None of this was anything new. Her story mirrored mine, and Jeff’s, and every other one of us that I’d met. We were a people united by our isolation.

“I went to therapy.”

That, now … that was new. None of the rest of us had voluntarily sought professional help. The aversion to it seemed to be almost as deeply ingrained as the desire to remind everyone we met that we weren’t from around here.

Tahlia nodded, clearly seeing my surprise. “I knew a few people who’d been helped, and forestry is a lonely profession to begin with. If there was something I could do to make myself a bit less isolated, I was going to try. I had to try. I thought I was going to lose my mind if I didn’t. Would you like to know what my therapist said?”

“If you think it will help, sure.”

“She said the compulsion was just that: a compulsion. It was irrational, I couldn’t suppress it no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much damage I was doing to myself. And it was external to the rest of me. The person I was, the things I wanted, they weren’t the compulsion; the compulsion was getting in the way of them.”

“She cured you?”

“Not in the slightest. She couldn’t do anything to help me. Not with that, anyway. She did help with some deep-set abandonment issues that she said were due to parental distance and I said she had no idea, since my real parents were somewhere in deep space. She was generally pretty accepting of the whole alien thing.”

Tahlia fell silent. We walked that way for a few precious seconds, the others fording the way ahead of us, dark gray silhouettes against the charcoal blanket of night. Finally, she sighed.

“I think,” she said, “that when we were made, when the seeds that became us were cultivated, that our parents used whatever technology they have—whatever they developed to carry themselves across the stars—and made sure we would have no choice but to show ourselves, over and over and over again, forever. I think we are ourselves, because you are not me and I am not you and we are not Jeffrey. We have our own minds and hearts and ideas and desires. But I also think they are able, on some level, to influence or control what we think. They shape our ideas about the world.”

The thought was simultaneously horrifying and far too realistic. We were ourselves. Nothing was going to change that. We were also hothouse flowers, cultivated by the gardeners who were even now raining their weapons down on our adopted world.

“I have to go,” I said faintly.

Tahlia nodded. “I thought you might.”