“You mean you gave us fair warning,” snapped Mandy. “You said, over and over again, that the invasion was coming, and we laughed, you knew we were laughing, you knew we didn’t understand how real it was, and you didn’t do anything to make us understand. You didn’t do anything to prove it.”

“I didn’t know how,” I protested.

“You should have figured it out.”

“Some things can’t be proven. I was your friend. I didn’t have any reason to lie to you. Why would I lie to you?” I paused before adding, “You said you believed me.”

Mandy shook her head. “It didn’t hurt anything to believe you. To indulge you.”

The way she spat the word “indulge” made it clear she meant for it to hurt me. And it did—it really did. Of all my friends, Mandy had been the one whose unquestioning acceptance I’d depended upon the most. Graham loved me. That changed things. Mandy, though, Mandy liked me, and I had always assumed that meant as much to her as it did to me.

Maybe not. Or maybe arranging for the invasion of her planet had changed things. I tried to step back and really look at the situation from her perspective. She didn’t have the pollen rubbing away the alien edges of the world. She was on a starship, surrounded by things that wanted to drink her dry, with vampire plants from outer space everywhere she turned. I, her friend, had turned green, like the Wicked Witch of the West gone vegan, and was starting to side more and more with people whose stated goal was the destruction of humanity as she knew it.

She was allowed to be pissed. She was allowed to be angry. She just couldn’t see how likely that was, in the here and now, to end with her getting herself killed.

“I’m sorry I didn’t try to prove something that was literally unprovable until the signal from space triggered my body to start sloughing off its mammalian attributes,” I said. “I’m sorry I assumed that when you said you believed me, you meant it, and didn’t mean you were tolerating me. I’m sorry about a lot of things. But this is where we are. This is what we have to work with. The invasion is happening.”

“Yeah, it is,” said Toni. She stepped forward, eyes on First. “Hey, spider-lady. Looking good. What happens to us? To the humans you’ve already snatched? Are we ever going to go home?”

// we could return your pets to the planet’s surface, but they will be defenseless // said First. // without one of us to protect them, nothing will come to their aid. //