Human hate crimes were down, except for the part where most of the people being attacked because they were from outer space were actually from the apartment complex down the block, the one that had always been viewed as “other.” Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter anymore, because finally, there was something that could be hated without any consequences. We weren’t from around here. We didn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.

One man, upon seeing the first strips of green on his wife’s back, had set her on fire. They had been married for over a decade. According to the reports, his actions had been fully justified, and while he was likely to go to trial, he was unlikely to face any real consequences. Killing a walking, talking plant from space wasn’t murder, after all.

It was probably a good thing we were an armada and not a friendly diplomatic mission. By the time our ships got here, they were going to have so much to avenge.

The sound of someone walking down the hall got my attention. I raised my head and watched Mandy enter the room. The spring in her step was long since gone, replaced by a weary plodding so out of character that it hurt. She should have been home with her things and her coworkers, planning her costumes for the next con and keeping herself distracted from the impending alien invasion. She should have been, for this last little stretch of time, human. Instead, she was here, in a house packed with aliens and surrounded by desert, watching the world revile her before they even knew her name.

I felt bad for her. But not too bad. Of the two of us, she was the one who’d had a choice.

“Hey,” she said, when she saw me. “Any news?”

“Plenty,” I replied. “Not anything good, though, and not anything game-changing. They’ve caught three more of us; they’ve killed two.” I chuckled mirthlessly. “It’s funny, you know? None of them can say for sure that we killed the kids we replaced. Maybe we made the replacements at birth. Maybe we’re like the Midwich Cuckoos, and there were never any ‘real’ kids to swap out. But the second humans know we’re not, they’re happy to start with the murder.”

“You drink blood,” said Mandy. “You need it to live.”

“Yeah, but they don’t know that.” We knew they didn’t because they hadn’t been broadcasting it on every news report. As soon as it got out that we were not only aliens, we were predators, it was going to be game over. The little rumbles of resistance from the fringe groups were going to stop, and it was going to be all anti-alien, all the time.