So, they return with ten cryotanks, which the brainslug explains is all she could fit in the car. So, can they fit multiple brainslugs into a single tanks? Because otherwise this sounds like it’s pretty space intensive.

The tanks clanked like metal, though they were built of no element that existed on this planet.

While it’s possible other stable elements exist that we just can’t create properly, it’s somewhat unlikely. And it’s even extremely unlikely that they’re naturally occurring on other planets, which is what it sounds like she’s saying. Heavier elements are rare because they require second-gen onward stars to make them. Unless we’re really confused about the lifespan of the universe, there just shouldn’t be huge amounts of elements that are even heavier than the rare ones that exist on our planet.

(Plus, most quality things are made of alloys, but in that case they’re now made of multiple other stable elements we’ve been unable to create, all of which are superior than any known element for making these things.)

He reached for a bottle on the table. The chloroform. I was sure the souls had something better to use. I would have to try to find it for Doc, before I was gone.

Does it really matter? You’ve been chloroforming long enough without a problem. You don’t even need to worry about getting them all the way under, since you’ve got magic painkiller.

She then realizes Melanie’s being weirdly quiet and doesn’t want to answer her when she tries talking.

You think that if you can make yourself disappear, that will stop me?
What else can I do to stop you?

Yeah, it’s really not the brainslug that’s too self-sacrificing.

They consider where they’ll be sending their hated seeker. Melanie votes for clawbeast death planet, but our brainslug protat is virtuous and decides that no, they’ll forcibly rehabilitate her by sticking her on the flower planet where there’s nothing to do but being peaceful, because a soul gets to choose their occupation unless they’re a seeker in which case they should be punished until they realize their mistake.

Jared laid the Seeker’s inert form on the cot with exceptional gentleness. This might have bothered me before, but now it touched me. I understood that he did this for me, wishing that he could have treated me this way in the beginning.

Even after being told that the kindness is all about her, she has to keep repeating it every time to handle how furious she is about it. But she’s really nice and hates for anyone to suffer! Really.

Would the face be less repugnant to me when another awareness looked out of those eyes?

Well, you disliked her on sight so I’m going with no, you’ll irrationally hate her just as much.

She wusses out about cutting open the neck, because the author’s already forgotten the bear story, and it’s incompetent doctor guy to the rescue. And she has them turn the tank on.

“How does it work? What’s the power source?”
I sighed. “I knew the answers when I was a Spider. I don’t understand it now.

I wonder if all brainslugs are idiots or if it’s just her.

I mean, you don’t need to be able to build an engine to say that cars run on gas. You don’t even need to understand the basics theory of how it works. Cars. Run. On. Gas. Cryotanks run on…?

They say that people don’t memorize as well when they’re reading off the internet, because they assume they can just look it up again. My best guess is that brainslugs are a really extreme version of that, and they don’t bother committing anything the host knows to their own memory, even if it’s stuff that’s not that complex.

I twisted my finger around the underside of the soul’s body, caressing down from the first segment along the other line of attachments, as stiff and profuse as the bristles of a brush. I felt carefully at the juncture of these tight strings, at the tiny joints, no bigger than pinheads. I stroked my way about a third of the way down. I could have counted, but that would have taken a very long time. It would be the two hundred seventeenth connection, but there was another way to find it. There it was, the little ridge that made this joint just a bit bigger–a seed pearl rather than a pinhead. It was smooth under my fingertip.
I pressed against it with gentle pressure, tenderly massaging.

Well, I know what this sounds like to me but hopefully that’s just a matter of too much internet and any subtext is quite unintended.

Anyway, that’s all it takes.

I lifted it, silver and gleaming, wet with blood that was quickly shed from the smooth casing, and cradled it in my hand.
It was beautiful. The soul whose name I’d never known billowed like a silver wave in my hand… a lovely feathered ribbon.
I couldn’t hate the Seeker in this form. An almost maternal love swept through me. “Sleep well, little one,” I whispered.

So…somehow the seeker’s body is going to be evil? I mean, there’s no way we’re just letting go of the insane hatred for her that’s been going this whole book.

Also huh, so, non-mother souls are indeed “it”.

it was a simple matter for me to ease the soul into the shockingly cold air that gusted from the opening. I let it slide into the small space and then carefully relatched the lid.

So…freezing a soul is just a matter of dumping it into cold? In that case what was the issue on the bear planet? I guess maybe that place might not have been cold enough to freeze it properly, but if you think about what would make for a gust of “shockingly cold” air in the desert that isn’t even cold enough to worry about tissue damage while handling like that, and then how the bear planet is defined as being super cold… I was expecting the issue to be that it needs to be controlled freezing, but apparently no, you just toss the brainslug in.

More evidence of engineering – this can’t be a natural adaptation, because in the event of natural seasonal temperatures, they’d die in the intermediary stages, but being able to handle uncontrolled sudden freezing isn’t something you luck into. Hm. Unless possibly they aren’t water based – if they don’t have any substance in their body that forms crystals upon cooling, then it might not be such a big deal…although temperature shock still causes all sorts of other problems if their tissues work anything like ours either. And there’s the issue of expansion and contraction from temperature – you can break metal by suddenly cooling it unevenly, so one part pulls away from the other.

I hugged it to my chest. The outside of the tank was the same temperature as the warm room. I cradled it to my body, protective as any mother.

Okay, so she’s just officially gone insane. In fairness, getting your memories overwritten by an incompatible species is going to be pretty rough and maybe we should just be impressed she remained coherentish this long.

Before I could ask, Jared lifted the nameless woman tenderly from the cot, rolled her face-up, and laid her on another, cleaner resting place. This tenderness did not move me. This tenderness was for the human

Let’s just write off all this as symptoms of the same insanity.

“Ah,” she groaned. Her eyes fluttered open, focused quickly on Doc’s face. There was no discomfort in her expression–the No Pain would be making her feel wonderful, of course. Her eyes were onyx black. They darted around the room until she found me, and recognition was quickly followed by a scowl.

There may be no rational reason for the hatefest to continue – indeed no rational reason for it to have started – but by god, we’ll be seeing it through to the end.

The Seeker’s host body was named Lacey; a dainty, soft, feminine name.Lacey. As inappropriate as the size, in my opinion. Like naming a pit bull Fluffy. Lacey was just as loud as the Seeker–and still a complainer.
“You’ll have to forgive me for going on and on,” she insisted, allowing us no other options. “I’ve been shouting away in there for years and never getting to speak for myself. I’ve got a lot to say all stored up.”
How lucky for us. I could almost make myself glad that I was leaving.

It’s always so weird when authors write something that seems like such a sympathetic explanation, then have their character explain we’re not supposed to be sympathetic at all.

And let’s all take a moment to think about how amazing Lacey is for staying around this long – the seeker was there since the beginning of the occupation. Melanie talks once in a blue moon and has been fading out completely, but Lacey was there the whole time, refusing to give up.

In answer to my earlier question to myself, no, the face was not less repugnant with a different awareness behind it. Because the awareness was not so very different, in the end.

Really it’s my fault for thinking that, in a story about brainslugs of all things, physical appearance wouldn’t be the biggest determinator of character.

“That’s why we don’t like you,” she told me that first night, making no change from the present tense or the plural pronoun.

This is just there to establish how very right the brainslug is to say they’re the same person, but it’s really interesting! They seem to have had an antagonistic relationship, but at the same time they’ve lost a sense of separation between the two. When she elaborates on why, it’s only reasons from her brainslug’s viewpoint, but apparently that means “they” didn’t like her.

Anyway, the actual terrible explanation:

“When she realized that you were hearing Melanie just the way she was hearing me, it made her frightened. She thought you might guess. I was her deep, dark secret.” A grating laugh. “She couldn’t make me shut up. That’s why she became a Seeker, because she was hoping to figure out some way to better deal with resistant hosts. And then she requested being assigned to you, so she could watch how you did it. She was jealous of you; isn’t that pathetic? She wanted to be strong like you. It gave us a real kick when we thought Melanie had won. I guess that didn’t happen, though. I guess you did.

I wouldn’t say pathetic so much as absurd and not in keeping with what we know about currently.

Plenty of souls have dealt with hearing their hosts and it’s just most of them get taken over as a result. Our brainslug’s story is a textbook case of that – it starts off slow and then she gets confused about who she is and ends up taking on enough human personality that she ends up identifying with them. Melanie barely even talked – it’s four months between the first time and the second, and she rarely manages more than two lines at a time. There’s no reason the seeker would have looked at her flailing stupidly around and decided obviously this person is awesome and has all the answers. Furthermore, if the seeker was jealous and wanted to see her failure, she wouldn’t have constantly encouraged leaving the host – if that’d happened, it wouldn’t have proven anything but that someone took advice. Is that a sign of weakness now too? Finally, yes, Melanie did win. That’s why there’s a brainslug here with the humans. The seeker knew that’s what her presence meant, she was only off by thinking Melanie had totally subsumed her instead of just enough.

Plus, if she was actually having trouble with her host, she should have used Melanie as an excuse to leave it. We know skipping is looked down on, but she did have wiggle room where she could have claimed there was just no other choice, so it wasn’t that she wanted to abandon her current host but that she was nobly shouldering the burden of handling the rebel human’s memories. Instead she had to put up with no end of bitching for asking another soul to do it. When it became clear that the other soul wasn’t up to the challenge, she was then willing to leave her host temporarily – risking everyone finding out about what’s supposedly her greatest secret. And it’s not even like the body would have been sedated, which would still seem like way too much of a risk when this is something she’s insanely desperate to conceal, because she says they’ll “restrain” her host until she’s done. So she was willing to pop out of Lacey, have Lacey rant, and go back in, because she cared so much about no one finding out Lacey was still there and ranting?

I really, really think this can only be explained as the author not knowing the end in advance. She gets an idea for brainslugs, and every new thing we’re introduced to is her considering at that moment what would be best to happen next. In the early story, she’s jumping from plot point to plot point with the focus of upping the pressure on the main character, so the seeker is willing to do anything to find Melanie’s family and that’s all she cares about. Now, the author’s focus is on how

Really, there’s nothing impressive about our protagonist. We’re told she’s super strong, but she has a breakdown over hearing her host think at all, even separated by months of time, and she gets sent into a depression spiral over falling in love with someone from her host’s memories until she’s willing to suicidally walk into the desert. And she’s ancient! The poor seeker is a newborn baby who’s never had experience with any other hosts and didn’t even have memories of another life before this to help keep herself separate from the host’s life. And she doesn’t even give any sign of things being wrong, unlike some brainslugs I could mention. And that’s with a constant commentary in her head, which should be a struggle just in terms of split focus alone.

I explained, unwillingly, that Melanie and I were friends. She didn’t like that.
“Why?” she demanded.
“She’s a good person.”
“But why does she like you? ”
Same reason.
“She says, for the same reason.”
Lacey snorted. “Got her brainwashed, huh?”
Wow, she’s worse than the first one.
Yes, I agreed. I can see why the Seeker was so obnoxious. Can you imagine having that in your head all the time?

Melanie has now repeatedly said she’d commit suicide for the brainslug. She is so fucking brainwashed.

But anyway, the book then says she whines a lot:

“Do you have anywhere better to live than these caves? It’s so dirty here. Isn’t there a house somewhere, maybe? What do you mean we have to share rooms? Chore schedule? I don’t understand. I have to work? I don’t think you understand…”

This is particularly inexcusable for Lacey of all people. Anyone acting like this would be hard to swallow, but we know not only has she been aware this whole time, but specifically aware with a seeker brainslug, so she should know everything about how they find people. She should be complaining this place isn’t secure enough, not demanding to hang out in a house somewhere.

Anyway, more bitching about how much she sucks, more brainslug thinking that maybe dying isn’t so bad if it means not staying with her, etc etc.

We also learn Kyle’s done something that everyone’s pissed off about – he’s run off for “Jodi” who is his sister/daughter/wife/stalker crush from before who’s spent this time brainslugged. Whoever she is, Ian gives less than no fucks about her, so I’m assuming they’re not blood related.

There was another place, another cave we could evacuate to. A much smaller place, with no water, so we couldn’t hide there long. They’d debated whether they should move everyone now or wait.

Hm. In that case it doesn’t seem like there’s much point doing it – they can’t hide the evidence they’ve been in the caves, so it’s not like they can evacuate here and then come back once the seekers check. Evacuating just delays things slightly. Plus, Kyle will know about that plan. Even if they made sure that no one but Jeb knew the location, he’d be able to tell the seekers that the humans would run to a nearby cave and to just keep watch over the whole area because they wouldn’t be able to stay there forever.

I knew I could trust Ian with the shiny cryotank more than anyone else. He was the only one I would let hold it when I needed my arms. He was the only one who could see, in the shape of that small container, a life to be protected. He could think of that shape as a friend, something that could be loved.

It’s a shame she can’t really say the same. I mean, she is pretty attached to this particular brainslug’s safety, mostly, I think, because she’s decided the two of them are united in their hatred of the bitch Lacey, but otherwise she’s cared only about outward appearances. How someone acts toward her is meaningless. The book is nearly over and she’s still never made any sign she’d actually care if Jamie and Jared were brainslugged – it’s faintly possible with Jamie because she might not get to feel protective if he wasn’t a kid, but her entire conception of Jared is that he’s hot and she likes his physical presence.

So anyway, they’re off to sneak the tank onto a shuttle out and also try to grab some healers.

If we took a Healer, then we might be able to preserve the Healer’s memory in the host body. Someone who understood all the medicines and their uses. Someone who knew the best ways to get to unattended stashes.

Is there any reason to think the memory bleeding goes both ways? Melanie hasn’t shown any sign of that. It makes sense that the hosts might have been watching the whole time and learning it themselves, but specifying you expect the healer’s memories to actually still be there when you remove the healer seems unlikely.

She explains that they should send them to far planets.

Avoid ships to the Bats, and especially the See Weeds. The See Weeds are just one system over–it takes only a decade to make the round trip.

So it takes them five years to cross a system.

That’s much too short. The Flowers are the farthest, and the Dolphins, Bears, and Spiders all take at least a century to go one way. Only send tanks to those.”

But…the fact they’re doing this might actually be an argument for the brainslugs to willingly abandon the planet – the humans are doing for them what they don’t do for humans. They’ve proven the brainslugs wrong about humans being vicious animals. By ensuring no one will find out for a hundred years…well, how long do you really think they can do all this? There’s billions of brainslugs infesting humans, and the humans can barely feed and house their current numbers.

I placed the tank gently atop the closest column in the truck. The addition, one among hundreds, was not noticeable.

We’ve been told everything’s labeled, but apparently this is the one thing that isn’t. Or will it show up as a blank wherever the information is supposed to be? How do they handle this? They seem to keep track of all brainslugs, enough to know the protagonist’s history and her request about what host she wanted. And they can’t just pop an unknown brainslug into a host long enough to ask who they are, because we’ve been explicitly told even that counts as skipping.

Then they get two healers and head back for home. They get fast food and she dips her fries in the shake.

“Melanie thinks it’s gross, too.” That’s why I’d cultivated the habit in the beginning. It was funny now to think how I’d gone out of my way to annoy her.

This may be the first sign that brainslugs can actually differ in personality quirks from their hosts beyond the general harmonyjoyness. She was cutting her hair shorter and shorter because Melanie liked it long, but there was no sign she actually liked the haircut, just that she was willing to be unhappy so long as it meant going against Melanie. But she actually likes the french fries in shake, so it seems her tastes actually differ from Melanie’s in this respect.

We made it home without incident. We saw no sign of the Seekers’ surveillance. Perhaps they’d accepted the coincidence. Maybe they thought it inevitable–wander the desert alone long enough, and something bad would happen to you.

How on earth did the brainslugs win? I mean really.

Anyway, back at the caves she shows faildoc how to rub the pearl.

Ian would be the perfect assistant. When I was gone, who else would take such care with my little relatives?

There’s this persistent infantilizing of the brainslugs that’s really weird. She’s pretty old, so I could understand seeing all of them as kids compared to her, but she’s happy to treat even actual brainslug kids as adults when they’re inside a body.

Anyway, they finish the female only for the male to wake up.

The Healer stared straight at me, his face childlike in his bewilderment. I knew why his eyes were on me–the lantern’s rays danced off both his eyes and mine, making diamond patterns on the wall.
“Why?” he asked me.
Then his face went blank, and his body slumped, unresisting, to the cot. Two trails of blood flowed from his nostrils.

Why indeed? It seems to be that he’s suiciding in actual response to seeing another soul is involved.

Anyway, huh, this is still another male victim. The author makes sure to get one of each gender, then has it be the guy who dies.