// it is as it is. we do the work of the Great Root. we leave the peaceful gardens to flourish. we take the warring ones, and improve them through our presence. //

There was so much about that that I wanted to unpack and understand. I left it for now, and said, “There’s war and famine and all sorts of bad stuff here because humans can only hold so many other humans in their minds at one time. They’re interconnected to a point. They need those connections to stay stable.”

// and you need those connections as well? // Second waved her tentacles in bewilderment. // this is not a common thing. how many such connections do your hosts require? how many of you must be planted in each crop? //

“What do you mean?” I paused. “And you still haven’t answered my question about the pollen.”

// all will be known when all is meant to be known. // Whenever she “spoke,” the words were accompanied by the hooting sound I’d heard before. It was remarkably varied for a language that appeared to have no consonants. // friends or pets, I can take you to them, if you will stop asking things you are not yet ready to know. //

“All right,” I said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Take me.”

Second turned to slither-walk down the path, and I followed her, trying to study my surroundings without staring at the surface of her mossy carapace. Evolution had made her, and our species—whatever it was called—had stolen her, keeping her in her own image. But why? Why wouldn’t we revert back to the mossy-hill form that First had shown me, in the shadow of the pollen?

I remembered how beautiful First had been. Had that been true, or had that been another trick, like Second’s cartoonish harmlessness? They were trying to ease us into things. I should probably have been grateful. Instead, I was scared—and scared of the moment when I would stop being scared.

They had dropped us here to acquire cultural literacy, to learn the people we were intended to infiltrate and destroy. Second and the Swift had both been welcoming, even ingratiating, but they stressed family relationships Jeff and I hadn’t even known existed as if they should trump everything else. Maybe for our original species, that was how it worked. Humans could be xenophobic, afraid of what they didn’t know. I wasn’t getting any fear from Second. Instead, I was getting … not quite disdain, but something similar. She simply didn’t care about these people who weren’t a part of her copse. They had no relevance to her.

What if humanity’s real distinction in the universe was hyper-sociality? The ability to form and maintain connections with people based on nothing more than a common interest or experience? I was starting to wonder whether the vague unsociability that seemed to run through every member of my species wasn’t a tweak like the compulsion to announce our origins, but an innate function of what we were. Humanity—the humanity we’d stolen from our hosts when we devoured them—could be the aberration. By the standards of our parents, we were the hyper-social ones.