Ascent

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.

Luna ran forward, plunging into the crowd and slipping through the spaces with every advantage she could get from being smaller than most of the people there. She ducked under arms and skidded between legs, taking Ignatius’s arm and not letting go.

Luna spotted Cub, and Bear, and the rest of them, and she snatched the gun and whirled around.

“What are you doing?” he cried out in alarm.

She sprayed a cloud of it that started to slow the controlled around her, spraying Cub and Bear and all the rest of them.

“Come on,” she said, as she kept her finger down on the trigger. “Change!”

Luna saw Cub blinking in the sunlight, stretching out his hands and staring at them.

She looked around until she saw Bobby in the shadows of a building and held out a hand to him.

And then she turned with the others and ran.

And didn’t stop running.

CHAPTER FOUR

Kevin recoiled when Purest Xan came into the room that held him and Chloe. Hanging there alone and unattended was bad enough, but somehow he knew it wouldn’t be as bad as anything the alien chose to do now.

“Fear is a weakness,” Purest Xan said, the words coming out a moment later through its translator. “Just one of many we have conquered.”

“What do you mean?” Kevin asked. He tried to hold back the fear he felt too, because he didn’t want the alien to see it now.

Chloe looked scared enough for both of them, but she looked angry too. If the twisted gravity hadn’t been there, holding them to the frames, Kevin suspected that she would have tried to attack the alien.

“Once, we were as weaker beings,” Purest Xan said, making a gesture so that a section of wall shifted into a screen that showed things that were like the Purest and not like them, all at once. They weren’t quite smooth-skinned, weren’t quite as graceful or as perfect looking, and certainly didn’t have the sense of cold implacability that the Purest had. They looked like the kind of things the Purest might have been a long, long time ago.

“We fought and we warred with one another. We turned our home world into a place that was almost unlivable with the weapons we used.”

The image on the screen shifted, showing a world that started out green and beautiful, only for all of that plant life to wither and die, and explosions to ripple across the surface, with fire and tearing winds spreading out in ripples from what looked like the heart of cities.

“We had to find ways to adapt.”

“By attacking other people’s worlds,” Kevin said. “By tricking us into letting you in so that you could take over people’s minds.”

“You’re evil,” Chloe added. “You’re nothing but monsters.”

Purest Xan looked at them without a hint of emotion. Kevin doubted that the creature was capable of them, and in some ways that was scarier than if Chloe had been right. These creatures weren’t malicious, or filled with hate, or determined to wipe out everything they feared. They acted as coldly and calmly as a glacier rolling over a town, not caring about the lives within.

“Your worlds do not matter,” Purest Xan said. “You are not of the Hive. You are not of the Purest.”

“You really think you’re the only things that matter in the universe?” Chloe demanded.

“We are the Purest,” Xan replied, as if that answered everything. “We created the Hive to solve the wars of our world. In coming together, we learned to put ourselves beyond the weaknesses of emotion. We learned from the worlds nearest us how to transform the lesser to be all that we require them to be. We built the Hive ships to carry us and gather materials with which to regenerate our world for the Purest.”

“So you just take and take, and give nothing back,” Kevin said.

“All else is lesser,” Purest Xan said. “All is ours.”

“Until we stop you,” Chloe said, struggling against the gravity that held her. If it felt anything like the shifted gravity that held Kevin in place, he knew that she had no chance of breaking free, but he guessed that telling her that wouldn’t persuade her to stop. If anything, it would probably make things worse.

“You are weak. You cannot stop the Hive,” Purest Xan said.

“Then why are we still here?” Kevin asked. “If you think we’re so weak and useless, why didn’t you have us killed the moment we arrived on your… ship?”

“We do not destroy what is useful,” Purest Xan said. “We gather it. It is our purpose.”

Useful. Kevin wasn’t sure he liked the idea of being useful to something like this. From what he’d seen of the other creatures they had found useful, the aliens went around reshaping their flesh, transforming them. He’d already felt the pain involved just with the aliens going through his thoughts. The visions he’d seen of the aliens’ world had been even worse.

“I don’t want to be useful to you,” Kevin said.

“You get no choice,” Purest Xan said. “You should be grateful to us. The chosen of a world are typically destroyed, to stop them being… a danger to us. You survive because we permit you to survive.”

“Why?” Kevin insisted.

Purest Xan didn’t answer for a moment or two. Instead, the alien moved around the room, making adjustments to some of the machinery.

“They’re going to look in our minds again, Kevin,” Chloe said, sounding terrified by the prospect. “They’re going to use those tentacle things again.”

“Not on you,” Purest Xan said, sounding almost contemptuous. “You will be intriguing enough to dissect and reshape. Your mind is quite interesting, but you are not worthy of more.”

“You can’t dissect Chloe!” Kevin yelled, fighting against the gravity that held him. It pressed him back into the frame easily, no matter how much he struggled to break free. The pressure held him flat, like a lead weight pressing down on his chest.

“We may do as we wish,” Purest Xan said. “If that is the greatest use the female can be to the Hive, that is what will happen. We will be generous, though. You will get to choose what happens to her.”

“Then I choose that she doesn’t get dissected!” Kevin said.

“After we are done,” Purest Xan said. “After you have joined our Hive.”

“What?” Kevin said. He shook his head. “No way.”

The alien moved to him, the tentacled devices ready in his hands.

“Your brain has capacities that the Hive requires,” Purest Xan said. “Therefore you will join us.”

The alien made it sound like an undeniable fact, as if it was simply the way the world was. It made the idea sound as obvious and natural as water being wet, or as the sun being hot. There was nothing natural about the tentacled things that Purest Xan held in its hands, though.

“So, what?” Kevin demanded, mostly because every moment he could delay this felt like a good idea. “You’re going to make me into one of the Purest like you? Do I get to lose all of my hair and have freaky eyes?”

Maybe if Kevin could annoy the alien enough, he could distract it from what it was about to do. Of course, it might then decide to do a whole host of things that were even worse, but right then, Kevin couldn’t think of anything worse than being changed into one of them.

“You are not of the Purest,” Purest Xan said. “But you can be made of the Hive. You will become our emissary, one of our chosen. You should welcome the honor.”

“You think it’s some kind of honor for Kevin to have his brain invaded?” Chloe demanded.

“It will not be an invasion,” Purest Xan said. “Kevin will welcome us. He will agree to become one of us.”

“Why do I have to agree?” Kevin demanded. “Why don’t you just do it if you’re going to, instead of playing games?”

The alien looked almost offended by that, although Kevin doubted that it could feel that emotion either. He doubted that it could feel anything.

“We do not play games,” it said. “Your species’ brains are delicate, though, and we require yours intact for the tasks that the Hive has for you. If you fight too much during the process, there is the potential that you could be… damaged.”

“I’ll fight you,” Kevin promised. “I’ll die rather than do anything to help you.”

The alien stood there staring at him, apparently not comprehending what he had just said. It frowned at Kevin slightly, tilting its head to one side as though listening to something only it could hear. Kevin got the feeling that it was trying to make sense of him, and trying to work out what to do while it did so.

“Your statement is foolish,” Purest Xan said. “Yielding is to your advantage. You get to continue to exist.”

“I’m dying anyway,” Kevin said, thinking about the moment when the doctor had diagnosed him with his illness, had told him just how little time he had left to live. “Do you think I care about threats?”

The alien stared at him for another moment or two, and again, Kevin had the sense of it getting advice from the others of its kind.

“We can save you,” it said, dropping the words there like lead weights.

The shock of that ran through Kevin like ice water. The best scientists Earth had to offer had tried and failed to help him. Now here the aliens were, offering to make him well as if it were nothing.

“You’re lying,” he said. He had to believe that they were lying. “You already lied about so much, do you think I’m going to believe this?”

He thought about all the ways they’d lied to get him to help with their invasion of the Earth. They’d told him that they were refugees seeking the safety of another planet. They’d told him that they were the ones fleeing destruction, rather than causing it.

“You have seen what we can do,” Purest Xan said. “We can manipulate flesh in ways your human mind cannot imagine. The Purest of the Hive are preserved almost indefinitely. We have every reason to want you alive. We could heal you, if you were of the Hive.”

What could Kevin say to that kind of temptation? It was everything he had wanted from the moment the doctor had told him what was happening. When he’d been at the NASA institute, he’d secretly hoped that one of the scientists there might find some way to help him, to make all the shaking and the pain stop. He’d thought that he would give almost anything to be well again. It took almost everything Kevin had to shake his head.

“If I have to die to stop you getting what you want, then that’s what I’ll do,” Kevin said. He meant it. He wanted to live, he’d hoped for a cure, but by now, he’d had plenty of time to accept what was going to happen to him. If dying could help to stop the aliens… well, he didn’t want to, but he would.

“And what about the other things the Hive can offer?” Purest Xan said. “We are told that your species values parents and friends. As one of us, you could decide what was done with those we controlled.”

Kevin swallowed, thinking of his mother, thinking of Luna. There were so many people he knew back on Earth, so far away that it was no longer visible on the screen. If he could help them… no, if the aliens wanted something from him, that wouldn’t help them at all.

“Then there is the question of your friend here,” Purest Xan said. “As this one has said, as one of the Hive, you could determine what happens to her. If you do not do this, the female will be experimented on while you watch.”