Return

“There are spots that might have what we need,” Barnaby said, pointing out over the city like a tour guide. “There are industrial buildings that way, and if we can find a chemical plant, it will have everything we need. Or we can go that way and look at more academic buildings. Or we can go deeper into the university and hope that something survived.”

Leon thought for a moment or two. Luna knew what she would have chosen, wanting to get to the nearest option, even if it was the least likely. She wanted this done as quickly as possible, and not just because she didn’t want to spend any more time than she had to as the thing she was. She knew that every moment she was like this was a threat to all of the others.

It seemed that Leon disagreed, though, because he pointed to the factory buildings.

“They’re our best chance,” he shouted to the Survivors around him. “Ignatius and Barnaby will tell you exactly what they’re looking for. We need the right equipment to save Luna, and to save other transformed we find.”

The group gathered around them. There were so many now; practically an army, although that would have implied that they all had some kind of discipline rather than just moving forward together because they wanted to. They marched forward in the direction of the waiting factories, going on foot now since the school bus wasn’t going anywhere in the wake of the battle. They dragged Luna along on her trailer, its wheels squeaking with every turn, its frame bouncing with every jolt of uneven ground. She felt like an exhibit in a museum, or perhaps like a captive in some ancient war, put on display before her death.

I’m not going to die, she told herself, trying to get herself to believe it. She clung to the thought of seeing Kevin again, the only point of certainty while more and more of her started to slip away.

Their procession set off toward the factories, and Luna just had to hope that they would be in time, before she lost even the parts of herself that managed to cling onto thoughts of Kevin.

CHAPTER FOUR

Kevin was walking through places he knew, places he’d been. He was wandering around them in odd combinations that made no sense, drifting from one to another as smoothly as breathing. He was walking on the Hive world ship that he’d been to, and the streets shifted so that they became the streets of Mountain View, where he’d grown up. He walked through a door, and now he was in the Colombian rainforest, with military people all around him, ready to fight for the right to control the Hive’s capsule.

Each step brought a different moment, shifting and changing so that it was hard to keep track of them all. He moved from moments in the signal chamber, deciphering the messages sent to the Earth, to the first instant when he’d seen people changing into monsters, knowing that they were too late to stop the invasion…

…to the instant when the doctor had told him he was dying.

Kevin became distantly aware of his body then, although it was so far away that he seemed to be floating above it. He could feel the pain in his head, so great that it felt as though it was exploding. The tremors in his body seemed to claim him so completely that it was impossible that he could be moving through any of these places.

He couldn’t be, he knew. He was dreaming, he was remembering, and he was dying.

You shouldn’t be told that you were dying when you were thirteen years old. He remembered thinking that, right back at the start of all this, in the office of the specialist. Now, nobody was telling him; he just knew it, as surely as he knew what a distant signal meant, or the sound of Luna’s voice.

He could feel the progress of the disease within him. It had been halted for the brief period that he had been a part of the Hive, but it had been far too close to this moment when they had stopped it.

More moments slipped through his dreams: sailing along the coast with Chloe and Luna; being in the bunker, there together in one corner of the dormitory, for that one brief night when it had been safe. Kevin wasn’t sure whether this was just a dream, or the thing he’d heard of where people’s lives flashed before their eyes before they died, or something in between.

More pain flashed through him, this time seeming to clench around his heart and crush it, holding it still so Kevin couldn’t feel it beat. It was the kind of pain he couldn’t have believed existed; the kind of pain that seemed to encompass everything at once.

There were so many images in his dreams; so many things he’d done that he might never have had a chance to if the world had been a different place. If he hadn’t had his power, would the Hive still have come? Would he have been all the places he had, seen all the things he had?

However much Kevin had done, it wasn’t enough. He didn’t want to die. He hadn’t wanted to die at any point in this. It wasn’t fair.

“Come on, you have to do something!”

The words seemed to come from a long way away, Chloe’s voice drifting in through a thin gauze that was still far too thick to reach through.

“We are attempting to,” a voice replied, and although Kevin didn’t recognize the individual, he recognized the Ilari language. “If we’d had time to study what was happening with him…”

“There is no time,” General s’Lara said. “Do what must be done.”

“Wait,” Kevin tried to say, but the words wouldn’t come out. “What do you mean?”

Then pain hit him, and if he’d thought he’d known what pain was before, this was a hundred times worse. It seemed to run through every cell of him at once, burning and freezing, tearing at him and crushing. It was as though it was tearing him apart, atom by atom, and rebuilding them one after another. Each cell was subtly different, subtly changed, and now it felt like a cool wave running through him, transforming him as he went.

Blackness rose up for him again, but this didn’t feel like the blackness of death. Instead, it felt soothing, and gentle, and pure. It wrapped around Kevin as surely as a blanket, and finally, he could feel his body again.

“You can open your eyes now, Kevin,” General s’Lara said.

Kevin’s eyes felt gluey and hard to open. He felt tired…

“Kevin,” Chloe said, far less gently. “Wake up.”

Kevin’s eyes flashed open, and he saw the room around him, white walled and gentle seeming. There were blue-skinned aliens around him, in pristine uniforms that seemed familiar. It took him only another moment to realize that this was yet another hospital. He was spending far too much time in these places. General s’Lara was there, looking on with obvious concern. So was Ro, and it was even stranger seeing the expression on the face of an alien species that normally had no emotions.

Then there was Chloe. She stood over him, and Kevin could see that she had been crying, although now her tears seemed to be ones of joy rather than pain. She reached out for him.

“Kevin, I thought you were dead!” she said. “I thought…”

“I thought I was dead,” Kevin said, trying to make a joke of it even though it was anything but that. He could still feel the pain that had been clamped around his heart, so crushing and dangerous and deadly. He’d truly thought that he was going to die. He’d thought about all the things he’d done, and all the things he was going to lose.

As Kevin looked over at Chloe, though, he felt a burst of shame, because it hadn’t been her he’d thought of in that moment when he’d been so certain that he was about to lose everything—it had been Luna. It had been times with Luna that had come into his mind when he’d been thinking about moments from the past that mattered. It had been Luna’s memory he’d grasped hold of and kept close to him in the moments when he was dying. It had been Luna, not Chloe, whom he’d been so afraid of losing. Just looking at Chloe now felt like a betrayal, even though it was something that he couldn’t help.

“Kevin, what is it?” Chloe asked. Of course she’d seen it.

“It’s nothing,” Kevin said, dismissing the thought. Instead, he stood up and walked around the room, trying to assess how he felt, ready for his body to be weak and ready to collapse from the effort involved even in trying to move. He was actually a little surprised that the medical staff there let him, but maybe they wanted to test how he was too.

Instead of collapsing he felt… healthy. Kevin wasn’t sure he’d ever felt that healthy, at any point in his life. He could breathe easily, and there was no pain in his head, no tightness in his chest. It was only because all the things that had been wrong with him were gone that he was able to realize just how bad the sickness had been.

It felt as though there had never been a day of his life before this when he had been truly well, because this wellness felt almost alien compared to everything that had gone before.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Chloe asked him, and Kevin nodded. He wasn’t sure how he could describe it.

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt this good,” he said. He looked around at General s’Lara and the medical staff, who all seemed to be looking over at him as if trying to check that things were working as they should. “What did you do?”

“We cured you,” the general replied. “We scanned your body, searching for defective patterns, and then used our healing technology to overwrite those patterns with something new. Your brain has been stabilized, so that your illness cannot progress.”

“And my ability to translate signals?” Kevin asked, and then realized the answer to that question before any of the others could say anything. The Ilari weren’t speaking his language, but their own. He could still understand them, could still sense the signals of the AIs communicating with one another, and could still translate them when they got too loud.

…appears to be fully recovered…

…may be necessary…

“The procedure should have affected nothing but your illness,” General s’Lara said, with a glance across to one of the medical staff, who nodded. Kevin could see her relief at that confirmation.

Kevin should have felt joy at that. He did feel joy, but there was more to it than that. He felt as though this should have been harder somehow. After all the work that scientists had done on Earth trying to stabilize and heal him, it felt impossible that these aliens could just make him well with so little effort.

“You… healed me,” he said. “Why? Why did you heal me? You know what I did. You know I’m responsible for the destruction of the world you hid on.”

“And we tried you for that,” General s’Lara said. “We agreed to let you stay. Do you think we would hold back our healing from you when we had the ability to help you? That is not who we are. It is not right.”

The sheer goodness and benevolence of that overwhelmed Kevin in that moment. How could these aliens be so benevolent? It seemed impossible that anyone could be so generous to someone who had done so much to hurt them. After all that he’d done…

“It wasn’t your fault, Kevin,” Chloe said.

Kevin wished he could believe that. All he could do was feel amazing levels of gratitude that the others felt that way.

“Thank you,” he said to the general. “I… I don’t know what to say.”

They’d given him back his life. They’d healed him, when no one else could do it, and they’d done it when he was sure they had every reason not to do it.

“You don’t need to say anything,” General s’Lara said. “We help those who truly need it. We seek peace where it can be found. We forgive.”

That seemed impossible to believe. Kevin wasn’t sure he would be able to manage to forgive the Hive. If he had a chance to destroy it, then he would. And yet… he looked across to Ro. Kevin didn’t hate him. He even trusted him, and yet the former Purest had been one of those trying to destroy his planet.

“I have so much to learn,” Kevin said.

He looked across to Chloe, and again, he had the feeling of guilt that he’d been thinking of Luna and not her when he’d been dying. Chloe had been the one who had been there with him on the Hive’s world ship. She’d helped him to escape. He knew what she felt about him, and he even felt some of it too… but it was Luna whose face was there when he shut his eyes, Luna he thought about in every spare moment, even though there was every chance that she was lost in the mass of the transformed.

“You’ve been given a fresh start, Kevin,” General s’Lara said, gently, as if she understood the sheer enormity of everything that was happening for Kevin. “The question is what you choose to do with it.”

Kevin couldn’t stand there in the room right then. It was too much. It wasn’t just that he didn’t know what to say, or what to think. He wanted to breathe the open air in that moment. He wanted to remind himself that he was actually alive. That he could actually potentially have a future.

There were doors from the medical bay leading out onto a kind of balcony that appeared to have been grown from the tree itself. It curved around like some great fungus growing out of the trunk, more than big enough to hold him and a dozen others. Kevin stepped out onto it, the trees surrounding him, the beauty of the world spread out below. Here and there, small ships darted between the trees as agilely as birds, or up to the larger vessels in orbit. Birds bigger than Kevin nested in some of the branches, singing songs that filled the space with music, while creepers hung down almost to the ground, and furred creatures half Kevin’s size clambered up and down them.

The air was sweet out there, and it wasn’t just the musk of forest flowers and the leafy canopy, although that helped. It was the fact that he could take a full breath without pain, and stand there without the dizziness that came from his leukodystrophy threatening to overwhelm him. It was so strange standing there like that, and the longer Kevin did it, the more certain he was that his whole life had been affected by this disease. He’d thought that it had only come into his life in the last few months, but one breath of the air here told him that it had always been a part of him, lurking and waiting, only seeming to come to life at the point where it got too bad to deal with.

He stood there looking out at the enormity and the beauty of the world around him, and the sheer emotion of it all felt simply overwhelming. So much had happened to him, and now, he felt healthier than he had ever felt. Even so, he felt tiny against the scale of it all. He felt as though there were too many things that he didn’t know; too many things that he still needed to learn and understand. He had all of this new life to spend, and there was so much to learn and do in it that even now, he didn’t know if it would be enough.

“Kevin, are you all right?” Chloe asked, coming out after him.

For a moment or two, Kevin wanted to hide behind the strangeness of everything that he had experienced. He wanted to tell her that it was just about the shock of what had happened, or about the sudden healing. He wanted to pretend that everything was all right. He wanted to lie, even though Chloe was the one person who deserved so much better than lies.

He knew he couldn’t, though.

“I… Chloe, there’s something that I have to tell you.”

“You love Luna,” Chloe said. She stood there, still as a statue, not saying anything, obviously leaving it until Kevin was willing to say something. It took him a moment, simply because of the shock of Chloe beating him to it.

He nodded. “I… she’s been my friend forever. I think about her all the time. I wish… I wish I could feel that way about you, but I don’t.”

Chloe stood there for what seemed like forever, and Kevin found himself wishing that he hadn’t inflicted this kind of pain on her, even as he knew there hadn’t been any other choice. He didn’t want to hurt her, but he didn’t want to lie to her either. Kevin waited for her to explode at him, shout at him, react with all the emotion that he knew filled her to the brim. Instead, she just stood there, as still as a statue.

“Yes,” she said at last. “I know.”

“You know,” Kevin said. “That’s it?”

“What do you want me to say?” Chloe shot back, and Kevin could hear the pain there now. “It hurts, of course it hurts, but I saw in the Hive how much worse things could be. I saw how evil it is to try to force what I feel onto people. I…”

Kevin could see the tears building in her eyes, and he put his arms around her automatically, holding her close to comfort her. He was pretty sure that the person who had just told you they didn’t love you shouldn’t be the one to comfort you for it, but he did it anyway.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish—”

“What do you wish, Kevin?” Chloe asked. “That none of this had happened? Don’t wish that. I don’t.”

A part of Kevin did wish it, in spite of that. He wished that the alien invasion had never happened. He wished that he hadn’t opened the capsule they’d sent, or that he’d been able to do something to stop the damage that had been done. He couldn’t count the number of people who had been hurt, or worse, because of the things that he had done. If he could take those things back, he would, simply because Kevin hated the pain that was in the universe because of him. Yet, if that hadn’t happened, he would never have met Chloe. He would never have done half of the amazing things that he had done.

Kevin knew then that Chloe was right: he shouldn’t wish that things were different. Even so, he was still contemplating how to answer that when he saw the skies starting to darken, an all too familiar shape moving into place above the world.

“No,” he whispered. “No…”

The Hive world ship moved into place like some kind of trick of the eye, one moment not there, the next there. It hung above the Ilari world, dominating the skyline, ships already starting to pour down from it, making it look as if it were easy to move something so huge and terrifying.

Kevin saw General s’Lara rush out onto the balcony with the same horror that he felt in that moment. They’d thought that they were safe. They’d thought that they had time, at least.

“How?” she asked. “How did they find us when we lost them?”

She looked from Kevin to Chloe, and back toward where Ro stood within the medical bay. Her suspicions were obvious to Kevin, and it was hard not to share them. Not that he thought for a moment that Ro would have done anything deliberately, but what if there was some residual connection to the Hive? What if they were tracking Kevin, and not Ro?

He was still thinking that when Chloe moved forward, holding up her arm.

“It… it’s pulsing. I think… I think they’re tracing it. Get it off me. Get it off!”

Kevin didn’t want to know what to say then. Above them, the world ship held its place, raining down smaller ships with the promise of death. Kevin looked up at them, feeling the sheer unfairness of it all. The Ilari had just saved him, had just given him the chance to live out the rest of his life.

Now the Hive was here, and Kevin couldn’t see any way that they weren’t all going to die.

CHAPTER FIVE

Luna was… Luna was. She had to try to remember that. She had to remember that she existed, and was real, and was not just… just… no, the memory and the words were slipping away even as she and the rest of the… the Survivors, that was it, made their way toward the factories that they’d picked out as the likeliest spot to have the things they needed.

Luna raged against the inside of her cage, tearing at the steel as if her hands might be able to rip through it. She could see the blood on the bars now, and she couldn’t even remember where it had come from. Was it her attacking the metal, or was it something else? She tried to stop herself, but she had no control over her body. The aliens who had control of her wanted her to find a way out of there, to find a way to kill, no matter how much it damaged her in the process.

“Hold on, Luna,” Ignatius said. Even he sounded worried now. “We’re going to find a way to process the cure. We’re going to bring you back to yourself.”

It wasn’t herself that Luna was thinking of in that moment, though. She was thinking of Kevin instead. Kevin was the one whose memory she held onto the way a climber held onto rocks for fear of falling. She clung to his image, but now even memories of him were starting to fade, as ragged around the edges as a… as a… she couldn’t remember what. She could remember traveling across the country with him. She could remember the fun times before all of this had started, when they had still just been friends, but so much of what had come in between had started to slip away. Even so, she clung to Kevin as tightly as she could, and by doing that, she seemed to cling to some of the rest of it. She recognized Bobby the dog running amid all of it, staying as close as he could to her. He wasn’t growling now, but maybe that was because he recognized that she couldn’t hurt anyone.

They were approaching the factories now, and Luna could see the others looking around with the kind of obvious caution that came from too many bad experiences. There were so many of them now; practically an army, and a part of Luna said to her that she should be trying to make them into things like her. She breathed out gas at them even now, though it had no effect, thanks to the cure.

Some of them looked at her with fear as they walked, as though expecting her to hurt them at any moment. Some fingered weapons, as if unsure whether to use them. She recognized one of the ones doing it as being named Cub, but she couldn’t remember anything else about him then, or why it hurt so much that he was one of the ones closing his hand around the butt of a gun.

“Looks as though this place has been the site of a few battles,” Ignatius said, turning to Leon. “Are you sure they’ll have what we need to process ore?”

Leon shrugged in response, and that was a long way from comforting to Luna. “I’m not sure of anything. There have been sounds of fighting around the factories, and the transformed might have scavenged. We don’t know what’s here.”

Luna didn’t know what to think about that. In truth, she could barely think at all by that point. In spite of Leon’s reservations, the group pressed forward cautiously among the remains of the factory buildings, looking around them as they went as if searching the shadows for enemies. The whole place looked as skeletal now as the carcass of some great creature made of steel, portions of walls damaged or even collapsed in whatever fighting there had been around there.

They took her on her juddering cart through into a space where the sign for a chemical company hung at an angle, looking as though it might fall at any moment. Vats and canisters stood wherever Luna looked, some large enough to be crossed by walkways of perforated metal. A few of the vats looked empty now, looted or leaking or just evaporated, but several rippled with chemicals, bubbling here and there in ways that promised death for anyone unlucky enough to fall in. Debris littered the floor so that it was hard to pick a way between it, from girders that looked as though they had fallen from the ceiling, to boxes scattered here and there that looked as though they had been searched for their contents.

The Survivors spread out around Luna, starting to search the factory, moving between the piles of debris and picking through what was left, presumably in the hope that one of them would contain something useful.

“What are we looking for?” one of them called over.

Barnaby answered that one. “We’re going to need machinery for processing chemicals into a usable form. Not the vats. Look further back.”

All Luna could do was wait and hope, and she hated the waiting. Part of her hated it because it meant that she couldn’t kill any of the people around her, but Luna knew that part wasn’t really her, just the part that was controlled. The bigger worry was that the more time passed, the harder it was to remember that. She couldn’t wait, because there was no time to wait.

“Here!” Leon called, from behind a pile of junk. There was a noted of hope in his voice, but Luna didn’t dare to share it right then. “Barnaby, Ignatius, come look at this.”

Luna saw the two of them disappear behind the same pile. Seconds passed, then minutes.

“Bring Luna,” Ignatius called out, and his hope felt somehow more solid, because he knew what it was they were looking for.

The figures around her wheeled her forward, across the roughness of the factory’s floor. Through the bars of her cage, Luna saw machinery she didn’t understand, but some of it seemed to be designed to grind, while parts of it scanned and parts of it liquefied. From the scuff marks on the floor, it seemed that Barnaby and Ignatius had dragged a couple of parts of it closer to one another in order to lash pieces of it together, while a couple of smaller pieces of equipment had been duct taped together to make a larger whole, albeit an unsteady one.

The two of them were working on the ore, and, from the way Luna threw herself at the bars even harder then, she guessed that they were achieving something. She kept going until—

“Stop!” a voice ordered, and it sounded like a voice used to giving orders and having them obeyed. “Stop, right now!”

Men and women came out of hiding places around the factory. All of them held guns that looked far more sophisticated than anything the Survivors had. Most of the people there looked as though they knew how to use them too, moving smoothly, aiming accurately, and not betraying a hint of concern as they surrounded Luna and the others.

“What are you doing here?” the man in the lead demanded. He had a pistol leveled at Luna. “Why have you brought one of those creatures here?”

“Luna isn’t a creature,” Leon said, obviously deciding to take charge. “She’s our friend, and she saved all of us. We just need—”

“You just need to leave,” the man said, “and you need to do it at once. I am Captain Harris of the Seventy-fifth. I have kept my people alive through discipline, and by making the choices that have to be made. I will not allow looters in our area, and I will kill the alien scum on sight!”

There was a crack as he fired, and Luna heard the ping as the bullet ricocheted off the metal of her cage, close enough that she was sure she could feel it passing close to her. Weirdly, she didn’t flinch or feel afraid, although perhaps that was because the progress of the alien vapor within her.

Around Luna, the guns of the Survivors came up, along with all the weapons held by the rest of the people they’d saved. The figures above had the more advanced weapons, but there were far more of those below, and plenty of them looked ready to fight and die if they had to.

They’re ready to fight to defend me, Luna thought, a little shocked by it. She hadn’t thought that so many people would ever do something like that for her. She hadn’t thought that—

“I’ve got it!” Ignatius yelled, running forward, and even Luna knew that running forward was a mistake in an instant like that.

In that moment, another shot rang out, and Ignatius stumbled, clutching at his leg. Luna could see the blood, and if she’d had any kind of emotions, maybe she would have been worried by that. Around Luna, more shots sounded, and people screamed, while more ran to try to get into cover. If she’d had any control of her body right then, Luna might have pulled back toward the far side of the cage, but she couldn’t, and she stood there as still as a statue. The fighting sounded around her regardless.

She saw Ignatius crawling across the floor toward her, despite all of it. He crawled with a look of determination that seemed completely out of place on his features. Ignatius didn’t do that kind of thing. He turned and he ran, but here he was, crawling to her in spite of the pain of a bullet wound. Luna’s hands reached out toward him, but not trying to help. She felt herself reaching for him, trying to hurt, trying to kill.

He got close to her and she tried to swipe at him, only for him to jab her with something that he held. Luna couldn’t feel the needle going into her flesh, but she could see it, and seeing it, she had a moment to feel hope before her fist smashed into Ignatius and sent him sprawling back.

This would work; it had to. Luna wanted to believe that she could feel whatever Ignatius had just done to her spreading through her body, fighting the alien control. She wanted to believe that…

The pain hit her, suddenly and completely, ripping through her, tearing at her. Luna screamed, and somehow the scream cut through the violence, bringing it to a halt simply because everyone there was too busy staring at her to do anything else. She wanted to look around at them, wanted to say something, but her throat still wouldn’t open for her words, and her body still wouldn’t do what she wanted.

Instead, she collapsed like a sheet dropped from waiting hands.

Luna saw Kevin. She saw him standing atop a world ship identical to the one that had hung above Earth, looking so dangerous and blank-eyed that he might as well have been one of the creatures himself. She saw golden towers and creatures there… saw the power building within it.

She saw the Earth torn apart by that power, layer by layer. Luna watched as energy poured into it, tearing off the atmosphere, ripping apart the plates that held the world together. She saw it explode, leaving nothing but rocks behind.

Luna saw Kevin again. This time, she found herself thinking of the times she’d spent with him on the road, and in the bunker, on the ship, and traveling by bike with him in the sidecar. She’d been clinging onto the image of his face as a way to hold onto the past, but now, all of the past with him was there for her to claim, laid out as if waiting for her to inspect it.

She saw every moment that she’d spent with Kevin set out in front of her, all of them at once, all visible as perfectly as if they’d been caught on camera. She could see the first moment they had met, and the look on his face in the first seconds when she’d been turned into something controlled by the aliens. She could see the first time he’d gone to her house, and all the many times that she’d been to see him, clambering over fences, slipping in without bothering with anything so boring as a path.