Instead, I closed my eyes on my dark bedroom and opened them on a forest that I had seen hundreds of times since I was three. Not the forest behind my grandparents’ house, comfortable and coniferous and still growing not that far from the house. Mandy and I could drive there in a few hours. This forest …

This was a forest made for dreams, or nightmares. Made for a world where the balance of oxygen in the air was different, where things felt less constrained to growing low and close to their own roots. Trees towered around me like California redwoods, some with trunks larger than an office building. Their bark was purple mottled with streaks of red and yellow, and it had a vital quality to it that the trees I knew when I was awake lacked. I pressed my hand against a trunk, the bark rough against my palm, and felt the heartbeat echoing through the tree, a thick, heavy pulse that shook my teeth in their sockets.

When I pulled my hand away, I left a layer of skin behind. This was a dream: there was no pain, only a calm satisfaction at the idea that I was finally to be divested of my human guise.

Evolution has tried on so many gowns, casting them aside the moment they become less effective than something else in her closet. It would be foolish arrogance to assume every world would follow the Star Trek mode and settle on something with two legs, two arms, eyes to watch the world, hands to reach out and change it. The octopus, the crow, they’re both Earth creatures, and they don’t look much like humans. Why would alien plant people?

Whatever I had been before my fall to Earth left me in the body of Anastasia Miller, it wasn’t what I would have been if I’d fallen anywhere else, or what I would have been if I had stayed at home. If I had a home. This forest … it felt like home, the way my dream forests always did, but it didn’t feel like a place I could visit. As always, I looked up, trying to see the sky, and found nothing but more trees, stretching upward and upward, reaching toward forever.

Vines circled the trunks and draped themselves over the branches, festooning them in festival array. Their flowers were the purple-black of bruises, blooming wide to show their bloody pink centers. I didn’t know what kind of pollinators might come to those flowers, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

Higher up, about where Earth trees would have been forming a crown, the branches grew thicker and denser, creating a platform on which smaller trees—these black-trunked and yellow-leafed—took root. It was a beautiful symbiosis, and it continued everywhere I looked.

The air was like honey. I took a deep breath, letting it fill my dream-lungs, and began to walk.