Морган Райс - Return

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.

Kevin was walking through places he knew, places he’d been. He was wandering around them in odd combinations that made no sense, drifting from one to another as smoothly as breathing. He was walking on the Hive world ship that he’d been to, and the streets shifted so that they became the streets of Mountain View, where he’d grown up. He walked through a door, and now he was in the Colombian rainforest, with military people all around him, ready to fight for the right to control the Hive’s capsule.

Each step brought a different moment, shifting and changing so that it was hard to keep track of them all. He moved from moments in the signal chamber, deciphering the messages sent to the Earth, to the first instant when he’d seen people changing into monsters, knowing that they were too late to stop the invasion…

…to the instant when the doctor had told him he was dying.

Kevin became distantly aware of his body then, although it was so far away that he seemed to be floating above it. He could feel the pain in his head, so great that it felt as though it was exploding. The tremors in his body seemed to claim him so completely that it was impossible that he could be moving through any of these places.

He couldn’t be, he knew. He was dreaming, he was remembering, and he was dying.

You shouldn’t be told that you were dying when you were thirteen years old. He remembered thinking that, right back at the start of all this, in the office of the specialist. Now, nobody was telling him; he just knew it, as surely as he knew what a distant signal meant, or the sound of Luna’s voice.

He could feel the progress of the disease within him. It had been halted for the brief period that he had been a part of the Hive, but it had been far too close to this moment when they had stopped it.

More moments slipped through his dreams: sailing along the coast with Chloe and Luna; being in the bunker, there together in one corner of the dormitory, for that one brief night when it had been safe. Kevin wasn’t sure whether this was just a dream, or the thing he’d heard of where people’s lives flashed before their eyes before they died, or something in between.

More pain flashed through him, this time seeming to clench around his heart and crush it, holding it still so Kevin couldn’t feel it beat. It was the kind of pain he couldn’t have believed existed; the kind of pain that seemed to encompass everything at once.

There were so many images in his dreams; so many things he’d done that he might never have had a chance to if the world had been a different place. If he hadn’t had his power, would the Hive still have come? Would he have been all the places he had, seen all the things he had?

However much Kevin had done, it wasn’t enough. He didn’t want to die. He hadn’t wanted to die at any point in this. It wasn’t fair .

“Come on, you have to do something!”

The words seemed to come from a long way away, Chloe’s voice drifting in through a thin gauze that was still far too thick to reach through.

“We are attempting to,” a voice replied, and although Kevin didn’t recognize the individual, he recognized the Ilari language. “If we’d had time to study what was happening with him…”

“There is no time,” General s’Lara said. “Do what must be done.”

“Wait,” Kevin tried to say, but the words wouldn’t come out. “What do you mean ?”

Then pain hit him, and if he’d thought he’d known what pain was before, this was a hundred times worse. It seemed to run through every cell of him at once, burning and freezing, tearing at him and crushing. It was as though it was tearing him apart, atom by atom, and rebuilding them one after another. Each cell was subtly different, subtly changed, and now it felt like a cool wave running through him, transforming him as he went.

Blackness rose up for him again, but this didn’t feel like the blackness of death. Instead, it felt soothing, and gentle, and pure. It wrapped around Kevin as surely as a blanket, and finally, he could feel his body again.

“You can open your eyes now, Kevin,” General s’Lara said.

Kevin’s eyes felt gluey and hard to open. He felt tired…

“Kevin,” Chloe said, far less gently. “Wake up .”