“We feed to live and remain ourselves. Without the minds of those we consume, we would be mindless flora, creeping across the forest floor. Our ships would become our prisons, floating through the void, waiting for the day when they would be discovered, broken open, and raided … or provided new minds to consume, for we can make no choices when we do not think as people, but act purely upon instinct. We show mercy. We preserve. This is a seed ship, stocked with volunteers, with the brave and the brilliant and the bold. They steer their way across the stars to harvest what has been planted, and they set the seeds of our new garden ships. This Earth will have several, each filled with every scrap of good green life, with every piece of preservable culture. We will end this ‘humanity’ you worry for, but everything they were will live on, in us.”

I thought of Anastasia Miller, three years old and murdered—not consumed, not killed, but murdered—by a plant that had fallen to her world from outer space. I wondered whether she would have considered herself to be living on in me, or whether she would have screamed and kicked her feet and demanded to have her life back.

I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that.

“They’re not going to lay down their weapons and let you have them just because you ask nicely, or explain how inevitable it is,” I said. “That’ll just make them fight harder. Humans don’t like to be told they’re going to lose.”

“So we’ll fight smarter,” she said. “We’re bringing our children home. All of you, all over the world, we’re bringing you home.”

“What if we don’t want to work for you? What if we feel more human than alien?”

I could hear the smile in her voice. “I’ll tell you a secret, Anastasia, even though you may not believe it at first. I swear it’s true, whether you believe it or not. There was a time when every one of us, from the smallest sprout to the tallest tree, felt the same.”

I said nothing.

“Our host gardens … they raise us. They nurture us. They mold us into the people we will be, using their beliefs, their values. We are more them than we are us when the ships come, because that is what we need to be. When the ships came to my host garden, I thought to help raise an army against these invaders from the sky.”

I said nothing.

“We failed. Such armies almost always fail. But my First was kind. He said to me, you have fought because that is how we are made, not because you are disloyal; not because you are any less my daughter. So still, you may choose.”

“Choose?” I asked.