Maybe that, too, was part of the reason we’d been dropped here so far in advance of the armada. If the flowers in the forest were an accurate reflection of the flower that birthed me, it was easier for them to consume children. They were too small to duplicate a fully grown adult; it would have strained the resources of the root system past sustaining. So we all started out as children, seemingly human, inwardly alien, running across this strange new world with children’s eagerness to see everything, touch everything, learn everything. That was useful. That made us better at gathering the information the armada needed. But even the least social children are likely to have people looking out for them and taking care of them, making sure their daily needs were met—making sure their skin wasn’t falling off and revealing the green ripeness underneath. The invasion had been timed to give us all time to reach adulthood.

It was funny, in a way. The more I thought about the timing of things, the way it had all been laid out and double-designed, the more obvious it became that some things were universal. I could posit a hundred things about not only my own species but all the other aliens we had met and devoured as we made our relentless way across the cosmos. Life spans had to be roughly equivalent for the majority of sapient races, or else our planting season would have been wrong. Biology had to be similar enough to let us adapt, a few fatal allergic reactions notwithstanding.

We were the weeds of the universe, and if we could grow somewhere, then that place was similar to everyplace else we’d sprouted.

I sat at the kitchen table, sipping a glass of blood mixed with orange juice and scrolling through the news reports on my tablet. Another six aliens had been captured. I recognized three of them from their locations, although their faces were too human to be familiar. In the forest, they were miracles of leaf and vine and flower, not glowering bipeds in handcuffs being shoved into the back of government vans.

Agent Brown was being smart about the arrests: I had to give her that much. Somehow, there was always someone standing by to capture the moment the “alien terrorists” were brought to justice, and somehow, the chaos of bringing them in always resulted in a torn sleeve or a missing jacket—anything to reveal the patches of green on their arms and throats. We came in every shade of the verdigris rainbow, from a green so pale it was almost like ivory to a green so dark it trended into black, and the photographers captured it perfectly, over and over again. See, said those pictures; see how unlike us they are. How strange, how foreign, how alien.