Return

General s’Lara shook her head. “There will be others who try to blame you for it, Kevin, but I do not. You were controlled, and we are safe now.”

They flew forward, in amongst the trees, the ships finding their way between the trunks to land on great platforms that extruded from the side of the buildings amongst the trees. This close, Kevin could see that there was a whole city there.

The ship touched down and they stepped out. Inside the landing craft, surrounded by walls, there hadn’t been the sense of space there, but now, Kevin could see just how high up it all was. It was high enough that the air felt thin and made his head hurt, while he stumbled unsteadily. His brain felt bewildered by the sheer height.

“Come on,” General s’Lara said. “I announced that we were coming as we approached, and people will want to meet you. They’re excited by the prospect of people who could break free from the Hive, and they think that you, Kevin, are very special.”

“Now I’m feeling left out,” Chloe said, but she didn’t sound as though she meant it that much.

Kevin put a hand on her shoulder. “I think you’re special.”

“You are,” General s’Lara assured her. “If you will let our scientists study you all, we will potentially learn so much.”

Chloe looked worried by that. “I’ve had enough of being studied for a lifetime.”

“We won’t force you,” General s’Lara said, and there was something understanding about her tone then. “It’s your choice. Now, come on. I’ll show you the base.”

Inside, it was every bit as impressive to Kevin as it was outside. The corridors had the same impossible scenes on them as had decorated the inside of the ships, each one turned into a canvas that it seemed the Ilari’s AIs could manipulate, since Kevin saw one of the blue-skinned aliens manipulating the wall into a strange kind of abstract work as they passed. He turned to look at them, offering a kind of bow to the general.

“Oh, stop it, Cler, you know I’m the one who should bow to you,” the general said.

They kept going, and the general started to explain the buildings they passed through as they went.

“In theory, people take whatever rooms they need for whatever they’re trying to do, and reshape them to suit, but there tend to be common areas to it all,” she said. “There are living spaces on either side here, in pods branching off the main corridor. These spaces seem empty. You can have those.”

Was it really as casual as that? They needed a room so they got one? She led the way into a big open living space with couches and beds set out around it. The whole place was empty and still, but didn’t seem sterile in the way that Kevin knew from the Institute, and it lacked the precise opulence of the Hive’s golden towers. It was comfortable instead, and felt as though it could easily be someone’s home.

“So we just wander in and take a room?” he asked, leaning against a couch as a brief wave of exhaustion hit him.

“How else would you do it?” the general asked, sounding genuinely puzzled that there might be another way to do things. She gestured to an open slot on a wall. “This is where we get food. It will be a little slower for you since you don’t have AIs, but you can still ask for what you want. Here, let me.”

She paused for a moment in front of it, and a tray of food just… appeared. Steaming strands of blue mixed with what looked like red berries sat there.

“My AI tells me that laxatha should be safe for you to eat, and it’s one of my favorites,” she said. “Here, try it.”

She set it out in front of them and sat down beside them, in a way that seemed strange for a general to do. Chloe was the first to taste the dish, and the surprised delight on her face told its own story.

“This is… good isn’t enough. It’s amazing. You have to try it, Kevin.”

Kevin took a tentative bite, and was surprised by just how good the mixture tasted. There was only one question on his mind, adding a slightly strange note to the meal while they ate.

“General s’Lara,” he said, “why are you here serving us food?”

“Because you’re our guests,” the general said.

“And that’s very kind, but you could have sent someone to do all of this. Don’t you have meetings and things you need to be at?” Kevin had met at least some important people, and he couldn’t imagine them doing this. “Why you?”

General s’Lara nodded. “I’ll admit that there are plenty of talks I should be having, but my AI is having at least some of them with others. Besides, here with you may be one of the most important places I could be right now.”

Kevin didn’t get it for a moment, but then frowned slightly as he did. “Because of everything that we might know?”

“I won’t lie to you,” General s’Lara said. “I think that you three may hold the key to this. We’ve been able to beat individual members of the Hive, we can do it easily when the numbers are equal, but the numbers are never equal. They just keep coming, and worse, they just don’t care. They throw creatures at us, and they don’t care if they’re killed or not. How do you fight something that doesn’t worry if it is going to die?”

Kevin wasn’t sure he had an answer to that. He’d used that against the Ilari when they’d been fighting. He’d thrown ships at them, seeing their desire to live as a weakness to be exploited.

“It’s the Hive’s greatest strength,” Ro said.

“The fact that you know them, and you were able to break free, might let us understand how to actually beat them. We might actually be able to win this war.”

“But we don’t know anything,” Kevin said.

“You might not know what you know,” the general said. “For a start, what do you know about this ability of yours?”

Kevin shook his head. “I hardly know anything. I hear signals, and I can translate them. I see things that need translating, and my brain just does it.”

“And it’s killing him for it,” Chloe put in, sounding somber. Just the words had Kevin feeling sad about the prospect of the ticking clock that had restarted in his body.

“What do you mean, killing you?” General s’Lara asked.

Kevin started to answer, standing up as he did so. The pain hit him almost immediately, and he realized that the things he’d been experiencing as they landed had been a lot more than just the background symptoms that had been plaguing him since he’d come out from the Hive again.

He’d gotten so used to ignoring it that he’d done it even when his body had been trying to warn him that something wasn’t right. Now it seemed that everything hit him at once. Dizziness overwhelmed him, spinning Kevin half around, so that he dropped to the floor in stages, putting out a hand to catch himself even while it started to twitch in the beginnings of a fit that seemed to wrack every inch of him.

Pain came with it, bursting inside his head in a supernova of agony. It felt like something broke inside him then, and he would have screamed if his mouth had still been under his own control. He’d felt himself lose control of his body before when signals had ripped through him, but this was different. This didn’t hold the promise of a message or an answer; the only promise it seemed to hold was the blackness that lay beyond it, threatening to rise up and overwhelm everything.

Kevin could see Chloe, Ro, and General s’Lara beside him, their lips moving as they talked. Chloe looked as though she was shouting something down to him, but he couldn’t hear any of it. It felt as though it was on the other side of a curtain, and slipping further away by the second.

He was dying, and there was nothing he could do about it.

CHAPTER THREE

Luna woke, blinking in the light, and even that was a surprise. When she’d slept, she’d expected to slide down into darkness and not wake up, consumed completely by the alien nanobots that were slowly taking over her body. Instead, she could still remember who she was, and where she was, and all the horrors that had struck the world.

It was only when her body stood without her thinking about it that she realized that something was wrong.

“No!” she screamed, but the scream just came out as a groan past lips that refused to move in response to her commands. They weren’t hers anymore, not really. Someone else was pulling the strings that controlled her.

She looked around at the compound where they’d fought against so many of the transformed and the aliens, and Luna had the sense that it wasn’t just her looking around in that moment. Other things were looking through her eyes, making decisions on her behalf, issuing commands without a thought for what it might do to her.

Luna fought against those commands as hard as she could, but it made no difference, just as it had made no difference the last time she had been one of the controlled. Instead, she stood like a prisoner in her own flesh while her body started to walk over to the others, held by walls made of her own muscles. She grabbed a long shard of metal that was as sharp as any machete or knife. If it cut into her hands, she didn’t notice.

Luna didn’t understand that. Before, the transformed had grabbed blindly at people and tried to convert them, stupid in the absence of direct control. This, though… this felt like someone was using her for something far more focused, something far more dangerous.

She stalked forward, and it was only as Luna did so that she realized exactly who she was heading toward. Ignatius, Cub, Barnaby, and Leon stood ahead—all the people the resistance to the invasion needed. The aliens were going to use her as a knife thrust at the heart of it all, aimed to kill the only people who truly knew how they might stop what the aliens had done. If the aliens could kill them, then who would truly know how the cure worked?

Luna tried to shout a warning, but it didn’t do any good. No sound came out, and while the change in her eyes would be obvious by now to anyone who looked, no one was looking. They were all too busy trying to recover from the aftermath of the battle, patching wounds and trying to find enough food for people who hadn’t felt thirst or hunger for days or weeks.

Then Bobby the sheepdog ran up, growled, and bit her.