// he was not hurt. he was lost. the scout you encountered then was not equipped to carry so many. we could not have saved you all. //

All … “We had humans with us. Natives of this garden, the people we’re templated off. Where are they? They need to breathe if they’re going to stay alive.” Please tell me you didn’t stuff them in those fruits, I thought. Please tell me they’re okay.

// ah. your pets. I will take them to you, if you will do a thing for me, first. //

“Anything.”

// look at me. // Her tentacle squeezed my wrist lightly before letting go, retracting into the space behind me. It was my move. I could stand here forever, if I really thought I needed to.

Slowly, trembling, I turned around.

The basic strokes of her had been present in the pollen haze: there was some similarity between her face and a lemur’s, and while I was willing to assume the creature she had consumed as part of her growth process hadn’t been mammalian—not by Earth standards, anyway—it looked as if it had been close enough to have strong similarities. Her skin, the same shade of green as my own, was ridged with wrinkles and glistened with sticky sap that looked surprisingly like mucus. Her eyes bulged, supported by hard fleshy shelves that jutted from the lines of her cheekbones, sharper and more angular than a human’s could ever have been. When she blinked, her lids approached from either side, rather than closing from the top down. Her mouth was small and pursed, almost like a sphincter. She couldn’t have been a predator. She didn’t have the jaws for it.

I didn’t look any lower. Her face was a horror and a shock, but it had enough in common—terribly—with the lifeforms I was accustomed to that it didn’t actually make me want to scream and run away. If I looked lower, that fragile peace might shatter, and I might find myself in trouble.

The flesh around her eyes crinkled as several of her top tentacles waved. She was, in her way, smiling.

// you are terrible to me as well, sister, with your smoothness and your smallness and your worthless limbs // she said, not unkindly. // you can see me and I can see you, and we can see our kinship for all of our differences, we remain united. //

United … “The pollen from the scout ship, that let me talk to you,” I said. “Is it changing me? Is it changing us?”

Second’s tentacles waved in clear distress. // this is not a good thing to speak of. you wished to see your pets. //