We all jumped at the sound of Tahlia’s voice. Toni hesitated before saying, carefully, “I think so. I don’t know your biology that well—no one does—but you can move the arm, and the bullet missed the bone. You got lucky.”

“Yes,” said Tahlia. She sounded drained, like something had pulled all the vitality from her body. “Lucky.” She stood, pushing her hair away from her face as she turned to the bed where I was seated. “He died without ever seeing the face of our homeworld. He died for nothing. He had done nothing.”

“He was going to, though,” said Toni. For the first time, she sounded calm, rational, and sincere. She sounded like the voice of reason, and it was chilling. “All of you were, and all of you are. You’re going to kill anyone who stands in the way of your invasion.”

“You don’t know that.”

“We do know that,” Toni corrected. “I guess yeah, you could make a point about human xenophobia and bigotry, but you started by killing kids, and now you’ve got weed balls smashing into the planet and something fucking huge parked out by the moon, and we’re not stupid, okay? We may be monkeys, we may be meat, but we’re not stupid. We know what it means when somebody shows up with that much firepower. Hell, we’ve been doing it to each other since we figured out how to get from one place to another. Go next door, take your neighbor’s stuff, and as long as you say God told you to, suddenly you’re in the right. Suddenly you’re fine. So it sucks that he’s dead. He was a pretty cool guy, as alien plant invaders go. But don’t pretend he was innocent because he hadn’t started slaughtering people yet. He just hadn’t gotten to that point on his agenda.”

I thought of the way Second had invoked the Great Root—reverential, sincere, in a tone that implied everyone would know what she was talking about, because have you heard the word of our lord and savior—and suppressed a shudder, leaning closer to Graham. The warm, solid presence of him was like a balm. I had never expected to see him again. I certainly hadn’t expected to see him so soon.

“Hey,” he said, and pressed a kiss to the crown of my head. “How are you doing?”

I took a moment to consider my answer before I said, “I want to rewind time by about six months, and take a lot more naps before we get to this point. I feel like everything is happening at once.”