It was like someone had taken a botanical garden and Disney’s Epcot theme park and crammed them together before enclosing them in a geodesic dome made of glittering, translucent material. Everything was green and brown, alive and vital. The trees were a patchwork, clearly originating on a hundred different worlds. As I watched, something that looked like a fruit bat crossed with a toucan soared overhead, only to be snatched out of the air by a vine that whipped out from a tree that resembled nothing so much as a piece of rainbow chewing gum stretched into a corkscrew. The bat-thing didn’t have time to squawk before it had been stuffed into a woody maw and consumed.

I blinked slowly, breathing in the mingled pollens of a million different worlds. The air held scents I couldn’t identify, thick and rich enough to make my head spin. I was pretty sure the oxygen balance wasn’t the one I was used to. I blinked again, trying to figure out whether putting my head between my knees would help the way it was supposed to. Did my body still work that way? Clearly, plants could get dizzy—I was dizzy as hell—but that didn’t mean the solutions were the same.

Sitting down seemed rude, since this was clearly a walkway, and moving closer to those alien trees seemed like a very bad idea. What if they thought I was the same as the bat-thing, and tried to swallow me? It would be a stupid way to die after everything I’d been through already.

Something touched my arm. I jumped, whipping around and then staggering as the dizziness intensified.

The something that had touched at me backed up a bit, its dozens of segmented limbs waving in what I automatically translated into apology. It had a face that looked like something from the lemur house: big, round eyes, a small, pursed mouth, and no nose to speak of. Its torso was more like that of a gigantic skink, covered in overlapping scales, and its “arms” were explosions of tentacles, each ending in a barbed hook. Following its body down continued the skink theme, until it reached floor level and became more like the result of an unholy melding of millipede and squid.

And every inch of it was green. The same family of shades and gradations that I saw in my own mirror every morning. There were no commonalities in our shapes; we couldn’t have looked more like we came from different planets. At the same time, something deep in my instinctual memory looked at this thing, this impossible thing, and knew we were kin. However much the shapes we wore might vary, it seemed that green was the color of the seeds we’d grown from, and so green was the color we would be forever.