The wind was whipping my tears away before they could fall, keeping them from freezing against my cheeks. I forced my eyes to stay open, watching the ground as it got closer. It was going to hurt when I hit, I knew that, but I also knew it wouldn’t hurt for long. That was one nice thing about plummeting to my death: no time for the pain to linger.

Although it would be better if there was no pain at all. I tried to catch my breath, coughing as the wind whipped that away to join my tears. I didn’t need air anymore. I was a plant. I was a plant, and I was falling through the sunlight, and this was fine, oh, this was perfectly fine.

I closed my eyes.

The pollen filled the scout ships and the seed ships, generated by a thousand conversion flowers, sticking to everything it touched, allowing the opening of a localized forest. I wouldn’t have been able to speak to First, or Second, or the Swift if not for the pollen; our mouths were shaped too differently. The pollen was here, too. It came from us somehow, the products of those conversion flowers, their walking, talking descendants, who were shaped like men but never would be, not really, not in the place where body met bone. I knew the pollen was here, even if First hadn’t told me so, because we made the forest between us when we slept, didn’t we? We reached out for one another’s hearts and minds, and we found them, and we spun a world that didn’t exist in the space we made. We were of our unnamed alien world as much as we were of Earth, and that meant we had the potential to do anything our alien forefathers could do.

When Second spoke to me through the pollen, when the flowers of the forest used it to relay the complicated thoughts First said they were incapable of having, it felt like a bend in the back of my mind, like a crimp in the place where thoughts were supposed to go. I reached.

Help, I thought. Please help. I am falling.

No: that wasn’t right. It lacked the heft and weight of speech, rather than silence. I still couldn’t breathe, was still falling, but had no idea how much longer that situation was going to last. I didn’t want to open my eyes. If I opened my eyes, I would know how much time I had left, and that wasn’t going to help my focus.

Help, I thought, louder. The world clicked, becoming crystalline and clear, and // help // I thought, feeling it flow out from me like sap from a wounded tree, like the last of my fragile humanity washing away.