Chapter Fifty-One

 

At least Kayla looks reasonably healthy. I lean over Brill and look past Stephen to ask mi amiga, “How long have they had you down here?”

“Since that night at the club. I got in a cab headed for the spaceport, then the car filled up with sleeping gas, and I woke up here.”

I look down at her ankle, cuffed to this sofa. For weeks. “Oh, chica!”

“Oh. No.” Kayla points towards a door on the other side of the lab. “They built a suite of rooms over there, with a bathroom, and they’ve fed me and brought me clothes. The only freaky thing was they kept asking when Stephen was going to show up, and hadn’t I called him yet. When they knew darn well I didn’t have a phone.”

“They expected you to realize you’re telepathic,” Stephen points out. “And just, you know, call me.”

She pokes his arm. “I told you, that’s crazy. We’re not aliens.”

“On this planet you are,” Brill points out.

Kayla glares at him. They’ve never had the easiest relationship. “At least if you’re here, it means Bo wasn’t after Kaliel after all.”

She’d missed everything that happened after that night at the club. It’s too much to sum up. I just tell her, “Tawny’s bumpclip of me and Kaliel was holonique.”

“Then where is he? Why didn’t he come for me instead of you?”

“He’s been looking for you, but he’d got a whole group of cops watching him.” Brill lays the end of the cuff that had been around his ankle on the floor. He may not be the best with locks, pero he gets there eventually. “We couldn’t have told him where we were going and still have a chance of sneaking you out.”

Brill starts on the cuff holding me to him.

“Stop acting like you’re so innocent!” Stephen shouts in the direction of the Zantites.

I’m so startled, I jump.

“Shut up, su!” Brill grabs for Stephen’s arm, pero it’s too late. Brill slides his foot back, so it will look like he’s still cuffed to the couch.

Zan-Murry turns around. “What did you say?”

Stephen pales at that intense stare. Pero, he swallows and straightens his posture. “You keep shouting your thoughts at me. You feel guilty, and it’s ripping you up. Let’s count it all up, and see who owes mercy to whom.” Stephen jerks the arm that’s still attached to his sister, trying to point. “Kay, the Mindhuggers snuck poisoned chocolate aboard our grandparents’ ship. If it hadn’t got blown up, everyone on board would have died anyway. It feels guilty about the one guy who did die. Or was it two?”

Kayla stares at Zan-Murry, open mouthed.

“They were researching ways to kill us. The Baker couple had already created slow-metabolizing theobromine to keep us from spreading. We couldn’t let them mass produce that.” This is news. Grundt had said Kayla’s grandparents were working with the Nitarri, but they must have had some connection with the Evevrons too. Murry looks away. “We don’t feel guilty. We feel justified.”

Kayla lets out a horrified squeak. Zan-Murry turns and walks away.

“Por favor, chica.” I reach towards her with my free hand, pero there’s too much sofa and too many people between us. “You forgave Kaliel, remember? Don’t make Murry angry now. We have a chance to–”

“It’s not even sorry,” she protests.

I try again. “Stephen said something about a song you sang one time when you were kids, a song that took away pain. Can you sing it to Murry?”

“I thought I dreamed that.” She looks skeptically at her brother. “I’ve been trying to figure out where I found that song for my whole life. I went to culinary school mainly for the linguistics sampler classes, trying to hear something like it.” Kayla’s expression is dreamlike. Then it hardens. “I don’t care what you all keep saying. I’m not an alien, and I don’t have any superpowers.”

“Pero, Kayla, you do. And you need to use them to balance Stephen.”

“No, Kay,” Stephen insists. “You need to support me. Brill’s friend Gavin sent me some data, and I’ve been studying it.”

Claro está. Gavin wouldn’t have trusted me to take care of this. I’d have thought he’d have had more faith in Brill, though.

“Gavin called you?” Brill sounds disappointed.

“He didn’t tell me what decision to make. But he thought I deserved the facts.” Stephen glances over at the Zantites. He drops his voice to a whisper. “When we go into that machine, we can take whatever they’re trying to send to the Evevrons and send it back to the mindworms. We can kill every single one of these parasites, wherever they are in the galaxy.”

Brill’s eyes go black. “If you do that, you’ll kill all the hosts.”

Stephen blinks at him. “Have you never seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Or The Thing. Or Alien. Or… or Bowfinger?” He’s pushing it on that last one, and he knows it. “It’s the only chance we have to stop this plague. How are you people forgetting that this is a parasite?”

Brill drops the cuff from around his wrist. “Enough. I’m going to try talking to Murry again.”

“Careful, mi vida.” I squeeze his hand, then I turn and look hard at mi mejor amiga. “We can change the script. This isn’t Body Snatchers. It’s ET. And we can help him phone home.

“Chestla looked at the data too. Her notes said the parasites work like biological computers, which were designed based on your telepathic abilities.” There really is some kind of connection between the Nitarri and the Evevrons. How did I not see that before? “It’s like you have a natural sublingual, that also works like a switchboard. Whatever FeedCast they give you, throw it away. It’s white noise to us non-telepaths anyway. So toss it and then connect the mindworm to the mind that’s like it on Evevron.”

“I can’t do that, Bo. I can’t help either of you. Because I am not adopted.” Her voice gets louder and more hysterical with each word.

And it’s out.

What she’s really hurting over.

“It’s true, Kayla,” Stephen says somberly. “Dad says we’re the last of the Nitarri Royal Family.”

I try for a smile. “Isn’t it fantastica that you’re a princess? You always wanted to be famous.”

Kayla’s hands twist together, forcing Stephen’s cuffed wrist to go with them. “But… I can’t be adopted! How was Gran not my gran? We were so close. Why would she have lied to me?”

I look at mi amiga, in so much pain. “Probably because she wanted you two to be close.”

“She did it because she wanted us to be safe,” Stephen says. “We’re in danger if anyone finds out what we are. Mom, too. All that moving around when we were kids – that was for us, not her.”

Kayla stares at him. “That would explain why Mom was so upset when HGB started broadcasting those bumpclips of me and Bo talking about chocolate. I thought it was because I was being exploited.” Her face crumples, as she sniffles. She takes a deep breath, gets control over herself. “I don’t want anyone in my head. When I was a kid – it couldn’t have been real. I can’t let the nightmares back in.”

“Nightmares?” Stephen asks.

“Yes. Your nightmares.” And then Kayla hits him with them. Chestla said Nitarri can only interact with non-telepaths via electronic receivers, like my sublingual, or as painful white noise, which I get a dose of. They can exchange communication, not read minds. Pero, Stephen covers his cabeza, like he’s ducking away from something flying in at him and lets out a little squeak.

“I’m so sorry.” Kayla stares at the floor. “I didn’t mean–”

Zan-Murry’s heading back over to us, holding Brill off the ground by the shoulders of his jacket. I’m running out of time.

I say, “Remember how you told me your abuelos chose your middle names? Your abuelita named you Anastasia for a reason, muchacha. Everyone loved that princess, right? Would someone who thought of you like that want you to kill anyone here today?”

“Kay, do you really think they’re going to let us live when this is over? If they’re doing it this way so no one will be able to trace it back to them, then the four of us are all loose ends.”

“No, Kayla, it–”

Stephen interrupts me. “It is willing to commit xenocide. Bodacious, your bleeding heart is going to get a whole planet killed. You know your little ad campaign? I say mercy is a joke.”

I’m looking at Stephen now. “He is learning what death even means. He’s almost there!”

“I want my hat,” Kayla sniffs, not responding to either of us. “Gran and I bought it together.”

Kayla always wears that hat when there’s something difficult she has to do. Until now, I never realized why. That hat means she’s accepting this.

Zan-Murry drops Brill in front of the sofa. The three other Zantites stop a little behind.

“I saw it earlier.” Brill leans down and pulls the hat from underneath the sofa. He passes it to Stephen, who passes it to Kayla. Kayla clutches the hat.

Zan-Murry says, “Now cuff yourself back and give me whatever you picked the lock with.”

Brill does as he’s been instructed. When he unzips his jacket to hand over the lockpicks, there’s a glint of metal, and I catch Zan-Murry eyeing Brill’s gun.

“Let’s get this over with.” Zan-Murry gestures for the other Zantites to uncuff Kayla and Stephen and move them into the tanks. “Before we lose our nerve.”

I can’t see what’s going on, have no idea if I’ve gotten through to Kayla. All I can see is that Murry has no idea he might have been out-thought, that he is in fact in danger.

“Por favor, Murry.” I turn to the scarred Zantite. “There’s another way. Let me explain.”

He’s not listening to me. He’s still eyeing the gun. He reaches to take it out of Brill’s jacket. Brill lets him. The Zantite opens it, verifying that it’s loaded. “If you believe what we are doing is wrong, why didn’t you shoot us to stop us?”

“Because the people you are manipulating here are still alive. And if you release the hugs you have on them, these choices you’ve forced them to make – they aren’t responsible for that. Killing them would be murder.”

Zan-Murry stares down at the gun. “But the lives of a few to save a whole planet…”

He has no idea how close Brill came to making that choice when we first came in here. Pero, I’m not going to tell him, not when he’s looking at the gun pero seeing the cryostasis pods where he first heard that idea being whispered to Leron.

Instead, I tell him what Brill told me. “I’m sorry that happened to you. You have a choice whether you let it destroy you.”

Brill says, “Vengeance is going to leave you cold inside, su. These people are the closest thing you have to family. If you do this, you’ll never be able to understand why they made you, or why they hurt you. I think they did it because they’re scared, just like you are, and because they didn’t know how else to take responsibility for what they’d done.”

The Zantite is dripping tears again. “Why do you care? I’m a plague. A menace. A monster.”

“My people have been called all that, too, su. Plus a few more creative things.” His eyes go violet for a second. Probably he’s thinking of the more outrageous ones. Conan? Zombie? Spider-Man? Ferengi? Kus’hepp? Or maybe something I’ve not even heard. “They’re just words. You can learn to ignore them if your purpose is powerful enough.”

“Murry. If you raze your planet and go back there,” I ask, “what will your purpose be then?”

Zan-Murry comes to stand by me. The other Zantites are talking to each other, calling out numbers, adjusting something. He looks down at me. “Do you think I have one?”

I shake mi cabeza. “Nothing justifies what you’d have to do to a planet worth of people to make them populate Evevron.”

Zan-Murry blushes green. “My only other choice is to die.”

“What if your purpose could be ridding Evevron of one of its worst pests, and re-engineering the rivers so that everyone can have enough water?” I’ve looked at the topomaps, and those spucks’ powerful burrowing claws should just about be able to do it. “You get to be the good guy instead of the plague.”

The scarred Zantite glances at the tanks. “It’s too late.”

“No, it’s not,” Brill protests. “You’ve done some wrong, wal, but we can still fix this.”

“I mean, it’s too late now. The machine’s online, and there’s no turning it off. We’ve already fed the distortion into the Nitarri’s minds, and they have no choice but to pass it on. My family, as you called them, are all about to die, and there’s no forgiveness after that.” Zan-Murry looks down at the gun. “I’ve miscalculated here, haven’t I? Most individuals value the life of every other individual.” He looks over at Brill. “Even the few who would have had to die to save the rest of them. They’ll never let me have peace, even in a space of my own. They’ll hunt me forever.” The Zantite turns the gun towards himself. “When I realized I was the monster, I should have found a way to just fade away.”

“Ga!” Brill is off the sofa, as far as the cuffs will allow, lunging for the gun, which he can’t reach. He’s dragging me with him as he manages to inch the sofa closer.

“Who are you trying to save?” Zan-Murry asks, stuffing the gun in his own jacket. “Him or me?”

“Both.” Brill swallows visibly. “All of you. That’s a lot of hosts for you to take with you.” Mi vida gestures over to a platform near the tanks, where one of the other Zantites has climbed up and picked up a lethal-looking drill, now dangling carelessly from his hand.

Murry is capable of releasing his hugs on most of his hosts – pero, not all of them. According to Chestla’s data, he needs at least four to hold onto the knowledge he’s gained, and even if he drove himself down to his barest state, he can’t release the last one. Not from the inside.

Brill should be suggesting he let most of them go, minimizing the loss of life if the Nitarri do decide to execute Murry or if he does decide to suicide, pero mi vida’s saying, “You’re just a child. There’s got to be a way to–”

The whole room lights up, like prism sparkles through a disco ball in the middle of an exploding sunrise, and the white-noise ambient feedback hitting my brain makes me clutch at mi cabeza and cry out in pain.

It doesn’t matter what we wanted to do. We’re out of time.

“Are you OK, Bo?” Zan-Murry puts a hand on my shoulder.

I can’t think clearly enough to speak.

Murry’s hand clenches suddenly.

Stephen screams.

I stare at the scarred Zantite, waiting for blood to come out of his eyes or something. Either he’s going to die, or he’ll be so spooked we’ll all wind up infected.

Pero, a slow smile spreads over his face – Mertex’s smile on a more muscular mouth.

“Que? What’s happening, Murry?”

“I’m talking to her. She says she found a way to talk to their radio, and they want us to come home. That they’ll share the planet with us.” He’s shedding tears again, huge wet drops that are falling on me. “They know what I was planning to do to them, and they don’t care. She says they understand where my feelings were coming from, and they’re sorry. But she doesn’t even know what that means. Should I trust she’s got it right?”

“Yes, mijo. Por favor.”

“She’s flying. We’ve never felt what it’s like to fly.”

“You’ll tell me if that’s amazing, too, no?”

“Bo, it is. It really is.”