Return. Морган Райс

at us, and they don’t care if they’re killed or not. How do you fight something that doesn’t worry if it is going to die?”

      Kevin wasn’t sure he had an answer to that. He’d used that against the Ilari when they’d been fighting. He’d thrown ships at them, seeing their desire to live as a weakness to be exploited.

      “It’s the Hive’s greatest strength,” Ro said.

      “The fact that you know them, and you were able to break free, might let us understand how to actually beat them. We might actually be able to win this war.”

      “But we don’t know anything,” Kevin said.

      “You might not know what you know,” the general said. “For a start, what do you know about this ability of yours?”

      Kevin shook his head. “I hardly know anything. I hear signals, and I can translate them. I see things that need translating, and my brain just does it.”

      “And it’s killing him for it,” Chloe put in, sounding somber. Just the words had Kevin feeling sad about the prospect of the ticking clock that had restarted in his body.

      “What do you mean, killing you?” General s’Lara asked.

      Kevin started to answer, standing up as he did so. The pain hit him almost immediately, and he realized that the things he’d been experiencing as they landed had been a lot more than just the background symptoms that had been plaguing him since he’d come out from the Hive again.

      He’d gotten so used to ignoring it that he’d done it even when his body had been trying to warn him that something wasn’t right. Now it seemed that everything hit him at once. Dizziness overwhelmed him, spinning Kevin half around, so that he dropped to the floor in stages, putting out a hand to catch himself even while it started to twitch in the beginnings of a fit that seemed to wrack every inch of him.

      Pain came with it, bursting inside his head in a supernova of agony. It felt like something broke inside him then, and he would have screamed if his mouth had still been under his own control. He’d felt himself lose control of his body before when signals had ripped through him, but this was different. This didn’t hold the promise of a message or an answer; the only promise it seemed to hold was the blackness that lay beyond it, threatening to rise up and overwhelm everything.

      Kevin could see Chloe, Ro, and General s’Lara beside him, their lips moving as they talked. Chloe looked as though she was shouting something down to him, but he couldn’t hear any of it. It felt as though it was on the other side of a curtain, and slipping further away by the second.

      He was dying, and there was nothing he could do about it.

      CHAPTER THREE

      Luna woke, blinking in the light, and even that was a surprise. When she’d slept, she’d expected to slide down into darkness and not wake up, consumed completely by the alien nanobots that were slowly taking over her body. Instead, she could still remember who she was, and where she was, and all 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,