But my people had, and it was, and now there was no way left but forward, through the fire, into the cold inevitability on the other side.

“If you’re not the diplomatic team, why are you here?”

“To tell you the real diplomatic team is coming, and things will go better for you if you try not to be afraid of them.” I slipped my arm around Graham’s waist, and he did the same to me, the two of us holding each other in the face of the end of the world. It was all right, if things ended here. At least we would be reaching the end of our stories together.

I wished I’d married him, back when human institutions like marriage were more common. I wished I’d gone with him to the Everglades. Maybe the next owners of this world would rise from his invasive pythons or his beloved frogs, and when we sailed back this way in a million years, the seedlings would be like Hunter, dressed in scales, dancing through the skies.

Above us, the sound of the scout ship descending grew louder. The vice-president paled, and we all waited for the moment when the invasion would end.

3.

The ship set itself down with surpassing delicacy, roots driving themselves deep into the soil, shattering the runway in the process. Hunter took a step back, displaying a degree of nervousness that spoke clearly to the role the scouts had played in taking his original world. Even if he now sided with his own species over the memory of that good garden, it’s hard to trust a machine that once carried the end of the world.

The vice-president and her people also fell back, the ones I had taken for politicians moving with her while the guards put themselves bodily between her and the settling ship. Seen from the outside, without a descent forceful enough to punch a hole in the world, the ship resembled nothing so much as a giant, hard-shelled seedpod, the sort of thing that could have fallen from any number of trees. One by one, the tiers of scaling began to separate, and I revised my impression: it was a vine-covered pinecone from space. Smaller, it could have been lost forever in any coniferous forest on Earth.

Once enough of the scales had lifted, the vines still wrapped around the inner core began letting go, revealing the door, which split into four equal pieces and peeled away, like the opening of a slow, strange flower.

First stepped out, onto the surface of the world.