Tendrils like swollen roots extended from the base of each flower, tangling and twisting over one another, forming a net that covered the entire floor of the basin. They were massed over the center, forming a latticed dome. I peered at them, trying to figure out what was in the middle.

Then I saw a flash of red, the color of Graham’s hair, and I knew.

Ripping my arm out of Second’s grasp, I flung myself into the basin, sliding down the wall and crashing into the front wave of the flowers. Their petals fluttered in silent dismay, and some of them actually moved away from me, showing an animal awareness as unsettling as it was expected. Of course they could move. Everything here could move. Any world capable of creating something like me would have to have created more-mobile vegetation. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

When I reached the root-dome, I began clawing at it, trying to make the individual tendrils let go. They felt unpleasantly like bones, dry and terrible and warm, so damn warm. I didn’t want to think about what could have made them that warm.

I had a terrible feeling I already knew.

At first, the individual roots making up the dome were rigid, refusing to yield to me. Then, bit by bit, they began letting go, letting me peel them back, breaking the tension. I kept scrabbling, kept fighting, until abruptly the entire dome unwound, the flowers choosing to retreat rather than keep fighting me.

There on the ground were my friends, all of them, naked as the day they’d been born: Toni and David, Mandy and Graham … and Lucas.

Lucas, whose skull was split like a ripe pomegranate, showing the terrible red and white and gray inside. Lucas, whose skin was pierced with a hundred roots, all of them pulsing slightly as they pulled the last of the life from his body, drinking him deeply, and I couldn’t even be angry, I couldn’t blame them, because his injury … it wasn’t the sort of thing a human could survive. If he was still alive to feed them, it was because they were keeping him that way, not because he was going to get better. No one sustained that much brain damage and got better. Half his head was gone.

The others looked like they were sleeping, pillowed on beds of small violet flowers that blinked at me like alien eyes. Different vines, these ones pale purple, a few shades lighter than the flowers, ran up their nostrils and held their mouths closed.

// the pollen gives sweet dreams to all hot-blooded species we have discovered in our travels // said Second, the hooting seeming almost like an afterthought to her silent words. // it does not harm them. //

“How do I wake them up?” The thought that perhaps it might not be a good idea to wake them here, in a completely alien world that was hard for even me to deal with, never crossed my mind. They were asleep. There was no way for me not to see them as in dire and immediate danger. They needed to wake up.