“Just get them out,” he pleaded again, rattling desperately at the cuffs that held him to the bed. “It’s just surgery, right? Just rip them out, I don’t care, just get rid of them.”

The tears welling from the corners of his eyes had started to congeal, a translucent pink film streaking his temples and brimming towards blindness, gumming the lashes and lids that couldn’t blink them away. She had kept him covered at first, in a clean gown and sheets now thrown red, sap-gold, and sodden in the biowaste bin by the door. But he had started to sob and wail about choking, being crushed inside the thin cotton layers, and when she had cut them gown away, the new, fragile sprouts that had been plastered to his chest, born, like any infant, in sweat and blood, had lifted their heads to the fluorescent light.

He had tried to tear them out with his bare hands before she had lunged for the cuffs. Most of the blood was from that. They were too deep, whatever they were, entwined too thoroughly with his body for just surgery to remove them. His veins and nerves, rootbound, would rip loose as well.

Which meant, if that alien life was going to kill him, he was already effectively dead. All she could do was observe, and so she did, scrawling rapt notes as the first flower opened in the hollow of his throat.