One of the trees twitched. It was a small motion. It was still visible, and so alien that it took my breath away. I had to swallow laughter. I was almost certainly on a spaceship; I was naked, and green, and no longer needed to breathe; at least one of my companions had been shoved inside a giant apricot to have a nice rest. All that, and it was the moving tree that bothered me.

Maybe it didn’t matter how much the pollen modified my thoughts. My humanity would win out in the end.

I walked cautiously toward the tree that had gestured me forward. It moved its branches again, and there were my clothes, and Jeff’s, and Tahlia’s, folded in neat little piles. Their shoes were gone. Apparently, they no longer needed those. I picked up the pieces I recognized, shaking them out before awkwardly pulling them over my sap-sticky limbs and tugging them into place as best as I could. I felt better once I was no longer showing my green ass to whatever happened to wander up behind me. “Human” was still an unusual-enough form for my people that I doubted most of them would understand what my nudity meant, but that didn’t mean I wanted to explain.

A narrow channel was worn in the moss in front of the beckoning tree, curving around the trunk. I gave my shirt a final tug and started walking, feeling the soles of my feet grip the ground, feeling my legs strengthen with every step. Was it me working out the last of the kinks from my nap, or was I actually pulling nutrients out of the soil? I knew virtually nothing about my own biology. It was unnerving.

The path wound through more of the massive trees until it began sloping downward, the moss giving way to ankle-high grass. I realized where I was going a moment before I reached the edge of the bowl cut into the ground, and beheld the flowers.

They looked like they did in my dreams, smaller than the one that made me, but with dragonfly wings for petals and soft, sticky-smelling centers. Their tendril-vines writhed gently, never quite stilling, never moving aggressively. There must have been thirty of them, and seeing them lifted my heart and stopped it in the same moment. This was the vehicle of the invasion, the true invasion, the one that began with infiltration across the gulf of stars. This was—

// home. //

The whisper was sweet, soft as the breeze generated by their tinkling petals. I felt nothing from the flowers but love. They were welcoming me in the only way they knew how, scenting the air with their perfume and inviting me to come, to lie down in their midst and let them know me completely, let them understand the shape of this new cultivar, grown in the soil of a new garden. I took a step forward.