Humanity had two choices: try to clean up their mess and undo the changes they had already made to their home planet, or run for someplace that wasn’t in quite as bad of shape. Naturally, they’d gone with the latter. Seattle and its environs were growing fast enough to put kudzu to shame. Almost everyone I knew with a spare room was renting it out, even the people who would have been happier living on their own, because there was no housing. The former Californians complained constantly, about everything from the rain to the buses to the state of the roads. None of them offered to go home. For better or for worse, climate change and the tech industry had given us a glut of people, and they were our problem now.

I hugged my purse against my chest, trying not to pay too much attention to the people around me. Most of them were ignoring me as fiercely as I was ignoring them, eyes fixed on their phones or closed entirely as they focused on the songs playing through their headphones. It seemed like the more people we packed into a small space, the more time everyone spent trying to pretend no one else was real.

My therapist calls that “disassociation,” and says it’s part of why I continue to say I’m an alien. Whatever happened to me during those three days, it was bad enough to make me disassociate from my species. It was the kind of trauma most people will never have to deal with, and I should feel lucky that a little disassociation was the only thing I’d come away with.

Well, that and the nightmares, and the flower with wings for petals, like some hybrid of plant and insect, impossible, incredible, blooming just out of reach. No matter how many times I dreamt of it, I could never reach it, never pluck it and have it for my own. I wasn’t worthy. Maybe no one was.

Or maybe it was the flower that would destroy the world.

The bus turned onto the company campus where half these people worked, myself included. I sat up straighter, checking my things. Supposedly, the bus company had a lost and found service. Functionally, anything left on the bus was likely to disappear, even among a crowd like this one, well paid and supposedly cared for. I could have something worth taking. Gas coupons, for example, or a valid Canadian shopping license. If I left my purse or my backpack, I would never see them again.

The brakes hissed as the bus pulled up to my stop. I rose, timing the motion to the sway of the vehicle, and let myself out through the back door. A few others followed me. I knew some of them, and we exchanged weary nods as we turned toward the boxy building that would be our home for the next nine hours.