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
