But even that question paled as the bulk of the scout ship—tiny compared to what we’d seen in our pollen haze—hoisted itself above us, looking at us with those segmented dragonfly-wing “eyes.” One of the tendrils reached down to caress the skin on the senator’s face with surprising gentleness, and he laughed, delight and relief and honest, childlike wonder in his eyes.

He was still laughing when the bullet took his right eye away, blowing it onto the ground along with a horrible spray of blood and bone and brain matter. It was all green and gold, the color of the trees, and so for a moment, my mind refused to acknowledge it for what it was. The cultural literacy I’d been sent here to acquire told me carnage was red, red, the color of rubies, the color of blood. It wasn’t green. Not here, not on Earth.

The senator, who may have been a good man—who had, for all that he had always been a spy for an oncoming alien invasion, done his best to serve his constituents well, and had never lied to them, which was more than could be said for most of the men in Washington—wobbled. His remaining eye was filled with a hurt confusion, like he couldn’t understand what had happened, or how it had even been possible. Hadn’t we won? Wasn’t the invasion finally here?

Then his knees buckled and he fell, first to the ground and then, as gravity took control, over the edge into the waiting pit. He never made a sound. One second, he was there, and the next, he wasn’t.

Jeff shouted, shoving me out of the way as a bullet ploughed into the ground where I had been. I whipped around, staring at the rise. A line of people had formed there, rendered faceless and featureless by the floodlights shining from behind them. Someone had broken out the siege gear.

“Run!” shouted Tahlia. She grabbed my hand, hauling me to my feet. I grabbed for Jeff, pulling him along with me, and the three of us raced along the pit’s edge, staying as close to it as we could without falling. The scout ship was a blotch on the sky above us, its tentacles whipping in all directions as it arrowed in on the source of the shots.

We had no weapons. We had no armor. We had nothing but each other, and even that number was dwindling, because we were leaving the senator behind. There was nothing we could have done to save him; all we could do now was try to save ourselves. So we ran, rocks and thorns digging into our feet, hands slick with sweat as we tried to hold onto each other. If one of us tripped, if one of us fell, that would be the end of it, and so we held fast, trying to stave off the inevitable.