“Yes. Choose. We will harvest this whole garden; we will take all its good things, and till the ground, that it may grow abundant once more in our absence. We will take most of your host species for blood, to fill our stores and nurture us as we cross the great voids. We will take others for meat, keeping them alive and peaceful until we hunger, or until a seed sprouts too soon and must be implanted to achieve conscious thought. But some, we will make over in our own image, as you once were. Some, we will retain, hearts and thoughts and minds preserved in new shells. Those, that fair and lucky few, will be the vessels of their history, and carry it with us into forever.

“The choice is yours, Stasia. You can stand against us—you have that strength—or you can save them.”

Chapter 18

Somewhere above North America: time unknown

Invasion ongoing

1.

“Stasia? Honey, can you hear me?”

I blinked, and the haze cleared, leaving me looking at Graham. I blinked again, and just looked, drinking him in as much as I could. The russet of his hair, the pale gray-blue of his eyes, even the freckles on the bridge of his nose, which he fussed over every summer. He was glorious. He was gorgeous. I couldn’t imagine him cast in green.

I couldn’t imagine him dead, either, drained of blood and cast aside. It was an impossible thought, and I refused to have it.

Ahead of us, Second was looking back, tentacles twisting and twining in silent sympathy. She knew why I’d passed out so abruptly. She might have received the same little show, in her time, when it was her host garden being placed on the chopping block.

Mercy was no longer an option. Mercy had never been an option. As soon as the first seeds sprouted in fertile soil, it had become inevitable that the conflict would bring us here, two species as unalike as it was possible to be fighting over the resources of a single world and the future of a single people—because my people’s future wasn’t on the table, not really. Humanity could destroy the aliens among them, could blow our ships out of the sky and arm themselves against the heavens, could watch the stars in wariness and eternal terror, and it would change nothing. We would still be the owners of the greater cosmos, one species made from hundreds, stitched together in a tapestry of roots and leaves and shared sap.