I smiled back. I couldn’t do anything else. No matter how conflicted my feelings about Earth and humanity might be becoming, my feelings about Graham hadn’t changed. He was the man I loved. He was the man who loved me. Everything else was, essentially, secondary.

Jeff was the last to stand, following a few beats after Mandy as we all gathered at the hatch. “I wish this thing had a window,” he said. “No way of knowing what’s out there.”

“If there’s not something there already, there will be in a few moments,” I said. “We weren’t exactly subtle when we landed.”

“True enough,” he said, and leaned forward to slide his hand between a gap in two of the vines. There was a thick squelching sound, like his fingers were sinking into mud. Then, with little warning and less fanfare, the vines began unlacing themselves. It was a slow process at first, escalating quickly into a full unraveling. A seam of grayish light appeared around the hatch’s edge.

Then the last vine withdrew, and the hatch gaped open, displaying the familiar shape of Mt. Rainier. Seeing the mountains was like coming home all by itself. Until that moment, I hadn’t really considered that leaving the planet would mean leaving the mountains. Of course it would—there was no other option—but they had been there for my entire life, always welcoming me, always waiting for the sun to rise so they could come out and say hello. The thought of giving them up ached.

“My God,” breathed Graham, jerking my attention away from the mountains and onto what should probably have been the first thing to catch my eye: the black curls of smoke rising in the distance from what had been the city of Seattle.

The airport was a blackened husk. No planes came or went; no baggage trains snaked across the tarmac. Even without our scout ship shattering the runway, it would have been impossible for any large aircraft to land here. The broken bodies of fallen planes were scattered across the ground, preventing anything with a longer landing path than a Cessna from touching down.

Motion from the ground caught my eye. I leaned forward. A ring of people was forming around the base of our ship, no more than a dozen so far, with more on their way.

About half of them were green.

The ones who weren’t green wore green scarves around their upper arms, or green eyeshadow streaked across their cheeks like a badge. Two had green hair that had come out of a bottle, not an alien ecosystem, their roots showing respectively blond and brunette beneath the covering dye. Each of the green people was clutching the hand of at least one non-green person, holding tight, like they were afraid we had come from the sky to steal their hearts away.

One of the green people—a man about ten years older than me, with a tangled beard that looked almost like moss, and skin the color of cabbage leaves—stepped forward, letting go of his human companion and showing us his empty hands.