The flower began growing again. Its stem swelled, becoming almost barrel-like at the base, while the top foot or so remained more slender, only as thick around as my wrist. The petals grew longer, taking on a thousand iridescent colors, so that when they rippled, it was a mesmerizing rainbow, as rich as the sheen of oil on crystalline water. The scent grew stronger as well, and began to smell of so many impossible things, Graham’s spaghetti and my grandmother’s perfume and Mandy’s favorite hairspray and cookies fresh out of the oven. Every good thing the world had ever known was in that smell, and all I wanted was to be closer to it.

No, whispered a deep-buried instinct, and I stayed where I was, watching the flower become glorious and grand. First smiled at me.

“The pollen is no longer needed to attract a mate, for the flower is no longer determined to reproduce. It will transform itself instead, and it spends its resources on attracting the resources to fuel that transformation. The soil is good. Now is when it finds out whether the world is good.” The vine-like structures around the base of the flower rose delicately off the ground, hovering around knee level. It was easy to picture them striking and seizing their prey, pulling it toward the center of that glorious flower—

—which began to open, not like a mouth, but like a second unfurling, like the petals within the petals were finally grown and mature. What they revealed was nothingness, a maw leading into the center portion of the plant.

First saw me seeing the change, and nodded. The vines pulled tight against the bulb of the body. The flower closed itself, first internally, and then externally, as the dragonfly petals furled tight. It drooped before finally dropping off, leaving the severed stem behind as the barrel swelled and glowed from within, ripening with the strange biological process of duplication.

“This is, sadly, often where we fail,” said First. “We find the world is not good, that the soil is sweet but the flesh is sour, and we watch our seedlings wither and die unfed, unable to reproduce themselves. We can and will try again, seeding the world over and over until it decides to grow. And when it grows…”

The barrel swelled further before it finally burst, spilling a small version of me—of First—of Anastasia Miller out onto the ground. It stood, wet with the juices of its alien origin, and wiped the sap from its eyes before it smiled and ran away, disappearing into the flowers like the phantom that it was.

“Once our seedlings become mobile, they grow. They absorb the nutrients and possibilities of their new world, and they find the ones who look like them, to tell them of our coming. Some will die during this process, unable to digest the specific slice of world they have consumed, and we will learn from that. Others will sprout later than their siblings, and join them after the bulk of the work has been done. All are welcome, always. We are so joyous when we reach a new garden and find a good harvest waiting for us.”