It was much harder to control three bodies at once when two of the bodies were half-strangers.
Luz had taken up residence in the Vasquezes without knowing what he was doing, at a time when they were looking for a friend or a father and he was looking for shelter. And he’d left them brutally, raw, in a moment of panic, two-thirds cut loose, and the last third given in to retreat, burying himself in the only head that hadn’t rejected him, hissing in those ears.
Though Luz had been quiet since, and though he was losing the feel of them, he remained colored by the thoughts of those three hole-filled children.
He’d seen Carmella as Hank used to, so Luz had suspected she’d be a challenge, but she was beyond reckoning. She counteracted his commands with images of him frying. She saw him as a severed hand that she set afire, causing Luz to stutter and stumble in her shoes.
If Luz had underestimated Carmella’s powers of resistance, he had completely discounted Orson’s. When Luz lived in Hank’s hands, Orson and Hank were only teammates. Luz underestimated Orson in the same way that Hank might have before this school year brought them together.
Luz had not expected Orson to force him into submission as Hank squeezed the air from him, but that was exactly what Orson had done. Now Orson’s body was incapacitated. Luz only knew where it was at all because the moment Orson’s light went out, the light inside Carmella, now split only two ways, shone brighter.
When Orson awoke, Luz would wake with him, and constrict tighter.
Luz used Carmella’s hands to open the trunk that Hank hoisted Orson into like a kidnapped thing. Luz used Carmella’s silver tongue to lie about the origin of this new alien invasion, used Carmella’s everything to drive Carmella’s car while Hank directed.
Milo’s body stumbled along the asphalt, headed toward home and Nameless Canyon, crisping in the late afternoon sun.
Why are you doing this?
“Don’t be angry with me.” Luz kicked a stone into the road, watched it strike a pothole and bounce. “I’m just living.”
No you aren’t. You’re a coral snake, not a king snake!
That attempt at abstract thought again. “You’re really growing up, kiddo.”
Why are you hurting us, Luz?
Luz stopped Milo’s feet on a rumble strip.
“You hurt me first,” Luz hissed. “You’re the only things that ever have.”
Here was what existence had been, for Luz:
He became attached to a family, then quickly outgrew it.
Ana tried to cut him out. This was the first time Luz Vasquez felt pain that belonged solely to himself. It wasn’t the pain of the blade on skin—without a physical body, how could Luz ever know that?
This was pain only something bodiless could feel. There was no filter between Ana and Luz. Self-hatred was nothing new to her, but it made cheese cloth of Luz when she loosed it on him.
What had started as something Luz considered inconsequential, natural curiosity—how would it feel to kill a friend?—had ended in a rejection so cutting and deep that had Luz lungs, he felt certain they would have collapsed. Not because Luz understood how Ana felt. He would never understand that.
Death was the thing these children had really failed to explain, in all the weeks he had lived with them. It baffled him. How could anything alive not fixate on death?
Ana had answered that. She showed him that living was painful enough. All Luz could think, with the blade and the hatred aimed at him, was that it must stop. He’d spun Hank’s hands to Milo’s throat. If Luz learned nothing else about death, he learned these children would die to save one another. They would kill Luz, to save one another.
When the Vasquez mother walked into her kitchen to see her son choking her other son and her daughter cutting her own face, the only real casualty in the room was Luz. The feeling was indescribable.
It was feeling.
When had that begun? When they named him? Maybe Luz became doomed the instant he pretended to be a father.
Had Luz felt pangs of loss during Milo’s recollections of a ruined birthday party? Had Luz come to understand beauty only because Ana felt the lack of it? Had he lived in Hank’s hands because those hands were made to hold things?
There was no telling. But feeling was insidious. By the time Luz had any understanding of what had happened to him, he couldn’t stop the growth.
Emotions were the parasites that plagued him.
Where are we going, Luz?
“I’m still curious about something.”
You won’t hurt me. Luz caught himself crossing Milo’s arms, stopped halfway.
“Why not? I’ve got other bodies.”
You won’t hurt me because you love me.
“I’m not your father, Milo. I don’t love you.”
You aren’t Dad. But you do love me!
“Shut the hell up.” Ana’s curse words, Hank’s denial. Milo’s body.
For a jarring instant, Luz understood how Ana and Hank and Milo had felt, wanting Luz gone from their skulls. He felt this way about Milo as they reached the stop sign.
Simultaneously, Luz thought he could never let him go.
Both of these thoughts, there was no denying—stung.
Luz wiped sweat from Milo’s neck and pulled him away from the road. He’d still be in plain sight if cars were to come by. None did.
Luz, we didn’t mean to hurt you.
“And I didn’t mean to hurt you. I meant nothing.”
Now you mean to for sure.
“Milo, I’m not a good person. I’m not a person at all,” Luz muttered, crossing the last road before the drop.
You’re scared.
“Know-it-all,” Luz muttered, leaning against the silver guardrail.
I want to know it all, but so do you! You’re being a hippo-crit.
“Maybe that’s why I’m still with you, in this useless little body.” Luz paused and looked down over the railing. Here was the steepest drop, the closest thing to a plummet that Nameless Canyon offered. “We’ve got growing left to do.”
There was no telling how Luz felt anything, being what he was. To have feelings but no body was an impossible plight. It was agony unlike the open air had been. Luz should have known that sharing bodies and minds might lead to sharing heart and soul, whatever that meant.
Abstract, Milo’s brain supplied.
He hadn’t known. He had only ever known what they knew.
“Milo.” Luz raised one foot over the barrier. “What did Dad say when you threw the paper plane from the observation deck?”
And the real agony Luz felt now, had felt since: they had never known him.
Go on.