“You still released the signal,” I said.

Toni shrugged. “Can’t be the hero of the horror movie if you don’t at least try to alert the authorities. And then run like fuck when they come to make you disappear for the crime of being inconvenient. Where are we going, anyway?”

“Back to the mothership, where we can take you apart to figure out what makes you tick,” deadpanned Jeff.

Toni laughed. “Yeah, okay. I’ll believe it when I see it.” She withdrew, presumably going back to her seat. To be honest, I didn’t care, as long as she wasn’t cramming herself between us and muttering about monsters.

Were we monsters? I didn’t know. I didn’t think of myself as a monster. But Mom, who had never forgotten the day I came out of the woods and told her the aliens had taken her real baby away, might have had something different to say about the issue. A lot of people might have had something different to say.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the pictures on Toni’s wall, all those children and teenagers with pieces of string connecting them to the word “deceased.” We’d been killing people since we got here. I rubbed the inside of my elbow with the heel of my hand, trying to soothe away the last lingering echoes of the itch.

Jeff glanced at me, looking knowingly at my hand. “Itches, doesn’t it?” he asked.

I still couldn’t remember what was underneath that bandage. Only that it was bad, somehow; only that it wasn’t human, or hadn’t been, when recast through the forest’s lens. “It does,” I admitted.

“I think it’s the signal. I think when we hear it, it speeds some things up that were pretty slow before. It’s not going to hurt you. This is what’s supposed to happen.”

“How do you know?”

“Because a flower ate me, and then I couldn’t stop telling people I was an alien invader,” he said matter-of-factly. “Clearly, that sort of compulsion is a ‘supposed-to’ thing, or it wouldn’t have been there. I was supposed to warn everyone I spoke to that the invasion was coming, and I was supposed to do it while I looked just like the kid next door. While I was the kid next door. Now there’s a signal from space, and I recognize it, I know it like I wrote it, and it’s making me itch and doing strange things to my body. So that must be a ‘supposed-to,’ like the compulsion. It doesn’t make sense otherwise.”

“Not unless the invaders are totally incompetent.” I made the statement lightly.

There was nothing light in the look Jeff leveled on me. “I don’t think they are. Do you?”

“No,” I admitted, and we drove on in silence, me rubbing the inside of my elbow, the green world rolling by around us.