Ascent

How could that be?

Where Luna and the others moved with an almost mechanical synchronization, he moved forward in furtive little darts and stutters, with what looked like some kind of gun cradled in his arms.

He didn’t look like a soldier, though. He looked more like a pirate, crossed with a professor. His hair was wild and spiked, while half a dozen earrings dotted one ear, and he had the beginnings of an unkempt beard. He was wearing a tweed jacket and button-down shirt over jeans and hiking boots. He wasn’t wearing a mask, which made no sense at all.

Luna moved to meet him, her hands coming up to grab for him fast enough that he couldn’t even begin to jump back, or maybe he just didn’t want to try. Even though he was a grown-up and she was just a kid, she had enough strength to hold him in place while her mouth opened wide and then wider still, a great cloud of vapor seeming to boil up in her throat as if waiting to be released. Feeling almost guilty, she breathed it out toward the man, enfolding him in a cloud of vapor thick enough to leave him coughing.

Luna stepped back, the aliens who controlled her obviously waiting for him to transform. He stood there, though, lifting the gun he held, and Luna felt a rush of fear. She might not feel pain, but she was pretty sure that if someone did enough damage to her, she would still be able to die. For a moment, she found herself hoping that the vapor she’d breathed out would take hold before he got a chance to fire. She didn’t want to die. Then she felt guilty for even thinking that. She shouldn’t wish this on anyone.

But the gun did not fire.

Instead, a cloud of blue-green vapor came out of the barrel, pouring into Luna’s lungs with every breath. She started to reach out for him to snap his gun in half, and probably to do the same to him, but the strangest thing happened when her arms were less than halfway to him.

She stopped.

In a single moment, she froze in place, her heartbeat coming faster and faster. She felt her whole world spinning.

Luna fell to her knees involuntarily. She felt them scrape on the sidewalk, actually felt it, and the sensation coming back was like when blood rushed back in after an arm or a leg had gone to sleep. It hurt and she cried out.

She couldn’t believe it.

She was back.

Back to her old self. No longer controlled.

She dug down into her memories, making sure they were still there; that they hadn’t been lost completely. She pictured Kevin’s face, and her parents as they had been on the first birthday she could remember. She breathed a sigh of relief, and not just for herself. It meant that the people who had been transformed weren’t lost.

She wanted to shriek with joy. To reach out and hug this man and never let go.

She stared up at him in wonder.

He smiled down in a curious, academic way.

“My,” he said, “you seem to be responding much quicker than the other subjects I’ve tried this on. Oh, forgive me, where are my manners? I’m Ignatius Gable. The vapor you just breathed in is the vaccine I created to counter the effects of the alien control. You should feel complete control returning to you shortly. Now, I’m sure you have a lot of questions about what’s going on, but we’re not exactly in a position to chat here. So unless we both want to get killed for good, I suggest you come with me.”

She blinked back, startled, and followed his gaze to see countless controlled closing in.

“NOW!” he shouted.

The controlled started to descend on them in a swarm. Luna could only watch as they crowded in close, grabbing for them. He sprayed them with his gun, but for the others, it didn’t seem to work.

Luna ran forward, plunging into the crowd and slipping through the spaces with every advantage she could get from being smaller than most of the people there. She ducked under arms and skidded between legs, taking Ignatius’s arm and not letting go.

Luna spotted Cub, and Bear, and the rest of them, and she snatched the gun and whirled around.

“What are you doing?” he cried out in alarm.

She sprayed a cloud of it that started to slow the controlled around her, spraying Cub and Bear and all the rest of them.

“Come on,” she said, as she kept her finger down on the trigger. “Change!”

Luna saw Cub blinking in the sunlight, stretching out his hands and staring at them.

She looked around until she saw Bobby in the shadows of a building and held out a hand to him.

And then she turned with the others and ran.

And didn’t stop running.

CHAPTER FOUR

Kevin recoiled when Purest Xan came into the room that held him and Chloe. Hanging there alone and unattended was bad enough, but somehow he knew it wouldn’t be as bad as anything the alien chose to do now.

“Fear is a weakness,” Purest Xan said, the words coming out a moment later through its translator. “Just one of many we have conquered.”

“What do you mean?” Kevin asked. He tried to hold back the fear he felt too, because he didn’t want the alien to see it now.

Chloe looked scared enough for both of them, but she looked angry too. If the twisted gravity hadn’t been there, holding them to the frames, Kevin suspected that she would have tried to attack the alien.

“Once, we were as weaker beings,” Purest Xan said, making a gesture so that a section of wall shifted into a screen that showed things that were like the Purest and not like them, all at once. They weren’t quite smooth-skinned, weren’t quite as graceful or as perfect looking, and certainly didn’t have the sense of cold implacability that the Purest had. They looked like the kind of things the Purest might have been a long, long time ago.

“We fought and we warred with one another. We turned our home world into a place that was almost unlivable with the weapons we used.”

The image on the screen shifted, showing a world that started out green and beautiful, only for all of that plant life to wither and die, and explosions to ripple across the surface, with fire and tearing winds spreading out in ripples from what looked like the heart of cities.

“We had to find ways to adapt.”

“By attacking other people’s worlds,” Kevin said. “By tricking us into letting you in so that you could take over people’s minds.”

“You’re evil,” Chloe added. “You’re nothing but monsters.”

Purest Xan looked at them without a hint of emotion. Kevin doubted that the creature was capable of them, and in some ways that was scarier than if Chloe had been right. These creatures weren’t malicious, or filled with hate, or determined to wipe out everything they feared. They acted as coldly and calmly as a glacier rolling over a town, not caring about the lives within.

“Your worlds do not matter,” Purest Xan said. “You are not of the Hive. You are not of the Purest.”

“You really think you’re the only things that matter in the universe?” Chloe demanded.

“We are the Purest,” Xan replied, as if that answered everything. “We created the Hive to solve the wars of our world. In coming together, we learned to put ourselves beyond the weaknesses of emotion. We learned from the worlds nearest us how to transform the lesser to be all that we require them to be. We built the Hive ships to carry us and gather materials with which to regenerate our world for the Purest.”

“So you just take and take, and give nothing back,” Kevin said.

“All else is lesser,” Purest Xan said. “All is ours.”

“Until we stop you,” Chloe said, struggling against the gravity that held her. If it felt anything like the shifted gravity that held Kevin in place, he knew that she had no chance of breaking free, but he guessed that telling her that wouldn’t persuade her to stop. If anything, it would probably make things worse.

“You are weak. You cannot stop the Hive,” Purest Xan said.

“Then why are we still here?” Kevin asked. “If you think we’re so weak and useless, why didn’t you have us killed the moment we arrived on your… ship?”