“You wouldn’t kill your mother!” she screamed and screamed, tearing at Rosalyn’s side. “I’m your friend . . . your friend. Everything went to pieces, Rosalyn . . .” So he was no longer the focus of her anger, Rosalyn was. He watched the salvager brace herself and shut her eyes tight, but Mother—Angela—went on shrieking and pawing at her. “Don’t take this away from me. My children . . . All of this was mine, my project. I gave up everything for this, don’t take it away!” They pierced, her screams, fracturing his headache into a million stabbing pieces, but he went to the machine himself while Rosalyn held Mother at bay.

“Do it, Edison.” Rosalyn opened her eyes, finding his.

“I’m your friend!” the creature on the bed wailed. “I’m your mother!”

He found the display on her life support. He knew this memory.

“You’re not my mother.” Edison blinked through the pain in his head, gazing at the pitiable creature writhing on the hospital bed. The little crocheted blanket fell on the floor. All the hate had gone out of him, and all the fear. “I’m sorry.”

—

Light shot in every direction. Edison opened his eyes to find Misato and Rosalyn staring at him, both with mouths open, their hands reaching out toward him.

His head felt better. Clearer. The pain lingered but gradually slipped away. A pile of blue ash scattered across the desk in front of him, and with it came a wave of nausea. The tendrils of iridescent turquoise spreading from the desk, from the woman that had been there but was no more, blackened, shriveling up like charred leaves.

“You fought back,” Rosalyn whispered, unblinking. “You helped me fight Foxfire.”

“Mother,” Edison rumbled. “She was . . . the first one. Angela. Alpha. Mother. The first one infected. I don’t know what happens now.”

“You and Misato tried to stop me, but then something changed,” Rosalyn told him, standing and backing away from the cloud of spores dancing above the desk. “Then you just . . . snapped, and went for her. ‘Help me,’ you said. Poor Angela . . . She gave up her entire life on Earth for this, and look at it. A nightmare. In her last message to me she said they were going to change medicine, she must have thought the Foxfire’s regenerative properties could be isolated, but this . . .”

“The road to hell,” Edison murmured, not bothering to finish the idiom.

“There are no intentions good enough to justify this,” Rosalyn replied.

“Worry about her later; the others, the ones that were totally consumed, totally her children, they’re angry,” Misato said, biting her lip. “Very angry. They’re untethered now. Nothing is controlling them. Not Mother. Nothing. They were listening to her but now it’s all a panic,” she said. “Can you hear it?”

Edison did, the distant buzzing that became a roar.

“There’s nothing human about them anymore,” he said quietly, sadly.