Ambushed, Doubted, Buried

Jamie was sound asleep, curled into a tight ball in the top corner of the mattress. He didn’t usually sleep so compactly, but he had good reason to at the moment. Ian was sprawled across the rest of the space, his feet and hands hanging off the edges, one appendage to each of the four sides.

Ian is now officially Replacement Husbando.

She heads to get washed before everyone else gets up so she won’t get in their way. She’s kind of loopy from lack of sleep too.

“Knock, knock,” a familiar voice called from the dark entry.
“Good morning, Ian,” I said. “I’m just done. Did you sleep well?”
“Ian’s still sleeping,” Ian’s voice answered. “I’m sure that won’t last forever, though, so we’d best get on with this.”

It’s Kyle!

One of the things the book I appreciate about the book while it’s been kinking on big strong men and getting punched in the face, we haven’t had a sexual tone to any of the threats. We’ve had a lot of men sleeping in the room with her or leading her to the bath without this being inherently threatening. And I appreciate that – a lot of these books have rape officially not being a factor while still having it there subtextually, but here no one is treating her as female, just alien they might need to kill, and Melanie has no reason to be uncomfortable because she spent most of her life on the run from brainslugs, who wouldn’t have raped her.

And so even here, when it’s a threatening guy surprising her while she’s taking a bath, it continues to stay an issue of personal survival without needing to have rape be a secondary concern. Rape being a concern all the time is no better than the books that have rapey plots they won’t admit to – they’re both tiresome and unpleasant to read before long.

Quick, grab a rock! Melanie ordered.
Why?
I saw myself crashing a rough stone against Kyle’s head.
I can’t do it!
Then we’re going to die!she screamed back at me.I can do it! Let me!

The brainslug objects, but it’s apparently reflexive, and she tries to obey Melanie’s order, but she finds she can’t give control of the body over. I’m not sure why – Melanie’s been able to do it before in times of stress and just demonstrated it during the kiss as well. I guess because plot.

The room is dark and this is actually suitably tense – she has no idea where he is. She has to get out before he finds her, but she doesn’t want to give away her position moving, and certainly doesn’t want to walk into him – and he was in the doorway of the only exit. She’s not stupid either, throwing some rocks to get him to move away then trying to edge for the door. He manages to grab her, then she gets free and runs, only to be brought down by a thrown rock. She screams, he tries to drown her, she flails her way free but can’t walk due to her injured leg, so he grabs her again and carries her over to the other, boiling river. She gets her legs around a pillar? It’s getting a bit confused by this point. And he tries to pull her loose. This finally moves her to violence, but it’s ineffectual, just clawing at his hair with the idea that if she’s holding onto him they’ll both go into the water.

Then the ground gives way because the river goes under into a sinkhole – the reason why he meant to dispose of the body there – and he manages to hit his head and ends up unconscious as the remaining stone starts to give way.

Melanie explains that now is time for leaving.

Walk away, Wanderer.I want to live. I want a choice, too.

So nope! Just as the brainslug has repeatedly claimed she doesn’t want to be the cause of Melanie’s death while staying in the body and being the reason everyone wants to kill Melanie, the brainslug is also happy to ignore that staying and trying to help Kyle is jeopardizing another person.

She manages to grab onto him as the floor breaks and starts screaming for help again. Ian shows up at last, just in time to save his brother. He asks what the fuck happened.

You know what will happen. Kyle broke the rules. Jeb will shoot him, or they’ll kick him out. Maybe Ian will beat the snot out of him first. That would be fun to watch.
Melanie didn’t really mean it–I didn’t think so, anyway. She was just still mad at me for risking our lives to save our would-be murderer.

No, I’m pretty sure that’s an acceptable response, particularly when he was planning to murder them by throwing them into boiling water.

So once again Melanie’s input is ignored as the brainslug just mumbles that nothing happened. It’s really moral cowardice – she has no acceptable lie for what happened and it’s pretty obvious without her spelling it out, but this way she can pretend she’s all noble. If she confessed the truth and said what she said to Melanie about her reasoning, that it’s wrong to kill one of their kind for one of her kind, that’d be actually noble because there’s a better chance of it working. (That would also be a much better fit with the supposed fact brainslugs don’t lie.)

Incidentally, her rescue of the guy would also be stronger if she actually had given control over to Melanie and let her fight back. A rock to the head in the dark is unlikely to be the deciding factor, and it’d have made her getting part of the way to escape more believable, as well as her ability to claw and scratch without a problem once she’s grabbed. Then once they’re out of danger, the brainslug’s hatred of hurting anyone lets her muscle Melanie aside for a stupid attempt at a rescue.

Ian realizes and he says he should throw his brother in the hole now, prompting more whining from the brainslug. She doesn’t make any real case, she’s honestly just whiny.

Oh well. Ian gets points for saying that his brother did something terrible and doesn’t deserve special treatment and support from him just on the basis of shared blood.

He hands her his gun so he can carry her to the doctor.

Without thinking, he handed the gun to me. I let it fall into my open palms, but I couldn’t curl my hands around it. I decided it was a suitable punishment, to have to carry the thing.
Ian chuckled. “How anyone could be afraid of you…” he mumbled to himself.

Because it could all still be an act, stupid.

What she’s done ensures everyone else will fully trust her now. She has no reason to ruin that by seeming to like holding a gun, she’s winning by being pathetic enough you trust her.

Especially when you know standard brainslug operating procedure is capture, not kill. A brainslug would have no interest in killing any of you. What it’d want is to get you to trust it enough it can get you all captured.

Now, the fact she didn’t “accidentally” drop Kyle at the last second there is pretty good evidence that Kyle’s not going to wake up and tell everyone she attacked him or something. But the fact he did attack her doesn’t change that acting sweet and caring is the best thing she could do at the moment. She was risking her own life to some degree with Kyle, but the whole infiltration would be a huge risk of her life, so if you believed it originally, this isn’t anything to contradict that.

Anyway, they meet all the men who have a shared ownership of her – Jeb, Doc, Jared – so each can express their unhappiness with her injuries, and then she says she wants to stay with the doctor so she’ll be there when Walter wakes up too.

Ian kisses her forehead before leaving and this is a Big Deal to the rest of the guys who have shared ownership.

They get Kyle in in time for him to wake up and stupidly blurt out upon seeing her that dammit, she’s not dead! Jared punches him back into unconsciousness.

“Um,” Doc said in a mild voice, “medically speaking, I’m not sure that was the most helpful thing for his condition.”
“But I feel better,” Jared answered, sullen.
Doc smiled the tiniest smile. “Well, maybe a few more minutes of unconsciousness won’t kill him.”

Haha but no seriously there’s a good chance it will. No wonder the guy’s struggling so much to treat Walter’s pain, I’m increasingly sure he’s not an actual doctor, just the guy with the most medical skill of the survivors.

Jared observes that Kyle totally tried to kill the brainslug.

“Did not,” I muttered.
Wes looked at Jared.
“Altruism seems to come more naturally to it than lies,” Jared noted.
“Are you trying to be annoying?” I demanded. My patience was not waning, but entirely gone. How long had it been since I’d slept? The only thing that ached worse than my leg was my head. Every breath hurt my side. I realized, with some surprise, that I was in a truly bad mood. “Because if you are, then be assured, you have succeeded.”
Jared and Wes looked at me with shocked eyes. I was sure that if I could see the others, their expressions would match. Maybe not Jeb’s. He was the master of the poker face.
“I am female,” I complained. “That ‘it’ business is really getting on my nerves.”
Jared blinked in surprise. Then his face settled back into harder lines. “Because of the body you wear?”
Wes glared at him.
“Because of me, ” I hissed.
“By whose definition?”
“How about by yours? In my species, I am the one that bears young. Is that not female enough for you?”

Backward priorities are backward. But hey, worldbuildingy. Seems to be sort of circling the concept of gender identity without really touching it – I guess I’ll just say that she got a concept of gender from Melanie bleedthrough and this is it getting rationalized weirdly through her own filter.

That stopped him short. I felt almost smug.
As you should,Melanie approved. He’s wrong, and he’s being a pig about it.
Thank you.
We girls have to stick together.

What the fuck is with this book, though.

“That’s a story you’ve never told us,” Wes murmured, while Jared struggled for a rebuttal. “How does that work?” Wes’s olive-toned face darkened, as if he’d just realized he had spoken the words out loud. “I mean, I guess you don’t have to answer that, if I’m being rude.”

I guess no different than when people say white face darkened, but bringing up that he’s not white while saying he’s said something stupid doesn’t read that well.

Anyway, finally a full explanation:

“There are only a few of us who are… Mothers. Not Mothers. That’s what they call us, but it’s just the potential to be one…” I was sober again, thinking of it. There were no Mothers, no surviving Mothers, only the memories of them.
“You have that potential? ” Jared asked stiffly.

Why is this a big deal to Jared? He wasn’t planning on brainslug sex regardless.

“We’re… a little like your hives of bees, or your ants. Many, many sexless members of the family, and then the queen…”

So by that you mean “extremely little like bees or ants, which are made up of sterile females who are still, you know, female”. Hey, this is probably tying into that whole thing about the female werewolf who couldn’t have kids and wasn’t a real woman and shit from Twilight? Can anyone recount that whole mess, I just have a memory of it being mentioned.

She clarifies instead that no, the difference is that she’s not exactly a queen or anything (except for being sorta royalty for coming from the origin planet, somehow) But there is only one Mother for every five, ten thousand of my kind. Sometimes less. There’s no hard-and-fast rule.” which is even less like communal insects because those control their production of reproductive members and in many species the “sterile” females will possess potential to turn fertile if they get the chance.

She then also clarifies there’s no drones. So they’re really nothing at all like ants or bees.

“The Mothers… divide. Every… cell, I guess you could call it, though our structure isn’t the same as yours, becomes a new soul. Each new soul has a little of the Mother’s memory, a piece of her that remains.”

A cell is basically a self-reproducing biological structure sooooo yeah. Also, how are they packing memory into something so small? Bleedthrough from the whole life-at-conception business about teh babby having a heart and mind? It’s not like it’s just one tiny memory, our brainslug has enough coherent memories to remember the vulture occupation.

And they have like a million babies, and for some reason this freaks everyone out. I guess it’s for the same reason they didn’t like the idea the brainslugs are immortal, even though it doesn’t matter – it’s not like the constraining factor here is reproductive speed in colonizing the humans-

Holy shit she could have divided back on the see weed planet and infested the other forest so all of those wouldn’t die. And yet she bitches out the seekers without the slightest shred of guilt.

She then explains it’s entirely voluntary and at will, but it’s agonizingly painful.

“Excruciating,” I told him. “We all remember how it was for our Mothers.”
Doc was stroking his chin, entranced. “I wonder what the evolutionary track would be… to produce a hive society with suiciding queens.…” He was lost on another plane of thought.
“Altruism,” Wes murmured.
“Hmm,” Doc said. “Yes, that.”

Not what jumps to mind when I think of passing on your agonizing death to a million babies. Also, brainslugs have magic science and they haven’t even figured out how to make it not agonizing? Brainslugs are assholes.

One person mentions the idea she could explode into a million babies and she points out the obvious fact they need a host to live, a pile of them will just die like any other exposed brainslug. Actually, do they know exposed brainslugs die? I’m not sure, maybe that’s all new info.

Then Walter wakes up and doctor guy who probably isn’t an actual doctor orders everyone else out because it’s time to kill him.

So they kill him, and she sits sobbing at the body until they waste more morphine using that to knock her out. She assumes they’re killing her too, but she’s just kind of sad no one said goodbye. Melanie tells her she’s dumb and indeed she wakes up, in time for the funeral.

I recognized Trudy’s voice. “Walter always saw the bright side of things. He could see the bright side of a black hole.

But actually black holes release light, or something. They’re kind of glowy is my point.

Everyone says something over the grave, and she asks for a turn.

“There was no hatred in your heart,” I whispered. “That you existed is proof that we were wrong. We had no right to take your world from you, Walter. I hope your fairytales are true. I hope you find your Gladdie.”

I thought you guys were taking the world because people did bad things to nice people? I mean, unless you figured those abused kids you guys were so upset by were also just as evil.

Then it’s time to go back in.

“I’m going to have to put you under again, Wanda. I’m sorry.”
“But… why?” I whispered. “I’m really not that hurt. I don’t want –”
“We have to take you back inside,” Ian said, cutting me off, his voice low, as if he didn’t want it to carry back to the others. I could hear the voices behind us, echoing quietly off the rocks.
“We promised… that you wouldn’t be conscious.”
“Blindfold me again.”
Doc pulled the little syringe from his pocket. It was already depressed, only a quarter left. I shied away from it, toward Ian. His hand on my shoulder became a restraint.
“You know the caves too well,” Doc murmured. “They don’t want you having the chance to guess…”
“But where would I go?” I whispered, my voice frantic. “If I knew the way out? Why would I leave now?”
“If it eases their minds…” Ian said.
Doc took my wrist, and I didn’t fight him. I looked away as the needle bit into my skin, looked at Ian. His eyes were midnight in the dark. They tightened at the look of betrayal in mine.
“Sorry,” he muttered. It was the last thing I heard.

God dammit book, why must you be creepy about stuff? Didn’t you get enough of strong men bossing her around already?