“It’s fine,” she said. “I know my role in this little drama. I was the resistance and now I’m the collaborator, remember? I sold out my own kind when they refused to listen to me. So now I’m on your side, in as much as I’m on anyone’s side. When your ships get here, I’m going to be at the front of the queue to step onboard and find out everything there is to know.”

“Then you’ll switch sides again and betray us all,” said Jeff sourly.

“Yes, but you’ll know it’s coming, and until you have more humans, you can’t afford to kill me.” Toni’s smile was almost serene. “A flock of chickens is expendable. The only chicken you have is worth the world.”

David, sitting next to her and playing the spare chicken in this scenario, said nothing.

I looked around the room, at this little group of people I didn’t like and hadn’t chosen, and asked the only question left that mattered:

“How long do we have?”

“Not long,” said Tahlia. She tilted her head back, like she could somehow see the sky through the ceiling, and smiled. “Not long at all.”

Chapter 13

Tucson, Arizona: August 7, 2031

Invasion Day

1.

As it turned out, we had until midnight.

I was asleep, walking through the forest and listening to the chiming, delicate whispers of the flowers surrounding me. The flowerbeds pulsed as they twined over and around the forms they cradled, my fellow invaders sinking deep into the play of roots and stems and breathing in the scent of a distant, alien world. I walked on, not wanting to disturb my peers or draw them into conversation. What would we talk about, anyway? The only thing we had in common was where we’d come from. That wasn’t enough to make us friends. The people I was living with were proof enough of that.

Besides, we didn’t need to talk to be together in the forest. We only needed to be. This was harmony, this was home, and conversation would only have complicated it. I wondered whether the people we would have been, if we’d been allowed to sprout here instead of scattered across the Earth, would have even wanted to converse. Maybe quiet and solitude came naturally to us.

But no. That couldn’t be right: the flowers grew in great tangled heaps, constantly chiming, constantly in conversation. This forest was a form of communication, sketched between us in nothingness and involuntary thought. We came from a social species. We had to.

Did that make us the aberrations, as children of Earth who had grown up isolated and untrusting? I looked toward the nearest flower-filled hollow, worrying my lower lip between my teeth. The flowers would know. The flowers always knew.

// come // they whispered. I took a step forward.

The forest flickered. Then, with no warning or fanfare, it began to grow.