Sorry. Again. We had to do it. People got all… paranoid when we took you outside.”
“’S okay,” I sighed.

See, why couldn’t this be the conversation before they drugged her and not after? Because kink. I’ve said before I’m much more tolerant of this in fic, because in fic it’s admitted kink and there’s an actual conversation about what it really means. This is to that as, oh, that Christian Domestic Discipline thing is to BDSM.

She wakes up in Ian’s room, who explains he’ll move out to one of the guy’s rooms so she can have this one. Not sure if that’s specifically because Ian likes her or because the group as a whole has decided she counts as female and is now uncomfortable with her rooming with a guy.

Also, Kyle’s going to the tribunal. She insists she wants to go and he accepts that, so he promises to be back in time to help her get there despite her damaged leg.

When he comes back, she’s still miserable and sick.

“Do you think it’s you reacting to the morphine, or Melanie’s body?”
“It’s Mel. She reacts badly to most painkillers. She found that out when she broke her wrist ten years ago.”

No doubt just out of sight Doc is scribbling Can’t poison them with morphine.

But this is illustrating part of why it’s particularly disturbing they’d knock her out with the stuff twice. She had a bad reaction the first time and she was objecting to getting more.

She finds her ribs bandaged and goes on about how this proves Doc is super wonderful.

“He tries so hard.”
“He does.”
“I feel bad… that I used to not like him,” I admitted.
Ian laughed. “Of course you didn’t. I’m amazed you can like any of us.”

She’s so fucking stupid. Of course, Ian is pretty dumb too for not realizing she specifically didn’t like the guy because everyone was talking about handing her over to him.

Oh, and he brings her cheetos. The cheeto thing is annoying – it was never identified as her or Melanie’s particular favorite junk food, just used as an example of it. Given how very many kinds of junk food there are, I’d think the odds of only one popping up each time is pretty low.

“Thank you. For more than the Cheetos, you know. For so much.”
“You’re more than welcome, Wanda.”
I stared into his dark blue eyes, trying to decipher everything he was saying with that sentence–there seemed to be something more than just courtesy in the words.

I wonder if this is the meta reason underlying Melanie being mostly silent. It’s harder to have an idiot protagonist if there’s two of them both looking at the same data.

Then again, once she actually starts to the tribunal, Melanie does point out Ian likes her.

I’m here, too. Does he even care about that?

I think I’m seeing where the sort of rape comes in.

But she disappears again before explaining what she means or doing much of anything really.

It was strange; through the caves, Ian had supported most of my weight with ease. Now, though, he seemed to have tired. His arm around my waist was slack. I lurched and hopped forward as best I could until he picked the spot he wanted. He settled me to the floor, and then sat beside me.
“Ouch,” I heard someone whisper.
I turned and could just make out Trudy. She scooted closer to us, Geoffrey and then Heath copying her.
“You look rotten,” she told me. “How bad are you hurt?”
I shrugged. “I’m fine.” I started to wonder if Ian had let me struggle just to make a show of my
injuries–to make me testify against Kyle without words. I frowned at his innocent expression.

Do you see what I have to put up with? It’s all like this, drawn out forever and with every rare moment of understanding drawn out with a million qualifiers because god forbid the protagonist seem halfway intelligent.

“Okay, then,” Jeb said in a loud voice meant to be heard by all. “Here’s how it’s gonna work.
Straight-up majority vote. As usual, I’ll make my own decision if I have a problem with the majority, ’cause this –”
“Is my house,” several voices interjected in chorus.

You know, it’s odd there’s so much dislike for her writing from guys. This sure seems to be pandering to the alpha male, with its democracy except the big man with the gun has final say.

Ian argues for his brother to be kicked out.

“But he could get caught, and we’d have no idea,” Brandt protested, rising to his feet. “He’ll lead them back here, and we’d have no warning.”
There was a murmur through the room.
Kyle glared at Brandt. “They’ll never get me alive.”
“Then it’s a death sentence after all,” someone muttered at the same time that Andy said, “You can’t guarantee that.”

The book really doesn’t want to admit that this kind of thing would have been hashed out long before.

Other people also point out that it’s not like he attacked a human, and Jared jumps in to point to how selfless their pet brainslug is.

Would any of you have done the same–rescue your enemy? He tried to kill her, and yet will she even speak against him?”
I felt all the eyes in the dark room on my face as Jared now held his hand out, palm up, toward me.
“Will you speak against him, Wanda?”
…
It was a few seconds before I could find my voice.
“This is all a misunderstanding,” I whispered. “We both fell when the floor caved in. Nothing else happened.” I hoped the whisper would make it harder to hear the lie in my voice, but as soon as I was done, Ian chuckled. I nudged him with my elbow, but that didn’t stop him. Jared actually smiled at me. “You see. She even tries to lie in his defense.”
“Tries being the operative word,” Ian added.
“Who says it’s lying? Who can prove that?” Maggie asked harshly, stepping forward into the empty space beside Kyle. “Who can prove that it’s not the truth that sounds so false on its lips?”

A woman has appeared momentarily! She halfway raises a point the book generally chooses not to think about, which is that her really shitty lying job is part of her general cute and harmless behavior and makes perfect sense from the standpoint of infiltration – plus, doing a really shitty job of lying makes people even less likely to realize when you tell other lies.

The more it hammers in her selflessness, the less it seems selfless and the more it seems an act. She was outright prompted here to begin doing a selfless lying routine. And yet, instead of pointing out how very convenient it is that she’s suddenly figured out how to lie (when brainslugs apparently don’t, not simply suck at) when doing so isn’t any sacrifice given Kyle’s repeatedly said he totally tried to kill her, we have Maggie apparently suggesting that what she says could be true despite Kyle saying otherwise, which just comes off as stupid. A better point is she loses nothing at all by doing this – if she wasn’t a terrible liar and her claims might actually sway anyone, then it’d mean something for her to be covering for him.

Maggie continues to be EVIL, which is to say unbrainslughuggy, and then Sharon calls a vote and refers to it as a misunderstanding, deliberately emphasized for the slower readers who don’t get she’s being EVIl and unbrainslughuggy. It’s all terribly disappointing. These women drive the start of the plot. Melanie is willing to risk her own life and lives of her brother and boyfriend trying to find Sharon, but once we actually meet her, no one cares.

The vote happens and most vote against kicking Kyle out, prompting Jamie to get upset and say maybe the souls are right and humanity sucks. Yeah, that’ll sure convince them the brainslug’s good.

Jeb says he’ll go with the majority, which roughly translates to him not actually wanting to kick Kyle out in the first place but being too much of a coward to admit to it. But he says that he’s also putting in a new rule:

“My house, my rules,” Jeb reminded them. “Never forget that. So you listen to me, Kyle. And you’d better listen, too, I think, Magnolia. Anyone who tries to hurt Wanda again will not get a tribunal, they will get a burial.” He slapped the butt of his gun for emphasis.
I flinched.
Magnolia glared hatefully at her brother.

Fucking book.

“Tribunal’s over,” Jeb announced. “Who’s up for a game?”

Worst transition ever. But the book decrees everyone likes the idea except for the people who are on the brainslug’s side, who mumble about the others being shallow and easily distracted.

Then they try to convince her to play to make the teams be equal. The fact she’s down to one functioning leg is treated as a transparent excuse. Once she convinces them to go play, she attempts to hop/crawl away from the field. Someone catches her when she inevitably starts to fall, but it’s not Ian, it’s Jared! This is a big deal for unknown reasons.

“You could have just asked for help,” he said conversationally.
“I –” I cleared my throat. “I should have. I didn’t want to…”
“Call attention to yourself?” He said the words as if he were truly curious. There was no accusation in them. He helped me hobble toward the cave entrance.
I shook my head once. “I didn’t want to… make anyone do anything, out of courtesy, that they didn’t want to do.” That didn’t explain it exactly right, but he seemed to understand my meaning.
“I don’t think Jamie or Ian would begrudge you a helping hand.”
I glanced back at them over my shoulder. In the low light, neither had noticed I was gone yet.
They were bouncing the ball off their heads, and laughing when Wes caught it in the face.
“But they’re having fun. I wouldn’t want to interrupt that.”

It’s a shame she’s presumably Mormon because she’d make one great Jewish mother.

They talk about how much she likes Jamie and Jared assures her that no really, her being here is an unqualified good thing because apparently Jamie shares with brainslugs the belief that the possessed body of a person is a perfectly good stand-in for the original person and doesn’t find being friends with the thing that ate his sister’s brain weird at all.

Jared asks about Melanie talking, and she says that it’s sometimes, but not much right now because Melanie’s mad, and he realizes Melanie must be upset about protecting Kyle.

“She wants me to fight back. But I… I can’t do that. I’m not a fighter.”
“I can see that.” He touched my battered face with one fingertip. “Sorry.”
“No. Anyone would do the same. I know what you must have felt.”

God, book, wasn’t it enough you had him beating her bloody while she swooned over how much she loved him? Did you really need this too? Also, she’s quick to explain she totally didn’t mean him.

She meant the seeker. The evil, evil seeker.

“Mel wanted me to throttle her. She really hates that Seeker. And I can’t… find it in myself to blame her.”

So the guy who attempts to beat her to death is good. The guy who nearly throws her into boiling water is good. The doctor who was going to kill her is good. But that seeker bitch, who showed concern for her welfare and repeatedly warned her that Melanie would take her over? Brutally murdering her would be acceptable.

Jared wants to know if she can hear anything from Melanie, and when explicitly prompted, the book grudgingly has her exist for a few seconds to produce a question, namely, why Jared’s stopped beating them. He says that he sort of knew since the first day when she told the lynch mob to take her and not hurt Jared and just didn’t want to believe it. Bear in mind he attempted to beat her to death well after that point.

“She hears you.”
“How… straightforward is the connection?”
“She hears what I hear, sees what I see.”
“Feels what you feel?”
“Yes.”
His nose wrinkled. He touched my face again, softly, a caress. “You don’t know how sorry I am.”

The brainslug picks up on what he’s saying here about their relative worths and tries to deny that it upsets her because every bad thing Jared does must be excused away.

Before he can try to kiss Melanie, Jamie shows up and hopefully the plot can get moving to something less awful.

…nope, Melanie’s reiterating that she’s jealous of Jared touching the brainslug even if he’s touching her at the same time. Enough.

Sharon and Maggie pop up just long enough to reiterate that they’re EVIL.

Then Kyle comes over.

“I’m not sorry,” Kyle told me. “I still think it was the right thing to do.”
…
Kyle held his hands up, a gesture of surrender, and spoke to me again. “I don’t think I was wrong, but you did save my life. I don’t know why, but you did. So I figure, a life for a life. I won’t kill you. I’ll pay the debt that way.”

So Kyle is now less evil than Sharon or Maggie. This book. This terrible, terrible book.

But whatever, so Kyle’s doing the thing where the thuggish guy has some moral code he sticks to. I’m quite sick of the subplot, so sure, anything to get it done with.

The brainslug then gives a quick speech about how she did it because she’s different than him, saying that it’s not a human vs brainslug thing, there’s nice humans and she’s nice like them, it’s just he, personally, sucks.

Kyle stared at me for a minute and then chuckled. “Ouch,” he said, still laughing. He turned away from us then, his message given, and walked back to get some water. “Life for a life,” he called over his shoulder.

Haha, Kyle, you and your casual attitude toward brutal murder attempts.

I wasn’t sure I believed him. Not sure at all. Humans were good liars.

Oh god please be wrong please let the endless treadmill that is these subplots be slightly closer to stopping.