Return

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.”