We tried to warn you. Maybe you should have listened.

—Stasia Miller

This was a very good garden. It grew so green.

We cannot wait to visit it again.

—spoken by First of the Seed Fleet, upon departing from garden designated “Earth.”

Chapter 22

Somewhere high above the world: time unknown

After the invasion

1.

Seeing the Vice-President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister of Canada both remade in green, standing between Hunter and First as they sent out their final address to their nations … something about that image broke something in the human psyche. Up until that moment, I guess there had been a deep undercurrent of belief that somehow, humanity could still win.

It wasn’t just the two of them, of course. That scene had played out across the globe, with the children who had been raised in humanity’s arms bringing their biological parents home. Supposedly, the distribution of our seeds was random. The placement of the seed ships most assuredly was not. All of us found family in their halls. Some, like me, found more than that.

We found where we belonged.

Though we had conquered the world, the death toll from the invasion was surprisingly low, and mostly self-inflicted. Murders, riots, suicides. All the violent thrashes of a threatened species. All we’d ever needed to do was show our faces and wait for the inevitable to begin unspooling around us.

Oh, millions of humans died. But no one set off any nukes, and the harvest wasn’t spoilt, and so it didn’t really seem to matter all that much. Not once the fight was over.

When the thrashing slowed, the scout ships moved in, carrying platoons of our more-martial forms. Hunter and his kind owned the skies. First’s harvest-mates filled the trees with webs. Plants can grow almost anywhere, and so can our seeds; we claimed the seas, the deserts, the plains. We took the world in three days, and it was delicious.

But this is all a story. This has only ever been a story. And since it’s a story, it can’t hurt you anymore, if it ever had that power to begin with.

You’ll wake up soon. It’s taking longer because the flowers are in the right soil. Earth is a good garden, but it isn’t the same as the garden where we were born, and we use that garden’s soil here on the ships. The flowers mature more slowly when planted properly, and they ripen more slowly too, taking their time, getting every little detail right. Getting every aspect of the thing they copy. They do a better job here, which is why they can handle larger prey. The flower that ate Anastasia could never have consumed or copied something your size.