“Please,” repeated the bearded man. “We need to get out of here. The people on … God, I don’t even know what the sides here are. The people who come from this planet will kill us if they find us, or worse.”

“Alan, you’ll scare the kids,” chided his human partner.

“Sorry, sweetheart, but maybe it’s time the kids were scared.” Alan shook his head. “There were a lot more of us two days ago. We need to get off of this planet.”

“Yeah, about that,” said Toni. “You get that like, the only place to go from here is up to the mothership, right? And what they do there, that’s probably also going to scare the kids.”

“We know,” said Alan, and his eyes were tired. Of course they knew. He knew what he was, and the compulsions our parents gave us meant his husband would have known almost as soon as they met, would have been at least a little prepared when the alien signals started playing on the television and the skin started sloughing off the man he loved.

They had children. If Alan was anything like me, he had never forgotten his own second birth—or third, if we counted the moment when the seed took root in fertile soil. He knew what waited for his husband, for his children, when he took them home to meet the family. It would be a form of survival. Not as they were now, but as David hoped to be, green and growing and safe among the stars.

“Take the ship,” I blurted.

Mandy and Graham looked at me with understanding; Toni and Jeff, united for one rare moment, looked at me with confusion.

“What?” demanded Jeff.

“We’re not using it,” I said. “There will be other scout ships. We can get back to the seed ship on one of them, or we can hitch a ride with First. But we don’t have kids with us. We haven’t been fighting this for days.”

We hadn’t seen Seattle burn. It was difficult to guess who might have started the fires. I wanted to say it had been the humans, that their anger and fear had boiled over into striking out even when it was as likely to hurt them as it was to stop the invaders. First had claimed we were going to preserve the best parts of humanity, and so many of those good parts were stored in the cities. It didn’t make sense to start out by setting everything in sight on fire.