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
