In the end, it probably didn’t matter. Burnt was burnt. Destroyed was destroyed. I looked at the faces of these refugees from a war that had crossed a cosmos to be with them, and realized how easy we’d had it in some ways. We’d been able to get ahead of the invasion. Yeah, it meant we’d been imprisoned and prodded and treated as the bellwethers of all the horrors yet to come, but we hadn’t been standing on home ground when the sky caught fire. There were going to be so many losses in this fight that we never understood. There already had been.

“I don’t know how to fly a spaceship,” said the woman with the long green hair, sounding dismayed.

“Neither do we,” I replied. “The scout ships are semi-autonomous.” They had birthing flowers worked into their engines, homing pigeons from another world. “It’ll get you back to the ship we came from safely, if that’s really where you want to go. I think it’s going to be a tight fit for all of you, but you can make it work.”

“Thank you,” said Alan, with a sincerity so heartfelt, it burned. “Thank you so much.”

“Just get out of here.” The five of us climbed down from the ship, Graham holding my hand the whole way, Mandy pressing in close behind us, like she thought she could split herself in two and dissolve into our bodies, protecting herself from everything that had yet to come. Jeff and Toni followed at a slightly greater distance, Jeff scowling the whole way. He would probably have argued with me if not for the fact that he knew we couldn’t defeat them: if this group decided to rush and overpower us, we’d be lost, and they’d have the ship anyway. This way, we looked like the good guys.

This way, maybe First would send us another ride home.

They filed past us, up the wide gangway into the mouth of the scout ship, where they began compacting themselves into the available seats. Alan and his husband shared one of the fungus seats, their children sitting on the floor, pressed against their legs, so scared they wouldn’t look at anything but each other. Were they going to be sorry about that later, these fleeing children of Earth? Sorry that they hadn’t taken one more look at the mountains, one more look at a genuine sky? Or were they going to be grateful they’d used that time memorizing what their sibling looked like in a shade other than green?

When the last of them was inside, the hatch—somehow seeming to understand what had just happened—lifted up and swung closed. We watched the vines tie themselves tight around the opening, sealing it against the dangers of space. Then the scout ship pulled its roots laboriously out of the ground, unwinding from its temporary home, and launched itself upward, almost like it was leaping away.