// ah! // Again, delight colored Hunter’s mental tone. // my template was made to be a fertilizer of eggs. it brings me great joy to go through the motions, even as there are no eggs now to be sparked into a new generation. //

It took me a moment to realize what Hunter was saying. // so … he, then? //

// yes, cousin // replied my amused relation. // it is not so important to my cultivar as it is to yours, but I know your host garden places much weight on such words, and so I thank you for asking. //

Somehow, being carried through the sky by a dinosaur-dragon hybrid who gleefully acknowledged his fondness for sex wasn’t the strangest part of my week. In a weird way, it was sort of reassuring. If Hunter still enjoyed sex, whatever form that took for his host species, that meant Graham and I could still have sex after we were both plant people. Assuming I got to Graham before Agent Brown and her flunkies hurt him. My reassurance collapsed like a punctured soufflé.

Agent Brown had Graham and Mandy. Agent Brown had every reason to assume they were collaborators, helping my people infiltrate this planet from the outside. Never mind that we’d fallen from space and infiltrated all by ourselves, even when we didn’t know we were doing it. We were the enemy, we were from somewhere else, and anyone who had helped us needed to be held accountable.

Hunter’s claws were tight around my waist. I put a hand on one of his talons, bracing myself, and silently decided that if she had harmed a hair on either of their heads, I would end her.

Silent, equipped by the evolutionary forces of another world to be the perfect predator, Hunter flew on.

2.

We caught up with the plane just before the Canadian border. Hunter fell into a comfortable glide behind it, using the wake of its displaced air to lift him easily up. He hummed as he coasted, utterly content in the moment, in the sky, in the hunt.

The sky … // what do you do on the ships? // I asked.

// the fruits of my host garden hunger for sky // he replied. // it is not common, for a shape to have such a need for a thing that it can overwhelm the message of the Great Root, but it does happen. we thirst to fly, to feel the wind around us, bearing us up and onward. on the ships, we sleep and study and lie as close to dormant as we may, and when a new garden is to come to harvest, we are released. this garden has good skies, cousin. before we leave them, they will be filled with the wings of my harvest, and we will bid them sweet farewell before the ships move on. //

// will some of you stay here? //