Desperately wishing David had come with us after all, I slid off my own fungus and crossed to where Graham was still seated, looking moodily down at his hands. I touched his shoulder. He raised his head.

“Hey,” I said. Then, needlessly, I added, “We’re here.”

“Seattle,” he said, and laughed mirthlessly. “We’re finally home. Only took how many days past when we were supposed to get here?”

“Better late than never.”

“Better never than whatever this is.” He looked back down. “This is it, Stasia. Once we walk out of that hatch, we’re part of the invasion.”

I wanted to tell him we already were, or at least, I already was: I’d been a part of the invasion since the beginning, and all the time we’d spent together with him thinking I was human, or on the side of humanity, had been a lie. I wanted to tell him he’d had plenty of opportunities to run, to go back to the safety of his own species and live out the dying days of a world that had come to the attention of something bigger and colder and crueler than it was. I wanted to say so many things. I swallowed them like the bitter pills they were, feeling them coil and snarl in my stomach, one more thorn briar I could never cut away.

“Yeah,” I said.

Graham sighed and stood. He hesitated for a moment, looking at his own trembling hands like he’d never seen them before, like they belonged to someone else. Someone better. Then he offered one of them to me, lifting his head, meeting my eyes, and forcing the smallest of smiles.

“I guess if I had to be a traitor to my species and my planet, I would want to do it with you,” he said, and twined his fingers into mine, holding tight.

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.