Next chapter, a month has passed. Ian keeps buddying up with her even though she just wants to sulk.

“Oh, come on.” He put his hand on my knee. Mel’s angry reaction was lethargic. She was too used to this kind of thing to really work up a good fit anymore.

I really don’t know what I can even say here.

His continued abuse of Melanie isn’t what bothers the brainslug, naturally – it’s that Jamie-chan was taken on a raid.

“He’s got Jared and Geoffrey and Trudy with him.

So at least it’s not entirely guys doing the dangerous important work. Just almost all.

She talks about how it was with Jared:

It was almost scripted at this point.
“Good morning, Wanda, how did you sleep?”
“Fine, thank you, and you?”
“Fine, thanks. And… Mel?”
“She’s good, too, thanks.”

You can really feel how important Melanie is to them, can’t you?

Jamie’s constant state of euphoria and his happy chattering kept things from becoming too strained. He talked about–and to–Melanie often

Bull. Shit. If he was doing this, he’d have been doing it on camera instead of the only time being in your summary of events.

Then Ian drags her into playing another soccer game.

“Ready to be humiliated, Wanda?” Wes taunted. “You may have taken the planet, but you’re losing this game.”
Ian laughed, but I didn’t respond. The joke made me uneasy. How could Wes make a joke about that? Humans were always surprising me.

That’s not humans, little brainslug. That’s just bad writing.

I’d seen my face while I was cleaning mirrors two weeks ago. The scar forming on my cheek was dark red and as big as the palm of my hand, with a dozen jagged points around the edges.

I do admit I’m kind of impressed the book is letting her be scarred up so badly.

They win, and then Ian and the brainslug decide to play another game while the other players go off to do other stuff.

He’s letting us win, Mel grumbled.
“Come on, Ian. Play.”
“I am.”
Tell him he’s playing like a girl.
“Playing like a girl.”

I really wish people would stop doing this.

“Tired?” he asked, the innocence in his tone a bit overdone. Being funny. He stretched. “I think I’m ready for bed myself.” He leered in a melodramatic way.
I winced.
“Aw, Mel, you know I’m joking. Be nice.”

I skipped over the previous one, where he offers to sleep with her when she says it’s weird being in an empty room. Considering how quickly this next one pops up, he’s presumably been sexually harassing Melanie for the whole month. But it’s just innocent flirting because he’s aiming it at the brainslug, and any discomfort the real owner of the body feels isn’t his intent at all.

Intent, like friendship, is magic.

Lily eyed us, mystified.
“Jared’s Melanie objects to me,” Ian told her, winking.
Her eyebrows rose. “That’s… interesting.”

So even a third party doesn’t think to object.

As we entered the narrow tunnel, Ian threw one arm lightly around my waist.
“You know,” he said, “it’s really unfair for Melanie to make you suffer when she’s angry at me.”

Let’s just say it continues in the same vein as the rest and leave it at that.

Then the rest come back and the brainslug sees Jaime was hurt – somehow he tripped while holding a knife. The brainslug wonders why he’s not at the doctor’s, but apparently he came from there. When she asks why he didn’t just stay the night rather than walk on an injured leg, everyone gets cagey. So she goes off to the hospital area herself.

“Doc didn’t want to. It was Jared’s idea this time.”
I was sure that it was Geoffrey who spoke now, though his voice was a little changed by the
subdued revulsion in it.
…
“I thought he was the biggest opponent to this business.”
That was Travis, I guessed.
“He’s more… motivated now,” Geoffrey answered. His voice was quiet, but I could tell he was
angry about something.
…
“I think it’s sick,” Violetta muttered. “Disgusting. It’s never going to work.”

Guess what they’ve been doing!

Inside, crappy doctor guy is crying and Jeb is trying to comfort him. Have to make sure no one blames teh menz. Look how upset they are!

The table glittered with silver–shiny scalpels and an assortment of antiquated medical tools that I couldn’t put a name to.
Brighter than these were other silver things. Shimmering segments of silver stretched in twisted, tortured pieces across the table… tiny silver strands plucked and naked and scattered… splatters of silver liquid smeared on the table, the blankets, the walls… The quiet in the room was shattered by my scream.

You’re a fucking moron. They explicitly said they give brainslugs to the doctor to be hacked up dozens of times.

But hey, yet another more death for the brainslug’s conscience, if the brainslug actually had one.

She could have died back on the see weed planet, giving them the million hosts they needed to take the other forest. Every day she spends now on this planet, supposedly helping the humans, is one without actually trying to stop the new policy of murdering all free humans they find. (There’s a number of ways she could negotiate her way into talking to the existing brainslugs if she actually wanted to.) Within the group alone, someone just died because she couldn’t get help from the brainslugs and was too stupid to have ever learned basic medicine in her thousands upon thousands of years of life. And now humans and brainslugs are dead because Jared wants to free Melanie and is pushing them to capture more test subjects.

They don’t understand her freakout because the human bodies are covered in sheets and they, like all characters, are morons.

I had clearly seen the vestigial feelers still attached to the truncated anterior section of a child. Just a child! A baby! A baby thrown haphazardly in maimed pieces across the table smeared with its own blood…

God, this is stupid.

This ties to her one previous mention that humans were extra terrible for abusing children and nothing else. The fact the seeker was born on this planet recently isn’t a factor in how much she wants to murder the woman for existing (she sees nothing odd about a child being part of the initial colonization), and the youth of her born-on-earth student was only relevant to better sneer about how much more experienced and smart she was. Plus, she’s been going on and on about how she totally counts as a child because although she’s ancient and the body itself is an adult, she’s only been in it for a little while.

So she starts screaming hysterically that they’re evil monsters and don’t touch her, so obviously everyone in the room grabs her for her own good.

“She’s hysterical,” Doc told him. “Hold on.” A sharp, stinging blow whipped across my face.

I know YKINMKATO but it’s really supposed to be labeled and disclaimed.

Ian shows up just in time to object to what he sees, prompting:

“It’s having a seizure or something, Ian. Doc’s trying to bring it around.”

And unless this is actually deliberately bad medical knowledge as a kink in itself, I think we can all agree this has plummeted beyond the point it can be even halfway justified.

She passes out but wakes up quickly, in time for her to overheard Jared overestimating her intelligence:

“. . . thought she’d have guessed what we were up to.

I’m not sure why.

Ian finally explains that she’s probably upset that they killed her kind and she saw the bodies. They don’t get it when he says it and continue to explain the human bodies were totally covered okay, so he lays it out even more clearly:

Oh, I’m sure Wanda would be upset by a human corpse–she’s so gentle; violence and death aren’t a part of her normal world. But think what the things on that table must have meant to her.”

Not that, you know, the ethics of murdering other sentient life are pretty shaky and get much more so now that one of them has explained that the majority of them didn’t really do much of anything for the takeover part. No. They’re still all totally fine murder bait, it’s just there’s this cute one over there who’s irrationally bothered by seeing “the things” torn apart.

It took him another moment.

Christ.

If you or I had walked in on a human vivisection, with torn body parts, with blood splattered on everything, it wouldn’t have been as bad for us as it was for her. We’d have seen it all before–even before the invasion, in horror movies, at least. I’d bet she’s never been exposed to anything like that in all her lives.”

Right. Lest you be confused, this is a visceral reaction, not a reasoned one. The idea someone might get this upset over the actual thing they did is clearly impossible, it’s just that it was gorey and she isn’t used to gore :((((

I was getting sick again. His words were bringing it back. The sight. The smell.

See? Love interest is naturally right.

Anyway, she pulls free of Ian and bolts, and then he and Jared get into a wrestling match over if they should follow her, Jared having suddenly decided to respect her screaming not to touch her now that it’s Ian who wants to do it instead of him.

Anyway, bluh bluh humans suck.

I wrapped my arms tightly around my shoulders and mourned for the child and the other soul who had died with it. My siblings. My family. If I had found a way free of this place, if I had warned the Seekers, their remains would not be so casually mangled and mixed together in that blood-steeped room.

And if you’d left to tell the seekers that maybe murdering humans isn’t a good idea in the first place, maybe you could actually have accomplished something of note. But god forbid the protagonist of anything I read do something heroic, right?

“Look, I guess that must have been pretty… bad. We never wanted you to see that. I’m sorry.”

I keep waiting for someone’s apology to involve the fact murder is wrong, but it’s just that they’re very sorry she was hurt by the sight of others being hurt.

“Where is she?”
“She wants to be alone. Let her be.”
“Don’t get in my way again, Howe.”
“Do you think she wants comfort from you? From a human?”
“I wasn’t party to this –”
Jared answered in a lower voice, but I could still hear the echoes. “Not this time. You’re one of us, Ian. Her enemy. Did you hear what she said in there? She was screaming monsters. That’s how she sees us now.

Yes, it’s totally because she’s crazy and irrational, and not because everyone who’s spoken to her has made it clear they think what they did was fine but feel bad she saw it. I was expecting someone, anyone, to say that knowing her made them realize the brainslugs shouldn’t be killed like this, but Ian doesn’t bother saying this either.

Anyway, Ian comes to sit silently with her. Book, it really doesn’t matter what he does at this point. Everyone here is terrible, so the fact he’s currently respecting her boundaries doesn’t matter. The scales can really not be balanced.