Ascent

Purest Xan followed them into the room, standing between them, by one of the dome-shaped devices. It took tiny, squid-like things from an opening within the dome one by one, each no bigger than the tip of the alien’s finger. Purest Xan placed them on Kevin’s head, where they stuck, feeling warm and slimy all at once.

“What is all this?” Kevin demanded. “What are you doing to us?”

“We are going to examine you,” Purest Xan replied. “We will see what use you are to the Hive. There will be pain.”

It said it as though it was nothing, or at least as though it didn’t care. Kevin could hear Chloe crying again now, and he wanted to say something, wanted to comfort her. Then the pain hit, and there was no time to do anything but cry out with it.

It felt like cold fingers rummaging around in his thoughts, picking things up and putting them back again, or maybe it was the tentacles of the things stuck to Kevin’s head. He tried to push them out, concentrating as hard as he could, but it made no difference; it just brought more pain.

Kevin could feel other presences now, dozens of minds, hundreds, connected in a kind of silent communion, their collective presence pressing into him and exploring every corner of his being. He heard himself scream, and he heard Chloe too, suggesting that exactly the same thing was happening to her.

Kevin saw images then, flooding into the forefront of his mind and flickering there. There were images of friends, of family, of everything that had recently happened. Kevin saw images of the Survivors jumping into his mind, and he tried to think about something, anything else, so that the aliens wouldn’t know where they were. He could feel their lack of interest though; it seemed to make no difference to them.

He started to see other things, the visions flickering through the rest of it, although the truth was that he couldn’t tell whether they were real visions or something flowing back along the connection to the Hive’s collective. The images filled his mind, blotting out the pain, the sensation of being pinned in place, even the fear of what was happening to Chloe.

He saw a planet floating in space, huge and dull. Moons spun around it, but even as Kevin watched, he realized that they weren’t natural moons, but more world ships. He saw one move out of orbit, the space around it bending and shifting as it moved impossibly fast for something that size.

He felt his consciousness being pulled down toward the surface of the planet, and as he reached it, he saw that the surface was blasted and ruined, polluted and inhospitable. There were towns there in spite of that, filled with hunched figures who looked similar to the Purest, but hunched over and changed, their flesh twisted to live in the ruined environment. Kevin found it hard to believe that anyone would want to live in a place like that, but through the connection to the Hive he knew that these figures didn’t get a choice. They were the ones not chosen for the world ship.

He saw other things there. He saw the camps of creatures stolen from world after world. He saw the flesh factories where they were tested and reshaped, tortured in way after way, with electricity and fire and more. He saw creatures dissected while alive, or forced to breed with one another in combinations that produced monsters. Among the desolation of the wasted planet, he saw small green domes too, like islands of perfection among the horror of the rest of it. Kevin wasn’t surprised to see golden towers standing at the heart of each one.

He came back to himself, gasping, feeling as though every scrap of energy had been pulled out of him. Kevin lay on the platform, looking around and seeing only Chloe in the room now. It felt as though the visions had only lasted seconds, but it must have been longer, to give Purest Xan enough time to leave the room.

“Chloe?” Kevin said.

He heard her groan, her eyes opening as she looked over at him. They were red with crying now as she stared over at him.

“I saw… I saw…”

“I know,” Kevin said. “I saw it too.”

“They’re going to kill us,” Chloe said. “They’re going to pull us apart to see how we work. They’re going to experiment on us like some little kid pulling the wings off flies.”

Kevin would have nodded if he could have pulled his head away from the frame enough to do it. That was the problem, though: they could talk about how much they needed to get out of there, they could see everything that was going to happen, but they still couldn’t move. All they could do was stay there, staring at the screen in front of them, and the Earth rotating slowly upon it.

It took a second or two to realize that it was getting smaller.

It was gradual at first, the planet shrinking away a little at a time. Then it started to move faster, and faster still, receding until it was just a dot. Then it wasn’t even that as the space around the world ship folded around it and it shot away through space.

Kevin stared at the screen in horror. He didn’t know where they were going, or why, but whatever could persuade the aliens to move their whole world ship from the Earth, he knew that it couldn’t be good for him and Chloe.

Or for Luna.

CHAPTER THREE

Luna fought. With every scrap of energy she could find, she tried to fight back against the immobility creeping through her body, making her slow, making her stop. She stood in the middle of Sedona, at the heart of a group of controlled people, and her mind screamed with the effort of trying to keep herself from becoming like them.

It felt as though her body was turning into stone, or… no, more like her limbs were going to sleep while inside she was still awake. She couldn’t feel her fingertips, but she kept on fighting. She could feel herself slipping into the controlled state, though, becoming more and more of a prisoner in her own body with every passing second. It felt as though she was trapped behind glass, her personality and her ability to control herself an exhibit in some museum made from her own flesh and bones.

The world even looked as though she was looking through a kind of strangely filtered glass, colors shifted so that all the ones Luna expected had a milky opacity to them, and new ones crept in around the edges of her vision. Luna didn’t need a mirror to know that her pupils would be a vivid white by now, and she hated it.

I will keep fighting, she told herself. I won’t give up. Kevin needs me.

In spite of her determination, it was hard to ignore the fact that her arms and legs wouldn’t do what she ordered them to. Luna was just standing there, the same as all the others waiting in Sedona, as still as an unused puppet, unable to do more than blink and breathe by herself.

Luna fought to do more. She focused on the smallest finger of her right hand, willing it to straighten. It seemed to move achingly slowly, but it moved. It moved! She tried to move the next finger, focusing on each joint, each muscle…

She screamed inwardly when nothing happened.

At least Kevin had gotten away. Luna had seen him make it through the ranks of the controlled and get to one of the ships. She’d seen him and Chloe sucked up into one of them too, and that made Luna worry more than anything that was happening to her.

You have to fight, she told herself again. Kevin is stuck on an alien spaceship without you. You know he’ll just get into trouble on his own, and not even the fun kind.

Of course, Kevin wasn’t on his own, but that thought didn’t make things better. It wasn’t that Luna hated Chloe or anything, but it was pretty obvious that she liked Kevin, and… well… so did Luna. It was weird how that was easier to admit when her mind was busy being taken over by aliens, but it was, maybe because she knew no one else would find out.

She’d tried making it obvious to him plenty of times in the past, although he never seemed to get it. Maybe that was a boy thing, or maybe it was just a Kevin thing, able to understand messages from across the galaxy, but not anything right in front of his face. Now he was up on an alien spaceship with Chloe, and if they weren’t exactly alone together, Luna was pretty sure that aliens didn’t count. Even if nothing happened, Luna still wasn’t sure that Chloe was a good choice to get Kevin back safely. Yes, she’d helped save Luna on the boat, and she could hotwire a car, but that wasn’t the same thing as hijacking a spaceship, and Luna didn’t trust her not to panic when things went wrong.

Then things did go wrong, and Luna had a perfect view of it.

One moment, the aliens’ world ship was hanging moon-like in the sky; the next, the sky around it rippled and flickered, as though space was a pond that someone had thrown a stone into. The world ship started to drift away, its shadow passing from the sky. There was a moment when the space it was in seemed to fold around it, and then it was gone, moving far faster than Luna could hope to follow.

For a brief moment, hope flared in her. Was it over? Kevin had gone up into the small ship above Sedona, and that had gone up to the world ship, and now both were gone. Had he found a way to end this? Had he and Chloe saved them all?

Luna tried to move her arm, hoping against hope, but nothing happened. Nothing had changed.

A bark beside her caught Luna’s attention. Bobby was there, the Old English sheepdog running up to Luna and nudging against her leg in a way that might almost have knocked her over if he had done it before the controlled breathed their vapor into her. As it was, she stood as solid as stone, unmoved and unmoving, not even reacting as he moved to her hand, licking her with a big, rough tongue.

Good boy, Luna thought, and tried to say it, but she couldn’t get the sounds out. She couldn’t reach out to pet him either, and that just showed her how much control the aliens still had over her. Bobby nudged against her again and then ran back as if expecting her to follow, and when she didn’t, he lay down and whined, looking up at her with sad eyes.

I’m sorry, Bobby, Luna thought, but she couldn’t say that, either.

It wasn’t the only thing she was sorry for. Around her, Luna could see the Dustside bikers standing just as still as everyone else. She could see Bear hulking over the rest of them, all of the sense of strength and command leached out of him by his transformation. She could see Cub just a little way away, the boy staring back at her blankly, where before he’d been confident and obviously interested in her.

Are you still in there? Luna wondered in the prison of her mind. Was everyone who had been transformed trapped like this? Were they sitting there behind the pure white of their pupils, horrified as the aliens controlled every movement they made? Luna didn’t know whether to hope that Cub wasn’t having to suffer that, or to hope that he was, because at least it would mean that he was still there, and at least there might be a chance to get him back.

What chance? Luna thought. What hope was there for any of them? No one had come back from this so far. The aliens had transformed most of the world, and the people who got transformed stayed transformed. It wasn’t like liking the wrong band; it wasn’t as if it simply wore off if you left it long enough.

She could hear sounds now, deep in the back of her mind. She recognized the screeches and the clicks, the static sounds and the buzzing, because she’d heard them plenty of times before when Kevin had been translating alien signals. Luna could hear this as their language, although she still had no idea what it meant.

She might not know it, but it seemed that her body did. Luna found herself starting to move, forming up with the other people there like some kind of military unit. She didn’t know who was giving the orders if the main alien ship was gone. Maybe some of the aliens were down on the surface.

It didn’t matter; whoever was giving the orders to her, Luna found herself obeying them. She started to march with the others, spreading out with them among the debris of Sedona, starting to lift rubble and pick through the houses.

Luna felt like she was watching it from a distance, seeing herself lifting rocks and pulling at sections of wood with her bare hands. She saw herself moving in concert with Cub and the others, picking the town clean with the thoroughness of ants cutting leaves or vultures stripping a carcass of meat.

She heard Bobby barking again, and he was beside her once more, yapping and running around her as if he might be able to distract her from what she was doing. He licked her hand again, then clamped his teeth down on her arm. It wasn’t hard, more like the way he might have held onto a wayward puppy and pulled it back into line.

Bobby was strong, and probably weighed almost as much as her, but Luna pulled clear of him as if he wasn’t there. She kept working, gathering materials and forming them into piles, sorting them as efficiently as a machine.

Luna saw cuts and scrapes appear on her arms from the effort of moving the materials, but she didn’t feel them. They were as numb as if she had left them in ice for an hour, the pain insulated from her by the layers of alien control.

Luna could feel that control now as Bobby continued to bark and run around her. She could feel what it wanted her to do, and she fought it, the small part of her that was still her horrified by the prospect even as the rest of her picked up a rock.

No! she commanded herself. I won’t do it. I won’t do this!

She fought against the impulses with every fiber of her being, pulling back at her arm with the full strength of a will that had previously stood up to everything from parents’ instructions to the raging ocean. For a moment or two, it felt as if she was even able to make her body hesitate, frozen on the brink of action. It was too much, though, like trying to hold back the weight of an avalanche with her bare hands. With an inner cry of despair, Luna felt that avalanche pour over her.

She turned and threw the rock at Bobby, crying as she did it.

He yelped, then whined as he hurried away, limping slightly on one paw. Luna saw him retreat to the edges of the buildings they were working on, lying down and watching her with a forlorn look that matched how Luna felt only too well.

But what she felt didn’t matter, not in the face of the aliens’ instructions. No matter how much her mind crashed against the limits of the cage that held it, the prison of her body kept working, lifting and tearing, separating resources and stacking them ready for collection even though the ship above Sedona was gone now.

She tried to count the minutes that passed, tried to keep some track of the time that was ebbing away, but there was no easy way to do it. Her body kept her eyes on the work, not on the progress of the sun, and if she got hungry or tired, she didn’t feel it. In the deepest recesses of her mind, Luna understood now how the controlled were so fast and strong: they didn’t care about the pain or the tiredness that would have stopped most ordinary people; where most people stopped well short of the limits of what their bodies could do, the controlled were pushed to those limits all the time by the aliens who commanded them.

Who command us, Luna corrected herself.

She didn’t want to think of herself as one of them, but Luna wasn’t sure how to distract herself from any of it. She couldn’t shut her eyes to block it out. She couldn’t stop herself from doing any of this. The most that she could do was try to grasp for memories of her life before this: sitting with Kevin on the shore of the lake when he’d told her about his illness, going to school and… and…

She latched onto a memory, thinking about one day when she’d been due to meet up with Kevin after school. They’d planned to go down to a pizza place on the corner not far from their houses. She could remember the feeling, what it had been like walking through their town, heading for a spot that had been just theirs, that no one else had known about, behind one of the wooden fences that surrounded an old house a little way along that no one had lived in for years.

Getting there meant clambering through the fork in the old tree that kept a gap clear among a stack of old junk, then running along the boards of a low roof in just the right pattern that her feet wouldn’t fall through, all the while making sure that no one who might shout at her for being somewhere she shouldn’t be saw her.

In other words, it was exactly the kind of route that Luna loved to run along. She made her way along it with the kind of speed and willingness to get muddy that would probably have made her parents sigh if they saw it. While she ran, she found herself thinking about Kevin, wondering if today would be the day when he got around to asking if he could kiss her.

Maybe he wouldn’t; he could be pretty oblivious about things sometimes.

She made her way through the gardens, over toward the spot where she and Kevin were due to meet. She heard a noise from beyond the fence, and saw Kevin and a couple of other boys she hadn’t seen before.

“What are you doing back here?” one asked. “Hiding away so no one can find you?”

“I’m not hiding,” Kevin insisted, which Luna guessed was just about the worst thing he could have done.

“Are you saying that I’m a liar?” the boy demanded. He pushed Kevin, so that Kevin scraped back against the wall. “Are you calling me a liar?”

Luna slipped through the gap in the fence. “I am,” she declared. “I’m saying that you’re a liar, and a bully, and if you give me a couple of seconds, I’ll probably think of plenty of other nasty things to call you too.”

He spun toward her. “You’d better run. This is between me and him.”

“And your friend, let’s not forget that,” Luna said.

“You’re being smart because you think I won’t hit a girl! Well—”

Luna punched him in the nose, as much because she was getting bored waiting for him to actually do something as anything else. He roared and set off running after her as Luna sprinted away.

She didn’t lead him back the way she’d come, because that was her route, but she knew plenty of others. Just for fun, she cut across the garden where they always had their pool filled, hearing a splash as one of the boys missed his turn. From there, she scrambled up onto one of the nearby roofs, then over through the park, then across into the garden where the big, angry dog lived, taking care to only step in the spaces out of range of its chain. A snarl and a shriek of anger behind Luna told her that the second of the boys had fallen behind.

“I’ll get you for this!” he yelled out.

Luna laughed. “Not unless you want to have to explain to people how I managed to punch you and get away with it.”

She ran back in the direction of Kevin, who was waiting there with the confidence of someone who’d seen this game before.

“You know, I could have taken him,” he said, trying to look tough.

Luna managed not to laugh. “But it’s more fun this way. Come on, you can buy me pizza for rescuing you.”

“But you didn’t rescue me. I could have taken him…”

***

Luna smiled at the memory, or would have if she’d been able to move her face. She tried to think of the bully’s name, because she was sure that she’d known it once. What bully though? What had she been thinking about? The fact that she couldn’t remember made Luna pause in terror. She’d been thinking about it just a moment ago, and now it was gone, like… like…

Luna tried to grasp the memories, she really did. She knew that she had memories; a whole lifetime’s worth. She had friends, and a life, and parents… she definitely had parents, so why couldn’t she remember their faces? Maybe she didn’t have parents. Maybe all of this was just some sick joke. Maybe she’d always been like this, and she was just defective somehow, feeling that she was different as a distraction from the work that the aliens needed her to…

No, Luna thought fiercely, I’m me. I’m Luna. They transformed me, and I have real memories… somewhere.

She wasn’t sure where, though. Every time she tried to grab for what felt like the beginnings of a memory, it slipped away into a great fog of thoughts that felt as though it was consuming every part of her. Luna tried to drag herself away from that fog, but it was creeping in more and more around the edges of who she was, seeming to fill everything, carrying away small pieces of memories, of words, of personality.

Suddenly, she saw something. It was just different enough to snap her out of it, even if just for a second.

There was a man approaching. Moving forward without fear. A real man. Not controlled.

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.