Senator Davis silenced him with a look. “Please, son,” he said. “National security has been a farce for a long time. We’re frankly lucky we haven’t had the keys to the White House stolen and the whole place posted as a vacation rental. Which someone would attempt to occupy, getting themselves shot by the Secret Service. When we’re having a good week, we don’t leak nuclear launch codes. National security says, ‘Try not to start a war you can avoid.’ It doesn’t say a damn thing about aliens. Even if it did, we’re not the only ones on this planet. Every single country on this big blue marble gets to have an opinion about an alien invasion. Most of them, it turns out, feel negatively.”

“What does that have to do with you being here?” I asked.

“I’m getting there,” he said. “Agent Brown stood in front of a room full of people and said, ‘The aliens exist, the aliens are definitely real, we had one in our custody, we let it get away.’ Then she took questions. Most folks wanted to know if we were here to enslave the human race.”

“Eat, maybe, but you don’t seem like the enslaving type,” said Mandy.

Senator Davis laughed. “I like this one,” he said. To Mandy, he added, “For an oxygen-sucking primate, you’re all right.”

“Thank you?” Mandy ventured.

“Think nothing of it.” His attention returned to me. “She didn’t say anything about our dietary needs. I assume…?”

“They never got around to testing me on human blood,” I said.

“Amateurs.” He shook his head. “Well, regardless, she’s held her little press conference, and she had sufficient proof to rattle a few cages. They’ll be putting their oxygen sniffers in all the airports by the end of the month. They’ll get plenty of false positives off senior citizens and the unwell, but they may flush out one or two of our scouts if we can’t warn them all that the airports are unsafe. Tell me, Stasia, before your blooming began and your condition became apparent to the naked eye, did you reliably believe in your own nature? Or did you, at times, question whether you might have fallen to a very specific and seductive delusion, one which painted you as special, unique, with no need for human mores?”

“I thought those were supposed to be princess fantasies, not space-plant fantasies,” I said.

Senator Davis smiled. “To each their own.”

“Right. Um. To answer your question, sometimes I sort of doubted myself, but I was so consistent, and if I didn’t try to think about it, I knew I was telling the truth. I couldn’t be anything aside from what I was.”

“And why do you think we were planted here so early?”

“Cultural literacy,” I said, without hesitation.

“That’s the answer every one of us gives,” he said. “Do you know what it means?”