It wasn’t a mechanical motion, or a human one: there was nothing jerky or jointed about the motion. It slithered. It was the sound grass makes when ruffled by the wind, all smoothness and natural yield of one moment into the next, so that it becomes impossible to tell where the motion truly began or ended. Jeff moved closer to the edge. I wanted to call him back, but my breath caught in my throat, becoming something thick and choking, impossible to either spit out or swallow.

Tahlia squeezed my hand.

Below us, someone—someone whose voice I didn’t know, someone unfamiliar—shouted something, and the specks of light began moving faster, converging on the pit’s edge. There was another shout, and I knew Jeff had been spotted. With that many beams of light slashing around, it had only been a matter of time before someone lit up the green shade of his skin and realized they were standing within striking distance of an alien.

The shouts got louder. The specks of light began closing on Jeff. I saw him turn toward us, but only for a moment, only long enough for him to realize that he couldn’t make it back to us in time, and even if he did, he couldn’t use us to save himself; he could only endanger us all. He looked back to the people, the humans, who were coming toward him, and then he took the only avenue he had left.

He jumped.

Jeff fell soundlessly into the pit, disappearing in an instant. That deep, distant movement repeated itself, a shaking, a slithering. The people with the lights shouted more, distance and dismay turning their voices into wordless noise. Some of them aimed their lights over the edge, trying to see what was below them.

Someone screamed. It didn’t sound like Jeff. It didn’t sound like anyone I knew, and maybe that was a mercy. Two vines as thick around as my leg rose out of the pit, wavering in the alien air, against that diamond-studded sky. They grabbed the nearest figure from the pit’s edge and calmly, deliberately tore it in two. The blood was a black flag against the darkness. Several more someones screamed, dropping their flashlights in favor of pulling their guns. Each bullet was a bright, futile flash summoning another twisting vine out of the shadows to grab and rend and destroy.

// come // whispered the voice of the forest, ripe and ready to burst at the back of my mind. It brought the taste of sweetness with it, like I’d filled my mouth with a blackberry the size of my fist. I took an involuntary step forward, my hand slipping out of Tahlia’s. She shot me a startled look.