for the table. There was an open seat next to Graham. I settled into it, reaching for the platter of toast.

Jeff shook his head. It was a very small motion: if he hadn’t been directly in my field of vision, I would have missed it. I stopped, hand extended, and frowned at him.

“I’ll get you a smoothie,” he said, standing and heading for the back of the room.

“What Captain Grumpy-pants is trying not to say in front of the humans is solid food isn’t really good for you,” said Mandy. “You can eat it—it won’t make you sick or anything—but you’ll only get nutritional value from it if you prime your system first.”

“Which you do by drinking blood.” Lucas stabbed his eggs with more force than strictly necessary. “In case you needed the reminder. Drink blood, digest cereal. Don’t drink blood, have fun shitting cornflakes for a week.”

“Lucas,” said Mandy quietly.

“What?” He looked up. “Don’t you like me reminding her that things have changed? That things are still changing? We’re prisoners in this house because we agreed to help a friend. A friend we thought was a person. I think she can handle a little honesty.”

“I don’t need to be reminded that things are changing,” I said, looking pointedly at my arm. “And I am a person. I never claimed to be human.”

“You never did anything that would prove you weren’t,” he countered. “I work in tech. I talk to people every day who want so badly to be special that they’ll swear they see ghosts, or talk to the fairies, or have prophetic dreams. Weirdoes who don’t hurt anyone don’t get corrected when they’re weird. They get tolerated. You were tolerated.”

His words, true as I knew them to be, still stung. I looked at him as levelly as I could manage, and said, “Well, maybe it’s time to think about who else you may have blown off for no good reason.”

“Maybe it is,” he agreed, and stabbed his eggs again.