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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.

Luna didn’t feel it, because at this stage, she couldn’t feel anything. She looked down at the dog, drawing back her leg ready to kick him, and Luna knew that she would, in spite of all the effort she put into holding herself back. Bobby danced back, snarling and growling, as surely as if she’d been a wolf troubling some ancient flock. Luna stepped toward him, lifting the long shard of metal now.

“Bobby, what are you doing?” Cub demanded, moving forward.

Luna turned toward him, slashing with the weapon that she held and managing to cut through the skin even as he danced back from the attack. She remembered this strength and this speed, but she’d never had the chance to use it to strike out at anyone before. She hadn’t realized just how dangerous it made her.

“Luna, what’s going on?” Cub demanded, dodging back from another blow. Luna saw him stare at her. “Oh no. No!”

Luna charged at him and the others with all the speed of her kind, breathing out vapor even though she knew it would do nothing to people already inoculated against the danger. A man got in her way and she cut him down with her shard of metal, shoving another man out of her path.

“She’s transformed!” Cub yelled above the sudden chaos.

Then he did the unthinkable, and reached for a gun.

Luna was already lunging for him, shoving him back and knocking the gun from his hand so fast she could barely believe how quickly she was moving.

“Grab her!” Ignatius yelled above the chaos.

Luna struck out toward him, the need to obey the Hive besting any attempt to resist. Inside, she was screaming, but it only came out as a dull hiss. A dozen other people were on her in that moment. Luna shook one of them off, throwing him away with more force than she could have believed, and lashed out at another.

Even so, more people piled in, and for all her strength, all her ferocity, Luna found herself pinned between them. There were too many of them to fight. She breathed out vapor in what seemed like the futile hope that it would turn some of these creatures, these humans… and even as she thought it, Luna caught herself. She wasn’t what the aliens wanted her to be. She wouldn’t lose track of who she was.

“She’s changed,” Cub said, shaking his head. “She’s gone. Luna’s gone.”

He still had the gun in his hand, and his hand seemed to be shaking now, as if he were wrestling with a decision. Luna could guess exactly what that decision was, and she hated it.

“Don’t say that,” Leon said. “She might still be in there.”

Luna wanted to scream that she was still in there. She wanted Cub to see that she was still there, that… well, she didn’t know what happened after that.

Instead, she saw Cub lift his gun.

“I know what it’s like as one of those things. Even if Luna is in there, she won’t be for long. It sucks away who you are.”

“But she’s there now,” Leon said. “We can still save her. The blast—”

“The blast converted people all around it during the battle, but it didn’t save Luna,” Cub said. Luna could see tears in his eyes now. “She’s gone, and now I have to do… I have to do the only thing that can be done.”

Luna could guess what he was thinking: that this was the same as with his father, Bear; that there wasn’t another choice; that he was sparing her from a fate worse than death. Even so, he was pointing a gun at her, and she hated it. How could he do that to her? How could he think, even for a moment, that it was the right thing to do?

“Wait!” Ignatius yelled, and he was the last person Luna would have expected to step between her and a gun. The chemist and former drug maker was nothing if not a coward.

“Get out of the way,” Cub snapped back.

“We can still save her,” Ignatius insisted.

“If she wasn’t saved when the blast went out—”

“Because she was at its center. The eye of the storm!” Ignatius said. He didn’t move aside. Luna hadn’t expected him of all people to stand in the face of that kind of danger. “It doesn’t mean that she can’t be saved. We just need—”

“What? To recreate the blast?” Cub demanded, and Luna might have wanted to dry the tears in his eyes if not for the reason for them. “Recreate a random burst of alien energy tuned to just the right frequency when it hit the crystals? Do you think I wasn’t paying attention to what you’ve been saying, Ignatius? If I thought there was a way…”

He pulled the trigger on his gun and Luna saw the dust at her feet kick up. Her controlled body didn’t flinch, didn’t even react.

“That was a warning, Ignatius,” Cub said, and Luna could hear the certainty in his voice now. “Move.”

Luna tried to get her body to move so that Ignatius wouldn’t be in the line of fire, but she was imprisoned both within her own flesh and by the hands of those who held her. They wanted this. They wanted to make sure that the most people were hurt.

“The blast let us overwhelm the nanites involved in the change for hundreds,” Ignatius said, “but we can still come up with a cure for one person at a time. We just need to process it.”

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.