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
