“Because it takes a long, long time for another harvest to be ready,” I said.

I saw the horror on his face. I saw the confusion, and the denial, and the hope that maybe he was right and I was wrong: this was all a lie.

“I’ll be outside,” I said, and turned, and walked away.

3.

Some bird I didn’t recognize was whistling and croaking in the trees across from the observatory. It sounded like a kind of owl. I walked toward it, head tilted back, trying to spot it against the foliage. Any bird that loud would have a certain amount of camouflage to help it out.

The parking lot fell away one step at a time, until I was standing in the shelter of the trees, surrounded by brown bark and leafy green, safely embraced by the growing world. I closed my eyes, thoughts of the owl forgotten as I breathed in deep, filling my lungs with the scent of the forest.

Lungs. There was an interesting question. Would my people even have lungs, or would they photosynthesize? Would I photosynthesize? The strange harmonics of the signal still echoed in my ears, making everything seem twisted and strange. I was the result of an alien seed blending with a terrestrial girl named Anastasia Miller. I had never delved too deeply into the question of my own biology, not because I wasn’t curious, but because there was no safe way to know. Hand myself over to a scientist and spend the rest of the time before the invasion held captive in a lab, waiting to be scraped across a thousand slides, studied in a million petri dishes. Enlist a friend and start a conspiracy. No. None of those things were for me. Better to live as an alien in a human world, knowing what was true without having any proof of it. But now …

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.