It was difficult to believe we had each somehow managed to consume an antisocial misanthrope by random chance. It was also tempting to believe her, to let everything she said be the absolute truth. Of course I’d lived Anastasia Miller’s life the same way she would have lived it, apart from the whole “alien plant person” thing. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I hadn’t stolen anything from anyone.

I knew that wasn’t true. But oh, it was tempting to pretend.

“These humans, they are the dominant species, yes?” First looked at me expectantly.

I couldn’t lie to her. I didn’t know why I couldn’t. It just didn’t seem possible. “Yes,” I said. “They number in the billions.”

“The billions,” she said, in a tone of delighted wonder. Her eyes grew heavy-lidded and hungry. “Think of the harvest to come. We will dine for years on the spoils of this garden.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“You will.” Her hand cupped my cheek. “You have a question for me.”

I had a million questions for her. Right now, however, there only seemed to be one that mattered.

“What are we really? When we’re not wearing something else’s shape?”

“Look.”

Slowly, her human mien melted away, first turning green to match my skin, and then shredding completely. Vines slithered out of her hair as it receded, and flowers bloomed where her ears had been. Then she began to grow, swelling and expanding until she was the size of a small hill. Flowers with dragonfly-wing petals sprouted out of her back, turning their faces toward the sun, and I knew without asking that this was how seeds were made: our ancestors grew the flowers from their own bodies, and when they withered, they left their children behind. I had grown from a flower like those ones. These were my kin.

Her eyes, such as they were, were holes filled with gleaming beads of sap. I didn’t know how she could see me. I didn’t know how she could think, with every inch of her made of vegetation and captive loam, chunks of soil held by the roots and creeper vines that ran all through the bulk of her body. I blinked, and realized that my eyes were filled with tears.

“You’re so beautiful,” I whispered.

She had no mouth. She had no lips. And still, I felt she smiled.

2.

The forest dissolved as the vines that had been covering my face let go, setting me gently on a smooth wooden path that wound off into the distance. The lights were as bright as the noonday sun, and I was surrounded by trees. Real trees this time, not the phantoms of the forest. The path was warm beneath my feet, and surrounded by beds of greenery the likes of which I had never seen. I stared, shamelessly drinking it all in.