Last time, they stumble over a cache of food and water.

I’d turned my back on the east to get the sun off my face for a moment. That’s when I’d seen it. The long, flat line of the mesa, unmistakable with the bordering peaks. There it was, so far away in the distant west that it seemed to shimmer above a mirage, floating, hovering over the desert like a dark cloud. Every step we’d walked had been in the wrong direction. The last marker was farther to the west than we’d come in all our journeying.

Huh.

I feel the drama here is undercut by the fact I’m trying to figure out if that’s possible. It seems like the landmarks only came into view as they traveled, so how could they have been walking the wrong way? Maybe I’m just not visualizing it right. Or it could be that they’re meant to have to go this way and then back, to ensure it’s a long trip, but in that case, it doesn’t make sense to not have a large enough water cache – anyone who needed the stuff they found in that house would need more of it to actually survive the trip.

Neither of them consider that maybe they aren’t meant to walk all the way to the last landmark – we know reaching the first landmark was a mistake, after all, so it’s possible they’re just meant to go in that direction a little longer. I’m not sure, I still can’t figure out if it’s possible for them to have actually gone the wrong way when they found the third landmark in this direction.

I stared at the floating mesa mocking me from the west for a long, hot time.
And finally, not really sure why I did it, I started walking forward. I knew only this: that it was me who moved and no one else. Melanie was so small in my brain–a tiny capsule of pain wrapped tightly in on her herself. There was no help from her.

This is interesting. We’re getting confirmation that Melanie’s actually started taking over and at the same time, we finally see some sign of the strength all the other characters kept talking about this ancient wandering soul having. You might even say this is showing real personality – they’re sharing memories and feelings, but reacting to events differently still.

She’s not doing it out of any hope it’ll work, and mutters to herself that the uncle was deluded and “There was… never… ever… anything out here!” I gasped between spasms of hysteria. but so what, she’s walking. I hate people just giving up and dying. I’m apparently the only one in the world whose big issue with the 2009 Star Trek movie is that Kirk’s dad should have run for the shuttles when the autopilot kicked in. So what if he had no chance of getting there in time, you can TRY.

Anyway, badmouthing her uncle gets Melanie’s attention and she defends the guy, saying she must have gotten it wrong. Considering it was a couple weird lines scrawled on a cover, that’s actually pretty believable. She only just figured it out for poorly justified reasons a few chapters ago.

Melanie suddenly wonders if her boyfriend and brother tried this and they both panic.

No, of course not.Melanie was already comforting herself.Jared’s too smart. He would never come out here unprepared like we did. He’d never put Jamie in danger.

Yes, I am starting to wish there was more explanation why you did. You seem far better off than Jared – you can get whatever supplies you need and didn’t need to worry much about being caught. You were a little limited by wanting to take off while you were away from the seeker, but you were still on time at the point you dove into the desert, so if you’d taken a little longer to prepare, you’d have still been gone by the time the seeker realized you wouldn’t show up and it’d take her even longer to start looking for you from there.

My best guess is that Melanie either didn’t believe it’d be that far in the first place or she didn’t trust her enslaving brainslug nearly as much as she sounded like, and decided it was better to have few supplies so retreat would be impossible even if there was a good chance she’d die in the attempt. She was willing to kill herself once, and that seems to have been at least as much to prevent them from using her to find others as it was to avoid being controlled herself.

She doesn’t quite think this, but when the brainslug asks, she finds Melanie calm and explaining it as At least I died trying. And I won. I never gave them away. I never hurt them. I did my best to find them. I tried to keep my promise.… I die for them.

So, she doesn’t explicitly confirm she was planning to get herself killed, but she doesn’t seem too surprised by the outcome either. She was really upset to learn they’d failed, but that was probably because it had seemed like her gamble had paid off and it hurt to lose that.

Brainslug says yeah, that may make sense to Melanie, but what about her own death?

“I guess it’s because I lost, then, right? Is that why?”

Yes.

No, she thought slowly. It doesn’t feel that way to me. I think… Well, I think that maybe… you’re dying to be human. There was almost a smile in her thought as she heard the silly double meaning to the phrase. After all the planets and all the hosts you’ve left behind, you’ve finally found the place and the body you’d die for. I think you’ve found your home, Wanderer.

This really isn’t supported, but I guess it doesn’t come out of nowhere since Melanie’s directed most of her ire at the seeker and bonded with the brainslug currently actually enslaving her over what a bitch that evil evil seeker is, with the asking questions and the daring to exist at her. Maybe it’s Stockholm.

My steps began to falter. My muscles screamed out to me for mercy, as if I had any means to soothe them. I think I would have stopped right there, but Melanie was, as always, tougher than I.
I could feel her now, not just in my head but in my limbs. My stride lengthened; the path I made was straighter. By sheer force of will, she dragged my half-dead carcass toward the impossible goal.

Go Melanie!

And she’s happy. She knows they’re going to die, but at least at the end she gets her body back.

She asks about the brainslug afterlife, and finds out they have none. It’s explained as because they get to live lots of lives so don’t expect more, sort of like how in the original Little Mermaid story mermaids get to live hundreds of years in return for not having immortal souls. Personally, I’d think brainslugs wouldn’t have one because they probably experience death in the host and get to feel the brain just shutting down, sending out some nonsense signals and then going quiet.

Melanie isn’t too sure about an afterlife in any codified sense, but feels like her feelings will live on because she just can’t imagine them not being there, and Melanie II feels the same because, well, she feels the same, yet at the same time…Perhaps this love would live on with her, in some fairytale place with pearly gates. Not with me. I really wish there was more actual talk about this contradiction, how the brainslugs make the hosts part of them and yet at the same time know that part isn’t the same as their core person. I guess the closest metaphor for us would be getting really into a story, be it real or fictional – it feels like something we’re experiencing, but it isn’t us.

Would it be a relief to be free of it? I wasn’t sure. It felt like it was part of who I was now.

Like I said, really wish there was more on this. Because it’s such an interesting thing to imagine, about emotions being not quite a part of you. I read Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep because of the opening:

Now, in her bed, his wife Iran opened her gray, unmerry eyes, blinked, then groaned and shut her eyes again.
“You set your Penfield too weak he said to her. “I’ll reset it and you’ll be awake and — “
“Keep your hand off my settings.” Her voice held bitter sharpness. “I don’t want to be awake.”
He seated himself beside her, bent over her, and explained softly. “If you set the surge up high enough, you’ll be glad you’re awake; that’s the whole point. At setting C it overcomes the threshold barring consciousness, as it does for me.” Friendlily, because he felt well- disposed toward the world his setting had been at D — he patted her bare, pate shoulder.
“Get your crude cop’s hand away,” Iran said.
“I’m not a cop — ” He felt irritable, now, although he hadn’t dialed for it.
“You’re worse,” his wife said, her eyes still shut. “You’re a murderer hired by the cops.
“I’ve never killed a human being in my life.” His irritability had risen, now; had become outright hostility.
Iran said, “Just those poor andys.”
“I notice you’ve never had any hesitation as to spending the bounty money I bring home on whatever momentarily attracts your attention.” He rose, strode to the console of his mood organ. “Instead of saving,” he said, “so we could buy a real sheep, to replace that fake electric one upstairs. A mere electric animal, and me earning all that I’ve worked my way up to through the years.” At his console he hesitated between dialing for a thalamic suppressant (which would abolish his mood of rage) or a thalamic stimulant (which would make him irked enough to win the argument).
“If you dial,” Iran said, eyes open and watching, “for greater venom, then I’ll dial the same. I’ll dial the maximum and you’ll see a fight that makes every argument we’ve had up to now seem like nothing. Dial and see; just try me.” She rose swiftly, loped to the console of her own mood organ, stood glaring at him, waiting.
He sighed, defeated by her threat. “I’ll dial what’s on my schedule for today.” Examining the schedule for January 3, 1992, he saw that a businesslike professional attitude was called for. “If I dial by schedule,” he said warily, “will you agree to also?” He waited, canny enough not to commit himself until his wife had agreed to follow suit.
“My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression,” Iran said.
“What? Why did you schedule that?” It defeated the whole purpose of the mood organ. “I didn’t even know you could set it for that,” he said gloomily.
“I was sitting here one afternoon,” Iran said, “and naturally I had tamed on Buster Friendly and His Friendly Friends and he was talking about a big news item he’s about to break and then that awful commercial came on, the one I hate; you know, for Mountibank Lead Codpieces. And so for a minute I shut off the sound. And I heard the building, this building; I heard the — ” She gestured.
“Empty apartments,” Rick said. Sometimes he heard them at night when he was supposed to be asleep. And yet, for this day and age a one-half occupied conapt building rated high in the scheme of population density; out in what had been before the war the suburbs one could find buildings entirely empty . . . or so he had heard. He had let the information remain secondhand; like most people he did not care to experience it directly.
“At that moment,” Iran said, “when I had the TV sound off, I was in a 382 mood; I had just dialed it. So although I heard the emptiness intellectually, I didn’t feel it. My first reaction consisted of being grateful that we could afford a Penfield mood organ. But then I read how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting — do you see? I guess you don’t. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it ‘absence of appropriate affect.’ So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair.” Her dark, pert face showed satisfaction, as if she had achieved something of worth. “So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that’s a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about staying here on Earth after everybody who’s small has emigrated, don’t you think?”
“But a mood like that,” Rick said, “you’re apt to stay in it, not dial your way out. Despair like that, about total reality, is self-perpetuating.”
“I program an automatic resetting for three hours later,” his wife said sleekly. “A 481. Awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future; new hope that — “
“I know 481,” he interrupted. He had dialed out the combination many times; he relied on it greatly. “Listen,” he said, seating himself on his bed and taking hold of her hands to draw her down beside him, “even with an automatic cutoff it’s dangerous to undergo a depression, any kind. Forget what you’ve scheduled and I’ll forget what I’ve scheduled; we’ll dial a 104 together and both experience it, and then you stay in it while I reset mine for my usual businesslike attitude. That way I’ll want to hop up to the roof and check out the sheep and then head for the office; meanwhile I’ll know you’re not sitting here brooding with no TV.” He released her slim, long fingers, passed through the spacious apartment to the living room, which smelled faintly of last night’s cigarettes. There he bent to turn on the TV.
From the bedroom Iran’s voice came. “I can’t stand TV before breakfast.”
“Dial 888,” Rick said as the set warmed. “The desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it.”
“I don’t feel like dialing anything at all now,” Iran said.
“Then dial 3,” he said.
“I can’t dial a setting that stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial! If I don’t want to dial, I don’t want to dial that most of all, because then I will want to dial, and wanting to dial is right now the most alien drive I can imagine; I just want to sit here on the bed and stare at the floor.”

…

But back to this.

Melanie manages to keep herself walking for hours more, but there’s still no end to the desert. Finally, she manages to drag herself under a tiny tree so she can die in a bit of shade. They wonder how long it’ll take them to die, neither knowing.

We didn’t fight. We drifted and waited, our thoughts dipping in and out of memories without a pattern. While we were still lucid, we hummed ourselves a lullaby in our head. It was the one we’d used to comfort Jamie when the ground was too hard, or the air was too cold, or the fear was too great to sleep. We felt his head press into the hollow just below our shoulder and the shape of his back under our arm.

Perhaps I’m wrong about brainslugs experiencing actual death. She says they consider leaving a host to be like a death, but from this, I doubt they stay in them up to the last. I was expecting her to be able to pull back from things, but at the last, the distinction between the two of them seems to have disolved completely.

And then, water. Someone’s there, pouring it first onto their face and then into their mouth.

But then, with them still incoherent, their rescuer shines a light at their eyes to see if there’s any reflection.

And, well, they can’t die here, since the book’s barely begun. There’s sixty chapters total. But she’s certainly in no shape to talk her way out of this – honestly, that was going to be a really tall order from the start, with everyone knowing brainslugs know what their host knows and pretend to be them.

“Uncle Jeb,” we croaked in surprise. “You found us.”

Us. Not Melanie and brainslug or even Melanie I and Melanie II, but “we” and “us”.

And…that may be the one thing that actually would give anyone pause, hearing one of the parasites speaking in the plural. There’s no attempt to pretend the brainslug is original Melanie, and no poor attempt to say that the brainslug just decided to throw her lot in with humans either. What’s happened here is something different, and possibly, something even more of a departure than what happened to Kevin.

“Well, now,” he said, and his gruff voice brought back a hundred memories. “Well, now, here’s a pickle.”

And maybe he sees that.