Return
Luna saw Cub hesitate at that. It seemed to be the only thing that was enough to do it.
“You can really do it?” he asked.
“Not here,” Ignatius admitted. “The damage from the battle is severe, but all I need is a lab with the right equipment, and a few specific pieces of machinery.”
“And in the meantime, we all have to hold onto Luna to stop her killing us?” Cub asked.
“We can build something to contain her,” Barnaby said. He already seemed to be working on it, holding up rough pieces of metal to the remains of a motorcycle trailer as if he could already see the way it fit together in his head.
“And she’ll pull in all the aliens from a hundred miles around,” Cub said.
Luna knew what he meant. The creatures controlling her would see everything through her eyes. They would know where to send more.
“We’re going to do that all by ourselves,” Ignatius said. “We owe her this, Cub, and I promise we can get her back.”
Cub stood there, but Luna could tell that he’d made his mind up. Maybe she should have felt grateful that he wasn’t going to kill her. Maybe she should have felt some pity for the tough decisions that he’d had to take already. Instead, all she could think of as he stood there was that he’d been going to kill her. He’d actually been going to kill her.
“All right,” Cub said. He backed away. “All right.”
Luna continued to snap and snarl, unable to help herself, while the people held her in place. She was everything that Cub feared she was, but she was more than that. She just didn’t have any way to let people know. A little further over, Barnaby was working on the enclosure designed to hold her. It looked like a kind of cage, made out of parts scavenged from the wreckage of the battle.
It came together slowly, piece by carefully constructed piece. As quickly as it came together, Luna felt herself gradually falling apart. She could feel memories sliding away into the depths of her being in a way that felt all too familiar. She’d felt this before, the first time she had been transformed, fragments of herself lost whenever she looked away from them, impossible to grasp, impossible to hold onto, like darting fish slipping through her fingers.
The memories of her parents slid into a vague kind of knowledge, with Luna unable to recall a single moment with them, a single instant spent laughing at home or arguing about chores or even sitting down together to eat. Luna knew the facts of her life, but couldn’t recall it. She couldn’t truly remember what it had been like to be in school, or to sit and watch TV, or to be outside, or…
…Kevin’s face came into her mind so sharply and perfectly that it might have been a photograph, and Luna clung to that image as tightly as she might have held onto a metal post in a hurricane. She wouldn’t lose Kevin, wouldn’t lose a single fragment of him. She wouldn’t lose the moments that she’d spent with him. Those moments seemed etched into her, from being there with him at the NASA Institute, to fleeing to the bunker and hiding from the flow of the vapor, to trying to bring down the aliens together.
There was something brighter about those moments than the rest of it, somehow. They stood out in Luna’s mind indelibly, and she managed to cling to them, holding onto thoughts of Kevin, and to all the things that she felt for him. That need, that love, seemed like a beacon in the dark that threatened to engulf her,
“Bring her this way,” Barnaby called out, and Luna looked up to see that he had completed his holding cell, so quickly that it stood as a reminder of just how talented he was when it came to building things. It looked roughly made, but the metal was thick, and the gaps between the bars were small enough that even Luna wouldn’t be able to slip out.
They carried her toward it, and her body fought even if Luna’s mind hoped that the cage would be strong enough to hold her. She felt her foot connect with a man’s jaw, her elbow slam into someone’s stomach. She felt blows connect hard enough to bruise or break bones, and it didn’t seem to make any difference. Most of the people carrying her now weren’t members of the Survivors, or at least, Luna didn’t think they were. Instead, they had the ragged look of the people who had previously been transformed. They seemed willing to help her even when the others were afraid.
They picked her up and flung her into the cage. Luna didn’t feel the landing. Instead, she rose and stormed for the door, but even her unbridled speed wasn’t enough to make it there before the metal slammed into place and the Survivors managed to lock it shut.
Luna threw herself against the bars, testing the strength of them. The pulsing instructions of the Hive told her to tear her way free and kill, to do as much damage as she could before they cut her down, but the metal didn’t give way under her hands, even when she tore at the bars hard enough to make her fingers bleed. That should have hurt, but like everything else as one of those transformed, it seemed to pass in a dream, almost happening to someone else.
The only problem was that the someone else was her, and this would really hurt if Ignatius was right about being able to change her back.
“Where do we go to process what we found?” Leon asked Ignatius and Barnaby. “We just need a lab, right?”
Luna tried to look away. She didn’t think the aliens were dragging knowledge of the Survivors from her, but she had no way of knowing. Cub was right about that much: she was a threat to the rest of them with every moment that she was able to see and hear. She could draw in hordes of the controlled as surely as a beacon.
“It can’t just be any lab,” Ignatius said. “We’re going to need specific pieces of equipment. The university would have had them, but with the attack, I’m worried that they might be gone.”
“Where then?” Leon asked.
Luna saw Ignatius shrug, and in that moment she knew that this was anything but certain. Ignatius had made the process of bringing her back seem so simple, but he obviously didn’t actually know where to find what they were looking for. None of them did, and somehow, Luna suspected that she only had a limited amount of time before everything she was disappeared for good. Even now, she could feel the weight of the aliens’ infection pressing down on her, crushing everything that she was. It felt as though there was a hand behind it, closing slowly on her and making that happen.
“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.