“What are you all doing here?” asked Jeff. His tone was less sour than it normally was, tangled up with confusion and amazement. Whatever he’d been expecting to find when we touched down, it wasn’t this small mob of survivors, with their mixture of Earth and alien biologies.

“We saw the streak in the sky,” said the man. “We knew the government would come to intercept, but they can’t move as quickly on the roads as we can through the trees. We got here first.”

None of the green people were wearing shoes, I realized, and many of the humans had blackberry scratches on their arms and faces. They must have fought their way through the woods on foot, the aliens leading them through an environment that was becoming more familiar, more welcoming by the hour.

Most of the scratches weren’t deep, and the ones that looked as if they might have been were packed with dirt, keeping the blood from rising to the surface. That was probably for their own protection. Running around while openly bleeding would have been a good way to get themselves attacked by their own allies.

“What do you want?” asked Jeff.

The man’s face fell. “You’re not here to get us?” he asked.

“Where are you from?” I blurted. All eyes turned toward me. “I’ve lived in Seattle almost my entire life, and I’ve never seen any of you in the forest. I thought I was the only one.”

“My husband and I live in Portland,” said the man.

“Denver,” said a woman with hair like a river of jade flowing down the middle of her back.

“Vancouver,” said another man. He pushed his glasses nervously up the bridge of his nose and added, “BC. I’m Canadian.”

“Hope you brought your passport,” said the human woman next to him, and he laughed, and she smiled, and it was beautiful. It couldn’t be anything other than beautiful. From the way Graham’s hand tightened on mine, I knew he agreed.

One by one, the aliens called out their places of origin, and none of them were closer than a few hundred miles. We’d been living so near each other for so long, unaware that we weren’t the only ones, isolated by our dreams of infinite forests and talking, whispering flowers. We could have supported one another, if we had only known; if we had been as fortunate as the senator, who’d been able to marry one of us and have a little time, in his own home, where there were no masks, and where there was no need for disbelief.

I wondered how his wife was doing. Hopefully, she hadn’t been caught in whatever net NASA was casting. Hopefully, she wasn’t standing trial for her host’s murder.