So, she sits around without food for three days.

At first, Ian ate, though I did not. Then, as he realized that it wasn’t a loss of appetite that left my tray full, he stopped eating, too.

This all seems so empty. He obviously isn’t actually mourning himself, he’s just waiting for her to stop doing this.

After three days he pleads with her to eat and insists he would have stopped it if he knew. The brainslug apparently believes him about the desire but assumes he couldn’t actually accomplish it.

And, as Jared had said, he’d had no objections before. I was the enemy. Even in the most compassionate, humankind’s limited scope of mercy was reserved for their own.
I knew Doc could never intentionally inflict pain on another person. I doubted he would even be capable of watching such a thing, tender as his feelings were. But a worm, a centipede? Why would he care about the agony of a strange alien creature? Why would it bother him to murder a baby–slowly, slicing it apart piece by piece–if it had no human mouth to scream with?

You mean, sort of like how your own compassionate species is fine with genocide? As the book goes on it gets clearer and clearer you guys don’t actually have any rationalization about why keeping the bodies alive somehow makes it not murder, and anyway the policy has always been to destroy any body you can’t use. Also, all that meat you’ve been eating. The eggs and milk too – those are obviously coming from the same type of hellholes as the meat. Worse, in some ways – I mean, the chicken you buy to eat needs enough space it won’t mutilate itself. What the layer hens do to themselves isn’t something anyone cares about, and you guys are probably leaving the male chicks to die in dumpsters just like we do now, since if you didn’t change the rest why would you care about that bit? And milk means separating the cows from their children, then killing those children and eating them, over and over and over again.

But those have neither human mouths nor brainslug tendrils, so they’re irrelevant to the narrative.

“I should have told you,” Ian whispered.
Would it have mattered if I’d simply been told rather than having seen the tortured remains for myself? Would the pain be less strong?

Presumably, since you just tuned out them repeatedly saying they totally did this the other half dozen times.

Finally, Ian leaves and she gets sad by this (because I guess this is really more of an extended temper tantrum than an expression of how incredibly upset she already is)

In that moment, I hated the body I was bound to. How did it make sense that his going depressed me? Why should it pain me to have the solitude I craved? I wanted the monster back, and that was plainly wrong.

Yes. It is. The seeker tried to warn you. You stayed in a body that had all sorts of bleedthrough problems and now half your brain is overwritten with nonsense fragments of a human personality.

Anyway, seems Ian just went to get Jeb.

“Gonna starve yourself, then? Is that the plan?”
I glared at the stone floor.
If I was being honest with myself, I knew that my mourning was over.

So yeah.

I hadn’t known the child or the other soul in the cave of horrors. I could not grieve for strangers forever. No, now I was angry.

I did not expect it to actually be a tantrum. I thought the book was just portraying her poorly in a way that plays into existing unconscious stereotypes of behavior. But no, totally deliberate.

Jeb then makes half of a good argument regarding the relative morality of their groups.

“Did you expect us to just give up, Wanderer?” Jeb’s voice was stern and more serious than I had ever heard it before. “We have a stronger survival instinct than that. Of course we want to find a way to get our minds back. It could be any one of us someday. So many people we love are already lost.
“It isn’t easy. It nearly kills Doc each time he fails–you’ve seen that. But this is our reality, Wanda. This is our world. We’ve lost a war. We are about to be extinct. We’re trying to find ways to save ourselves.”

But for some reason the book adamantly refuses to connect the final dots. They are doing to the brainslugs only what the brainslugs already did to the hosts – does anyone truly feel that obliterating a mind is more acceptable if the body keeps breathing? We know that’s not how the brainslugs see it among themselves, because we see their horror at what happened to Kevin despite the fact that brainslug’s physical body is intact – even most of the mind, in his case.

Some few of these humans could see my side of things; Ian, at least. Then I, too, could consider their perspective. They were monsters, but maybe monsters who were justified in what they were doing.
Of course they would think violence was the answer. They wouldn’t be able to imagine any other solution. Could I blame them that their genetic programming restricted their problem-solving abilities in this way?

But that’s how you solve the problem of hosts fighting back. You kill them.

“Your kind don’t spare our babies.”
“We don’t torture them, though. We never intentionally cause anyone pain.”
“You do worse than that. You erase them.”
“You do both.”
“We do, yes–because we have to try.

So very close!

But the brainslugs have a choice in being erased. They could just get the fuck out, as our brainslug protagonist has repeatedly refused to do. Even if they can’t survive long outside the body so the death is inevitable, there’s presumably some less painful way they could be disposed of. If all that matters is causing pain or not, they’re the ones insisting it be done the hard way.

“It will never work, Jeb. You can keep cutting us out in pieces, but you’ll just murder more and more sentient creatures of both species. We do not willingly kill, but our bodies are not weak, either. Our attachments may look like soft silver hair, but they’re stronger than your organs. That’s what’s happening, isn’t it? Doc slices up my family, and their limbs shred through the brains of yours. ”

The brainslugs already murdered the humans, and it sure sounds like they’re the ones physically murdering them here as well. He’s cutting them, so it’s not like he’s just yanking them out and they’re accidentally destroying the brain as they try to stay attached. They’re tearing it apart out of spite as he cuts into them.

He’s tried everything he can think of, but he can’t save them from getting turned into oatmeal. Your souls don’t respond to injected sedation… or poison.”
My voice came out rough with new horror. “Of course not. Our chemical makeup is completely different.”

Then how are you able to survive in a human body in the first place?

Also, I think you missed the point – if you guys are running on different biologies, that should make it easier, not harder, to find something that poisons them without hurting the host.

“Once, one of yours seemed to guess what was going to happen. Before Doc could knock the human out, the silver thingy tore up his brain from the inside. Course, we didn’t know that until Doc opened him up. The guy just collapsed.”
…
“Jeb, we are relatively tiny creatures, utterly dependent on unwilling hosts. We wouldn’t have lasted very long if we didn’t have some defenses.”

So now you’re admitting your basic defense is to murder your unwilling host while others try to save them out of sheer spite.

It’s not that I don’t think you could have this sort of outlook in a different species, it’s that the book is so utterly unaware that’s what’s going on. This isn’t a rationalization. There’s no acknowledgement of how astoundingly hypocritical it is for her to say humans are inherently violent when the conversation is just a litany of all the ways brainslug “self-defense” is really just spitemurdering everything in their grasp.

She again suggests that maybe they should just kill her, and the tone-deafness continues hilariously with Jeb explaining how humans make decisions based on the individual.

How many people, in the abstract, would… let’s say Paige… how many people would she sacrifice to keep Andy alive? The answer wouldn’t make any sense if you were looking at the whole of humanity as equals.

I feel the fact it’s just assumed that everyone would slaughter lots of strangers to save a single person they know tells me far more about the author than I would ever want to know.

There are plenty of people who do, in fact, believe burning the world to save one person is wrong. I really believe most people would hesitate even in a situation where they had to kill a single stranger to save someone they know, and the idea of killing many people to save one life is far more disturbing.

Or look at our culture. We do have characters who are willing to kill many to save one, and they’re generally in darker works where the question of how the death toll can be possibly be justified is an underlying issue.

“The way you are valued here… Well, that don’t make much sense when you look at it from humanity’s perspective, either. But there’s some who would value you above a human stranger. Have to admit, I put myself in that group. I count you as a friend, Wanda.

Also, regardless of if, when it comes down to it, you’d kill strangers to save a friend, there’s the fact that you should definitely not be basing your entire decisionmaking around that! Humans are intelligent, they can tell when they’re wrong about how they feel. Seeing someone you care about die is an emotional thing, it’s excusable that people would act irrationally there. Calmly laying out your double standard is not. You know what you’re doing. You know it “doesn’t make sense” which is to say, you know it’s morally wrong. And you’re still doing it.

“I just don’t see how I can live here anymore. Not if you’re going to be slaughtering my family in the other room.

And back to brainslug immorality, there continues to be no acknowledgement that the brainslugs are slaughtering what’s left of their species. She’s fine with that.

Anyway, he says it’s fine because they’ll stop now that she’s said it won’t work. Even though I really don’t see how she could know there’s no way to paralyze/poison a brainslug given she’s an idiot who doesn’t even know the bare basics of medicine.

So she eats the food and her tantrum is over.

Ian came back then. When he walked into our circle of light and saw the food in my hand, the
look that spread across his face filled me with guilt. It was a look of joyous relief.
No, I had never intentionally caused anyone physical pain, but I had hurt Ian deeply enough just
by hurting myself.

Also by not getting the fuck out of Melanie. You’re hurting her and the people who care about her.

And naturally, there’s no moment of reflection that wait, if humans get hurt by bad things happening to other humans, and brainslugging is a bad thing, then the brainslugs do in fact hurt other humans when painlessly erasing the ones they get their hands on.

But then, if she was going to figure that one out she could’ve back when seeing Melanie and Jamie’s suffering trying to avoid getting caught.

Speaking of that suffering, they then mention Jamie, first that he’s been freaked out because of her disappearance and then that his leg is infected and they can’t do anything about it.

“It’s a bacterial infection,” Ian said. “We don’t have antibiotics anymore.”
“Because they don’t work–the bacteria are smarter than your medicines.

Okay, first off, how do you know that and not how your own healing works? Second, you don’t know what antibiotics are, do you? Antibiotics are produced by other species, including other bacteria, and they’ve been working since longer than plants and animals have existed on this planet.

The reason our antibiotics are unreliable is because we don’t use that many, allowing bacteria to adapt to just the handful we’ve employing against them. And even with that, the bacteria that are resistant tend not to simply be the same thing plus resistance – they’ve often crippled themselves to block the antibiotic, and are primarily a problem in hospital settings where they don’t have any competition (and can prey on people whose immune systems are already shut down).

The speed at which the bacteria adapt is a problem, plus issues of allergy, the fact we also have a lot of existing bacteria in our system that we need around, etc etc. If you could just churn out magic spells instead, that’d definitely render them obsolete. But they absolutely do work.

Jamie was sick. There was nothing to treat him with here. No options but waiting to see if his body could heal itself. And if it couldn’t…
“No,” I gasped.
I felt as if I were standing on the edge of Walter’s grave again, listening to the sound of sand falling into the darkness.

Looks like the brainslug didn’t need the whole friend vs stranger thing explained! She was able to handle Walter’s death but Jamie’s mild illness is intolerable.

A better book would have properly played up that she couldn’t believe Walter would really die because it’s so outside her experience, and made her far more traumatized by it actually happening.

Jamie’s face was red and sweaty. The right leg of his jeans had been cut away, and the bandage was peeled back from his wound. It wasn’t as big as I’d expected. Not as horrible as I would have imagined. Just a two-inch gash with smooth edges. But the edges were a frightening shade of red, and the skin around the cut was swollen and shiny.

Since it’s been days, I assume they’ve been cutting open fresh pants for him.

But that aside, reasonable injury here! No dramatic spewings of pus, no spitting in the wound, no getting leaves.

I couldn’t swallow down the lump in my throat. Monster? My Jamie? Never.

I really can’t tell if the book means for her to be irrational. I mean, it really seems like it’s presenting her feelings as overwhelming and inexplicable, but then it never goes anywhere with them.

He asks about Melanie:

“She okay? Not too worried?”
“Of course she’s worried,” I murmured, watching the cloth travel across his forehead as if it were someone else’s hand moving it.
Melanie.
Where was she?
I searched through my head for her familiar voice. There was nothing but silence. Why wasn’t she here? Jamie’s skin was burning where my fingers brushed it. The feel of it–that unwholesome heat–should have had her in the same panic I was feeling.

Well, that’s one way to resolve a love triangle.

I think she’s actually going to try to do something about it, though, since then she drags Ian off to talk privately. And by talk, I mean make out:

“I need you to help me, Ian.” My voice was strained, frantic.
“Whatever you need. You know that.”
I put my hands on either side of his face, staring into his eyes. I could barely see a glint of their blue in the darkness.
“I need you to kiss me, Ian. Now. Please.”

I’m assuming this is supposed to be all confusing and cliffhangery, but she’s obviously thinking this will accomplish something. If it was just the last line it’d be more ambiguous of if she was just seeking comfort or something.