The signal was here. People knew the invasion was coming, and whether or not we came in peace—“the harvest” didn’t sound like coming in peace—the humans weren’t going to see it that way. They would look at the vanguard, at people like me and Jeff and all those other faces on Toni’s wall, and they would see nothing but an armada of dead human children being worn as masks by alien intelligences. It wouldn’t matter that when we had done our replication, we’d been mindless seeds, acting on instinct alone, feeding on the meat our flowers provided for us. It wouldn’t matter that sometimes human infants killed their mothers in the process of being born, making us no different, really.

We were a loss of identity and a loss of life and an infiltration that had been going on for decades. They would feel the need to destroy us, if only for their own peace of mind. And that was if we were coming with open hands, as friends who just didn’t have the same ideas about the sanctity of the individual, who thought wearing familiar faces would make us seem like we were already part of the same team.

I didn’t think, I couldn’t think, that we were coming in peace. No one crosses that much distance, or sends scouts that far in advance with no way to contact the fleet and says, “No, don’t come; this place isn’t safe for us” if they’re coming in peace.

The wind whispered through the trees around me, the familiar, terrestrial trees, and I hesitated. Maybe we did have a way to talk to … home, or whatever I was supposed to call the nursery where I had been cultivated. What was the forest if not some vast communication device, one tailored to keep us connected to one another despite the incredible distance between?

Maybe we’d been talking to them all along.

I wandered deeper into the wood, trying not to think about Toni, who would never wander freely into the woods again. For her, just staying at the observatory, surrounded as it was by trees, had to be a trial. She did it anyway. There was something very foolish, and very human, about that.

A rock turned under my foot. I kicked it away, pausing as I heard it skid over leaves and fall over a previously unseen drop. More cautious now, I inched forward and peered down. The land cut away, revealing a long expanse of open space that ended when it reached the road.

Three white cars were winding their way along that stretch of gray concrete. This far above them, I couldn’t see any markings on their sides … but I could see the lights on top. They were turned off now. They could start flashing with the flick of a switch.

The cars, and their lights, were heading for the observatory.