Disputed, Guarded, Assigned, Visited, Bored, Abandoned

She jerked me forward, much the same way as she had in the desert, assuming control of my frozen body. The only difference was that this time, it was by force.
I wasn’t able to stop her fast enough.
She lurched forward, raising my arms to reach out for him. I screamed a warning at her in my head, but she wasn’t listening to me. She was barely aware that I was even there.
No one tried to stop her as she staggered toward him. No one but me. She was within inches of touching him, and still she didn’t see what I saw. She didn’t see how his face had changed in the long months of separation, how it had hardened, how the lines pulled in different directions now. She didn’t see that the unconscious smile she remembered would not physically fit on this new face. Only once had she seen his face turn dark and dangerous, and that expression was nothing to the one he wore now. She didn’t see, or maybe she didn’t care.
His reach was longer than mine.
Before Melanie could make my fingers touch him, his arm shot out and the back of his hand smashed into the side of my face. The blow was so hard that my feet left the ground before my head slammed into the rock floor. I heard the rest of my body hit the floor with dull thumps, but I didn’t feel it. My eyes rolled back in my head, and a ringing sound shimmered in my ears. I fought the dizziness that threatened to spin me unconscious.
Stupid, stupid,I whimpered at her.I told you not to do that!
Jared’s here, Jared’s alive, Jared’s here.She was incoherent, chanting the words like they were lyrics to a song.

Well then. I don’t think I really need to go into this.

Turns out that to make up for the first dozen chapters being all plot and stuff happening, now it’s time for things to be the same things happening over and over again, and most of them are terrible. I’ll pick out one example and just yes, keeps happening, really no need to go through each time.

There’s also the revelation that apparently the Kevining I was enjoying so much wasn’t really it. The brainslug just also fell in love with Jared in a separate way and came for that reason, not because Melanie had beaten her into doing so.

Back to this, also, other people keep trying to kill her while she’s a prisoner and getting stopped by her current wardens. Braingslug does some okay stuff where she acts concerned for Melanie’s former family at the risk of her own life, but admittedly, she has nothing much to lose by such grandstanding, so that could be excused as an act.

The brainslug is locked up for a while, where she doesn’t talk or do much of anything to make them not want to kill her besides being pathetic and silent. en they let her out under guard, and she continues to be super quiet and pathetic. This magically works and Melanie’s crazy uncle finally floats the idea to her that hey, maybe Melanie’s still in there, to which she continues to not fucking talk and otherwise fail to take any opportunity to do anything. Remember how I kept wondering why Melanie never tried to actually argue with the brainslug about ethics or anything? The real answer is the author doesn’t want to write people talking, at all.

Is Twilight like this? Because I remember reading a ridiculous pulled-from-the-web-to-file-off-the-serial-numbers fic where good dom Edward meets abused (kidnapped, I think?) slave Bella and her current owner gives her to him and he checks her to see if she’s okay and so on while she keeps expecting him to start beating her again and it just goes on and on with neither one of them saying a word because otherwise Edward would have said that he was concerned for her health and she would have learned he wasn’t plotting to skin her alive. At the time I thought that was particularly dumb plotting, but now I’m wondering if it’s an exaggerated version of how things work in canon.

It is like the snark gods are punishing me for daring to like Meyer’s writing.

“Look at it this way, Kyle. If somebody found your Jodi on a raid and brought her back here, would you want me or Doc or a vote deciding what we did with her?”
“Jodi is dead,” Kyle hissed, blood spraying off his lips. He glared at me with much the same expression Jared had just used.
“Well, if her body wandered in here, it would still be up to you. Would you want it any other way?”
“The majority –”
“My house, my rules,” Jeb interrupted harshly. “No more discussion on this. No more votes. No more execution attempts. You three spread the word–this is how it works from now on. New rule.”
“Another one?” Ian muttered under his breath.
Jeb ignored him. “If, unlikely as it may be, somehow this ever happens again, whoever the body belongs to makes the call.”

Yes, literally, “the body” belongs to Jared despite Jeb being her uncle and her also having an aunt and cousin around. Christ, book, you are bound and determined to make me regret liking how you handled things earlier.

Whoever knew the body or the body’s owner would sound more natural than saying they are the body’s owner.

I also refuse to believe this has never come up. Even if they never actually ran across the brainslugged version of someone they once knew before, the fact brainslugged versions of people they once knew are running around is the basis of their entire life. They’d have discussed it.

And it would also make Jeb look less like a psycho dictator if, instead of slapping everyone down by saying it’s his place and also he’s got this big fat gun, he reminded them that this is what everyone agreed to. Frankly, if everyone else thinks this is a bad idea that’s going to get them killed., someone needs to smother Jeb in his sleep. When it’s the end of the world, no, one loudmouth with a gun does not get to decide everyone else dies for his stupid decision, and the fact he got there first doesn’t change that.

I deeply wanted to believe that the gun in Jeb’s hands was a bluff.
From the first time I’d seen him, Jeb had shown every outward appearance of kindness. He had not touched me once in violence; he had not even looked at me with recognizable hostility.

The Melanie/Brainslug separation is growing steadily more pronounced for no clear reason. It doesn’t occur to her to look into Melanie’s memories for the answer to this question.

I could hear voices now. They were low, less urgent than the last time I’d heard the babble of a human crowd. No one was expecting us today. I could only imagine what the response would be to my appearance with Jeb. My palms were cold and wet; my breath came in shallow gasps. I leaned as close as I could to Jeb without actually touching him.
“Easy,” he murmured, not turning. “They’re more afraid of you than you are of them.”
I doubted that. And even if there were any way that it could be true, fear turned into hatred and violence in the human heart.

That’s what she does now, cower and stick close to a guy.

And it’s all her – Melanie is silent and silent and silent. Back earlier it was claimed that she grew more quiet when the brainslug dealt with brainslug matters, but here, surrounded by humans where if that’s true she should be getting louder, she’s fading out the same way.

And with that in mind, I can’t muster up much energy to talk about how the brainslug doesn’t understand why humans would be afraid of them. This strange dissonance will never be addressed. We’ll never get more about how the brainslugs view life when they themselves are just roving consciousness and yet they don’t consider it death to snuff out other consciousnesses so long as the body continues to live, except for when they also don’t consider it death to snuff out a body if it isn’t of any use for their consciousness to ride in. Melanie is never going to talk about it. The brainslug hasn’t shown any sign of her views changing over time, so she won’t develop on her own. And the brainslug is also playing mute the whole time, so no one else can say anything because they’ll never hear her say it in the first place.

Anyway, the place itself has pretty okay reasoning:

These are lava tubes–can you beat that? This used to be a volcano. Well, still is a volcano, I expect. Not quite dead, as you’ll see in a bit. All these caves and holes are bubbles of air that got caught in the cooling lava. I’ve put quite a bit of work into it over the last few decades. Some of it was easy–connecting the tubes just took a little elbow grease. Other parts took more imagination. Did you see the ceiling in the big room? That took me years to get right.”
…
“You’ll like this part–it’s always everyone’s favorite,” he promised.
A wide, open arch shimmered with moving light. It was the same color as the light in the big room, pure and white, but it flickered at a strange dancing pace. Like everything else that I couldn’t understand in this cavern, the light frightened me.
…
The heat hit me first–like a wall of steam, the moist, thick air rolled over me and dewed on my skin. My mouth opened automatically as I tried to pull a breath from the abruptly denser air. The smell was stronger than before–that same metallic tang that clung in my throat and flavored the water here.

Okay, so maybe this is all pretty conveniently perfect – they’ve got infinite water supplies in the middle of a desert that doubles as a convenient way to get rid of their garbage, and despite being in caves they’ve got light because they also stocked up on infinite mirrors to channel the light from the top without having any large openings and also enough ventilation the air doesn’t get thick.

But it’s technically plausible! If you stumbled across such a perfect setup, you could indeed survive pretty well. And an abundance of resources is a very common feature in survivalist stories, and perhaps somewhat justified – we can just say that all the other people in less perfect circumstances are too dead to have a story involving them. I’d rather this than that their place just runs on raw handwavium.

When they run into Jamie, Melanie tries to take control again and this time the brainslug shuts her down.

I drove her from my limbs, chased her from every hold she’d found, thrust her back into the recesses of my mind, and chained her there.
Her surrender was sudden and total. Aaah, she sighed, and it was almost a moan of pain.
I felt strangely guilty as soon as I’d won.
I’d already known that she was more to me than a resistant host who made life unnecessarily difficult. We’d become companions, even confidantes during our past weeks together–ever since the Seeker had united us against a common enemy. In the desert, with Kyle’s knife over my head, I’d been glad that if I had to die I would not be the one to kill Melanie; even then, she was more than a body to me. But now it seemed like something beyond that. I regretted causing her pain.

BUT WHAT THE FUCK DOES ANY OF THAT MEAN?

WHAT DO BRAINSLUGS THINK HOSTS ARE? THEY MOURN THE DEATH OF A BODY EXCEPT HERE APPARENTLY BODY MURDERING IS FINE AND THIS IS SOMETHING ELSE AND NOW IT’S YET ANOTHER THING AND JUST WHAT.

Jamie wants to chat with her about her life and flinches at the word seeker like everybody because apparently the rest of the sparkleyeerks are so much better. She explains the whole elevanor shaft stunt.

“Why didn’t you let her die?” he asked.
…
“I wasn’t in on the decision,” I murmured. “I was still in a hibernation tank in deep space when
that happened.”

What? No! You didn’t let her die because you guys think bodies dying is bad! Now explain that to the nice boy and maybe finally someone will try to get a reason out of you for why that’s different than killing their minds.

But nope. Jamie makes a valiant attempt to try a different avenue of the plot.

“Where were you coming from?” he asked.
In spite of myself, I smiled at his unwilling interest. “Far away. Another planet.”
“What was –” he started to ask, but he was interrupted by another question.
“What the hell?” Jared shouted at us

Oh, Jared. I didn’t need more reasons to hate you.

Jared had a different reaction. He lunged toward me, closing the length of the hallway in a few
running strides. I cowered into the wall and covered my face with my arms.

The only redeeming feature this has is that she’s so horribly written now that it’s hard to care about her. She’s just mute all the time for no reason, like a dog only without the fact that dogs are non-sapient animals and therefore more lovable in their stupidity, and also without the enthusiasm of a dog or really any of its redeeming features.

Once, Jared slowly ripped open a bag of Cheetos–showy about it as usual–and the rich smell of fake powdered cheese rolled through my cave… delicious, irresistible. He ate one slowly, letting me hear each distinct crunch.

Cheetos wouldn’t exist.

A lot of snack food wouldn’t. Snack food is really, really terrible for us. See, we can produce a lot of food, but people only eat so much! And food scientists looked at that and said no, we can make them eat more. And then they did.

Have you ever started eating a bag of some sort of snack thing and found it didn’t taste good, yet you kept eating? Particularly insidious are the ones that have an unpleasant aftertaste. That just makes you grab more to get the taste out. If you were a bunch of harmony brainslugs, you would just remove vast swaths of the food industry, because it’s just pure addiction – you don’t even necessarily enjoy eating, you just want to eat.

We learn no one’s coming for her:

“We’ve been keeping a close watch for some change, but they never seemed overly anxious. The search never strayed from the area where we abandoned the car, and for the past few days they were clearly looking for a body rather than a survivor. Then two nights ago we caught a lucky break–the search party left some trash in the open, and a pack of coyotes raided their base camp. One of them was coming back late and surprised the animals. The coyotes attacked and dragged the Seeker a good hundred yards into the desert before the rest of them heard its screams and came to the rescue. The other Seekers were armed, of course. They scared the coyotes off easily, and the victim wasn’t seriously hurt, but the event seems to have answered any questions they might have had about what happened to our guest here.”

Coyotes attacked an adult human and dragged them off. Look, I know people don’t like coyotes, but this seems excessive, particularly when if the brainslugs really are fixing things, there should be a boom of natural coyote food as the place de-desertifies and also we stop killing all rodents and other prey we can.

“Except… Well, it’s probably nothing at all.”
…
“You see, there’s this one… a Seeker, no doubt about that–it packs a Glock.”
…
“Kyle was the first to notice how this one stood out. It didn’t seem important to the rest–certainly not part of the decision-making process. Oh, it had suggestions enough, from what we could see, but no one seemed to listen to it. Wish we could’ve heard what it was saying…”
My skin prickled anxiously again.
“Anyway,” Ian continued, “when they called off the search, this one wasn’t happy with the decision. You know how the parasites are always so… very pleasant? This was weird–it’s the closest I’ve ever seen them come to an argument. Not a real argument, because none of the others argued back, but the unhappy one sure looked like it was arguing with them. The core group of Seekers disregarded it–they’re all gone.”
“But the unhappy one?” Jared asked.
“It got in a car and drove halfway to Phoenix. Then it drove back to Tucson. Then it drove west again.”
“Still searching.”
“Or very confused. It stopped at that convenience store by the peak. Talked to the parasite that worked there, though that one had already been questioned.”

THAT HATEFUL BITCH, TRYING TO FIND ANOTHER OF HER KIND AND ACTUALLY DOING A REALLY GOOD JOB OF IT!!!!!!!!

This makes the brainslug cower in horror, and they literally examine her to see that she’s showing signs of fear, because again, she’s mute and won’t just explain.

Jared abusive-husbands her a bit and she stammers out that the seeker is the meanypants who she ran away from. She then lies to not explain the whole Melanie-is-still-in-her-head thing, because fuck you for reading the book thinking it wouldn’t suck, and just keeps whispering that she didn’t wanna tell the seeker she didn’t like the seeker she didn’t want to tell.

“Why weren’t you able to access everything? Is that… normal?”
This question was very dangerous, too. For the first time so far, I told an outright lie. “She fell a long way. The body was damaged.”

Fucking book.

Then there’s a long, long debate about if she’s a seeker or not. It’s dull and boring and not saying anything new.

Then oh no! Jared will leave on a supply run and she’ll probably get killed without him there and I don’t care I don’t care.

It’s vaguely interesting that Jared initially argues but once he realizes they need him to go he looks at it as a way of avoiding the hard decision to kill her. That’s human behavior! I wish only it wasn’t a lone blip in the stupid.

I knew the human exaggeration for sorrow–a broken heart. Melanie remembered speaking the phrase herself. But I’d always thought of it as a hyperbole, a traditional description for something that had no real physiological link, like a green thumb. So I wasn’t expecting the pain in my chest. The nausea, yes, the swelling in my throat, yes, and, yes, the tears burning in my eyes. But what was the ripping sensation just under my rib cage? It made no logical sense. And it wasn’t just ripping, but twisting and pulling in different directions. Because Melanie’s heart broke, too, and it was a separate sensation, as if we’d grown another organ to compensate for our twin awarenesses. A double heart for a double mind. Twice the pain.

See? So much stupid. As usual, Melanie cares not for the imminent death but just that her husbando will be gone. Then the brainslug cries when he leaves. Our. Heroine.

Also, remember how we’ve had a surprising lot of gender balance so far? This is the end of that. Our cast now revolves around Jared, Uncle Jeb, Kyle, Jamie. Even the doctor is naturally a guy, as are the other bit players. Sharon is somehow there, but all she and the aunt do is glare hatefully from a distance. Women don’t matter any longer.