“Why does Jared have Sharon in a headlock?” Jamie whispered to Ian.
“She’s in a bad mood,” Ian stage-whispered back.

It’s funny because women are dumb and irrational and need men to keep them from doing anything.

Doc nodded to himself and brought the scalpel down again, making a cross cut. Red blood and dark yellow discharge oozed from the gash.
As soon as Doc’s hand was clear, I was spraying Clean back and forth across the bloody X. When it hit the oozing secretion, the unhealthy yellow seemed to sizzle silently. It began to recede. Almost like suds hit by a spray of water. It melted.

That sounds like a violation of conservation of mass. Also, pus is largely made up of human cells, so if something’s making the pus melt, it’d be melting flesh too. And it’s completely unnecessary – the whole point of pus is that it’s containing the infection already. Just let it drain, then put the anti-infection stuff on the inflamed flesh.

“Okay, Heal,” I muttered. I found the right canister and tipped the little spout over the gashes in his skin. The clear liquid trickled in, coating the raw flesh and glistening there. The bleeding stopped wherever the Heal spread. I poured half the container–surely twice as much as was needed–into the wound.

Even though we’ve already established that they’re worried about using it properly and adverse effects, and the healer she talked to didn’t say anything about the stuff being safe to overdose with, naturally she’s fine wasting it.

I looked around for Sharon automatically and just caught sight of the flame of her hair leaving the room. Maggie was right behind her. How sad. How frightening. To be filled with so much hate that you could not even rejoice in the healing of a child…

Yes, book, you hate them, I figured that out chapters and chapters ago.

They’re recounting how she did it and Ian gets upset at the idea she injured herself because dammit, she’s his property.

Ian’s fingers brushed across my cheek. It felt nice, and I leaned into his hand when he left it there. I wondered if it was the No Pain or just the joy of saving Jamie that made everything warm and glowing.
“No more raids for you,” Ian murmured.
“Of course she’ll go out again,” Jared said, his voice louder with surprise. “Ian, she was absolutely phenomenal. You’d have to see to really understand. I’m only just beginning to guess at all the possibilities–”
“Possibilities?” Ian’s hand slid down my neck to my shoulder. He pulled me closer to his side, away from Jared. “At what cost to her? You let her almost hack her ownhand off?” His fingers flexed around the top of my arm with his inflections.

So Ian wins the boyfriend off by ultimately being the more abusive and controlling of the pair. In every way this book ends up predictable.

Anyway, they glare and argue a bit, then decide to celebrate Jamie being okay by digging into prepared meals.

“Dibs on the garlic chicken,” Jeb said. “I’ve been missin’ garlic quite a bit–though I imagine no one misses it on my breath.” He chuckled.

Why can’t they just grow garlic? It’d be nice to have a better idea of how their planting works. They seem to be mostly eating onion soup and not to have much to spare, but they’re also growing spinnich, which isn’t exactly full of calories.

What was it that made this human love so much more desirable to me than the love of my own kind? Was it because it was exclusive and capricious? The souls offered love and acceptance to all. Did I crave a greater challenge?

Well, did you ever like having pets? I mean, there’s definitely something to be said for animals that aren’t too into you – it makes it really rewarding when they tolerate you at all.

Or was it simply better somehow? Because these humans could hate with so much fury, was the other end of the spectrum that they could love with more heart and zeal and fire?

No, that’s stupid. Among humans, the people who hate extra hard are generally not extra nice in other situations, and among the various personalities of animals, the hateful ones are just generally more hateful and the nicer generally more nice.

They all end up in a pile, falling asleep, and then Kyle says he wants to go with her on the next raid, and Ian says that she isn’t going on any raids ever again.

“’S up to Wanda, I’d say.” Jeb interrupted, shockingly. But it’s rapidly contradicted with “You can’t leave it up to her, Jeb,” Ian protested. because…

“Do you want to go out on raids?”
“If I can help, of course I should go.”
“That’s not what I asked, Wanda.”
I was quiet for a moment, trying to remember his question to see how I’d gotten it wrong.
“See, Jeb? She never takes into account her own wants–her own happiness, her own health, even. She’d do anything we asked her to, even if it got her killed. It’s not fair to ask her things the way we’d ask each other. We stop to think about ourselves. She doesn’t.”

Which is total nonsense. She came here because she wanted to – Melanie drove her nuts to make her do that, but it was certainly a selfish motivation. Before that, she’s spent her life selfishly not being a mother, even at a moment where it could have saved millions of hosts. She’s currently selfishly refusing to get the fuck out of Melanie. She absolutely has the normal baseline selfishness he’s saying she needs for self-preservation and I don’t know why the book suddenly wants her to be a saint.

The raid itself was something she did knowing it would be easy, and let’s face it, she was certainly never at risk even if it went wrong. Her willingness to injure herself seems shocking, but she’s spent her whole very long life knowing any injury can be healed quickly and painlessly, and furthermore, she’s not actually the same thing as the body, so even if she had to put up with an injury for Melanie’s whole lifespan, that’s still not long for her. So even assuming that she would be willing to get herself killed, which she’s not, this isn’t that situation.

Instead, the book has her defend herself by confirming she’s so pure and noble to the point of helplessness.

“That’s not true,” I said. “I think about myself all the time. And I… I want to help. Doesn’t that
count? It made me so happy to help Jamie tonight. Can’t I find happiness the way I want to?”
Ian sighed. “See what I mean?”

It’s a shame the only one to assume she’s evil is Kyle, who isn’t too bright, because otherwise someone might point out that this is suspiciously OOC and would only make sense as the brainslug refining her personality to better trick them.

Ultimately, they decide to let her do it, probably because they just want the damn stuff.

This is too easy. It’s not really even fun anymore,” Kyle complained.
“You wanted to come,” Ian reminded him.

So yeah, it’s working well.

Occasionally, in the smaller towns, someone would notice me, would speak to me. I had my lines down so well that I could probably have fooled a human by this point.
“Hi there. New in town?”
“Yes. Brand-new.”
“What brings you to Byers?”
I was always careful to check the map before I left the van, so the town’s name would be familiar.
“My partner travels a lot. He’s a photographer.”
“How wonderful! An Artist. Well, there’s certainly a lot of beautiful land around here.”
Originally, I’d been the Artist. But I’d found that throwing in the information that I was already partnered saved me some time when I was speaking to males.

So brainslugs are uniformly monogamous and uniformly straight, and despite being all harmonyjoy, don’t have any good dating services set up.

Also, the more obvious fix would be “My partner and I are photographers” which also avoids anyone wondering why she doesn’t seem to be doing anything but following her partner around on his job. But this is more subservient, so the book prefers it. Or perhaps the author doesn’t think women should have a job if they have a spouse working.

I’d only had to speak to a pharmacist once, in Salt Lake City; after that, I’d known what to look for.
A sheepish smile.“I’m not sure I’m getting the right nutrition. I can’t seem to avoid the junk food. This body has such a sweet tooth.”
“You need to be wise, Thousand Petals. I know it’s easy to give in to your cravings, but try to think about what you’re eating. In the meantime, you should take a supplement.”
Health. Such an obvious title on the bottle, it made me feel silly for asking.

Then why do they have pharmacists? Why don’t they just have bottles on the counter for everyone? Why wouldn’t this be common knowledge?

Plus, vitamins aren’t the main concern with eating junk food. If they were, all those sugary cereals with ESSENTIAL VITAMINS AND MINERALS would be fine. This stuff would have to also do things like present you from gaining weight. And if you’ve got that, it’s getting into more worrying territory – as I’ve said, there’s a lot of issues with being able to support the brainslug population on the modern American lifestyle, and having the brainslugs overeating even more is really not going to help with that.

She gets new clothes in each town too.

Lily and Heidi and Paige were all close to my size, and they would be grateful for something new to wear. The men rarely bothered with things like clothes when they were raiding. Every foray was life-or-death–clothes were not a priority. Nor were the gentle soaps and shampoos that I’d been collecting at every store.

But cheetos were. It sounds less like they couldn’t afford to get clothes and more like they had different priorities for which luxuries they picked up.

The hard part, the part I really minded–not that I would say this in front of Kyle, who was so quick to doubt my intentions–was all the taking without giving anything back. It had never bothered me to shop in San Diego. I took what I needed and nothing more. Then I spent my days at the university giving back to the community by sharing my knowledge. Not a taxing Calling, but one I took seriously. I took my turns at the less-appealing chores. I did my day collecting garbage and cleaning streets. We all did.

That’s something I’ve been wondering about, and it’s nice to see it being sort of addressed. I find it odd that those things would be considered such terrible jobs, though – sitting around all night in an empty hospital as a secretary or healer sounds way more boring, and being a cashier in this world…ugh.

The little inn was not very busy. We parked close to our room, and Jared and Ian went straight
from the van to the room in a matter of five or six steps, their eyes on the ground. On their
necks, small, faint pink lines provided camouflage.

Huh, come to think of it, why don’t they just have long hair? Jared even mentions back in the beginning that he has his fake scar because he doesn’t have hair like Melanie’s to hide his neck. But neck length hair isn’t that weird for men, and it should be even less weird for brainslugs who presumably aren’t going to be dicks to each other about appearance.

“You have to admit, Wanda, we humans had better entertainment,” Ian teased. On the television screen, two souls were speaking their lines clearly, their bodies held with perfect posture. It wasn’t hard to pick up what was happening in the story because there wasn’t a lot of variety in the scripts souls wrote. In this one, two souls were reconnecting after a long separation. The male’s stint with the See Weeds had come between them, but he’d chosen to be human because he guessed his partner from the Mists Planet would be drawn to these warm-blooded hosts. And, miracle of miracles, he’d found her here.
They all had happy endings.

Okay, this is supposed to sound super sappy, but it’s actually disturbing.

Remember at the beginning, when the gawkers weren’t sure how many planets she’d been on? And the fact there seems to be virtually no communication between planets? It seems like they have no real way of keeping track of each other. If you make a friend and they decide to go to another planet, you either go with them or you never see them again. There seem to be official records in someone’s hands, because the seeker knew our protagonist’s history, but they don’t seem to be in use for finding each other.

And the stories people tell tend to be wishes for what they want to happen, not what actually does. So if this is the story everyone tells, it means lots of people have lost friends and wish they could find them again.

I wish they’d run old human shows again.” He flipped through the channels and frowned. “Used to be a few of them on.”
“They were too disturbing. They had to be replaced with things that weren’t so… violent.”
“The Brady Bunch?”
I laughed. I’d seen that show in San Diego, and Melanie knew it from her childhood. “It condoned aggression. I remember one where a little male child punched a bully, and that was portrayed as being the right thing to do. There was blood.”

Also, the old shows may have been vapid, but they could have some fucked up stuff by our modern sensibilities. This is all stupidly done – the brainslugs would surely be upset by the bullying and the failure of anyone to stop it long before the kid was left to punch the guy himself.

And bullshit, no twenty year old knows Brady Bunch episodes from their childhood, let along a future twenty year old.

She looks out and sees a family with a little boy.

“What are you staring at, Wanda?”
Jared’s question wasn’t anxious, because I was smiling softly at the surprising scene.
“Something I’ve never seen in all my lives. I’m staring at… hope.”
Jared came to stand behind me, peeking out over my shoulder. “What do you mean?” His eyes swept across the buildings and the road, not pausing on the playing family.
I caught his chin and pointed his face in the right direction. He didn’t so much as flinch at my unexpected touch, and that gave me a strange jolt of warmth in the pit of my stomach. “Look,” I said.
“What am I looking at?”
“The only hope for survival I’ve ever seen for a host species.”
“Where?” he demanded, bewildered.
I was aware of Ian close behind us now, listening silently.
“See?” I pointed at the laughing mother. “See how she loves her human child?”
At that moment, the woman snatched her son from the swing and squeezed him in a tight embrace, covering his face with kisses. He cooed and flailed–just a baby. Not the miniature adult he would have been if he carried one of my kind.
Jared gasped. “The baby is human? How? Why? For how long?”
I shrugged. “I’ve never seen this before–I don’t know. She has not given him up for a host. I can’t imagine that she would be… forced. Motherhood is all but worshipped among my kind. If she is unwilling…” I shook my head. “I have no idea how that will be handled. This doesn’t happen elsewhere. The emotions of these bodies are so much stronger than logic.”

This is a facinating idea.

(They’ll probably brainslug him once he gets to be a teenager and starts arguing and causing trouble. See, that’s a better premise for an Unwind-style setup. I also kind of assumed they weren’t brainslugging babies anyway, just because who’d want to be trapped in a baby’s body?)

But it’d be so much better if it wasn’t being pointed out by a brainslug. If she wants to save the host species, she should go to her own kind and tell them that what they’re doing is wrong. That they should stop enslaving humans and all the other species.

“No,” I murmured to myself. “No one would force the parents if they wanted the child. And just look at them.”
The father had his arms around both the mother and the child now. He looked down at his host body’s biological son with staggering tenderness in his eyes.
“Aside from ourselves, this is the first planet we’ve discovered with live births. Yours certainly isn’t the easiest or most prolific system. I wonder if that’s the difference… or if it’s the helplessness of your young. Everywhere else, reproduction is through some form of eggs or seeds. Many parents never even meet their young. I wonder…” I trailed off, my thoughts full of speculation.

I can’t believe that’s true.

I mean, the live birth part, maybe. An awful lot of life on our planet has live births, but there’s no way to know for sure if that’s just an evolutionary quirk. But parents not caring for their young is a big problem for intelligent life. Genetic intelligence only gets you so far, you really need to be taught. The brainslugs and spiders apparently just pass their knowledge on directly, but the fact that’s been mentioned explicitly suggests the rest don’t, and education is the bigger resource investment. If parents don’t meet their own young, then what stops a few from producing all the children and leaving the burden on the rest to raise them? And why is live birth apparently a requirement for caring for the young? Most birds are at least as helpless as a human baby, and there are some live birth species that don’t care for their young.

“Hmm. Perhaps, someday, some of my kind and some of yours will live in peace. Wouldn’t that be… strange?”

It would be, but now I’m kind of resentful that the book obviously won’t be showing that or even hints of how it might work, especially with the shitty, shitty plot I’m currently slogging through.

Anyway, they go back to the room. Ian and Jared always double up even though they’re big and Jared tends to punch Ian for getting in his space.

“. . . not fair to ask her to choose,” Ian was saying. He kept his voice low, but the fan was not loud enough to drown it out. The hotel room was very small.
“Why not? It’s fairer to tell her where she’s going to sleep? Don’t you think it’s more polite –”
“For someone else. But Wanda will agonize over this. She’ll be trying so hard to please us both, she’ll make herself miserable.”

Then she could alternate which one she’s sleeping with, or flip a coin, or even, and I know this is strange, you could consider the fact that Melanie only wants to be near one of them.

And while the book is presumably trying to show how in-tune with her Ian is, since she says that he’s totally right and knows exactly how she feels, it looks more self-serving because Melanie screaming in the back of her head does mildly bug the brainslug, and he can probably also tell that this will happen as soon as anyone suggests sleeping with Ian, so he knows she’d really just end up with Jared.

“Fine,” Jared snapped. “But if you try cuddling up to me tonight… so help me, O’Shea.”
Ian chuckled. “Not to sound overly arrogant, but to be perfectly honest, Jared, were I so inclined, I think I could do better.”

Gay people theoretically exist! In a no-homo conversation and nowhere else, but still.

Anyway, they’re driving merrily along home when suddenly a police car pulls up behind them and turns on the siren. Can it be? An actual plot problem?