With every passing night, the forest grew grander, the trees straining for the sky like gravity had been rescinded, the dragonfly-petaled flowers growing lusher and denser in their chiming groves. The sound of crystal petals knocking against each other was a constant now, lulling me to sleep and waking me in triumphant peals. There was a language there, something I couldn’t understand and didn’t want to, because it wasn’t for me. What the flowers said when they were alone was theirs. I didn’t need to share it to be grateful for its existence.

// here // they whispered, when I—when any of their bipedal children—drew close enough to converse. // here, welcome. coming, here. coming, soon. // Their language, strange and subtle as it was, was getting easier and easier to understand. All it cost was a few sheets of skin, peeling away while we slept, to be found like dried-out husks at the foot of the bed when the morning came.

We were blooming, all of us, faster and faster all the time. Even Tahlia, who insisted her own blooming was over, replaced by flowering—which seemed like basically the same thing to me, and maybe that just meant my own flowering hadn’t started yet, or maybe it meant I didn’t recognize it. Whatever the nomenclature, the process was definitely accelerating. My own skin was more than half-green, and while there were no mirrors in the forest, I knew I no longer looked even remotely human when I walked there by night. None of us did. As for what we were …

When I opened my eyes, it faded, replaced by a quiet sort of regret, like somewhere deep down, I was sad that I would never be made of twisting vines and trembling fonds. Like my bipedal, almost-human shape was somehow wrong. That was the worst part of all this. The feeling that I was wrong.

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.