One minute, he was seeing his own hands right there on the table, and the next his mind was somewhere else. Something else. A ghost from his past shimmered to the fore, knocking him off balance. He hadn’t been drunk in a long time but he remembered the sensation, and God was it similar. His vision blurred and his limbs moved on their own. A spinning, nauseating pit formed in his stomach, a well of helplessness that deepened by the second. And worst of all, he could see it on the woman’s face the instant he changed.

“Revenge, yes,” he heard himself say, but his voice was huskier, labored. Words came out of him, words he wanted to say, but now they were all in the wrong order. He felt his feet shifting and he lumbered toward Rosalyn, gait uneven, stuttering, as if he were a toddler learning to walk, all momentum and no grace.

“You will help us. The credentials . . .” His hand turned into a claw and he pawed at the air in the direction of her wrist. “With your credentials we can use the network again, and the navigation systems can return us to the station. Mother . . . Mother wants to go home.”

Rosalyn was backing away from him, her face pale with fright. That pit in his stomach filled with acid, and he drowned in it, so disoriented that he forgot momentarily how to fight it back. How to swim. Her back hit the wall near the door, and Edison watched her pound at the console to try to open it while still keeping her eyes on him.

He had closed the distance, staring down at her from his height, the alien in his body distorting her image until she warped into something small and fragile. No. He had to swim. He had to find air. There was a way back to control but his thoughts jammed. A word, an idea, danced on the tip of his tongue, maddeningly close . . .

“The credentials. If you were one of her children, you would want to help Mother. It would be easier”—Edison heard his voice and shuddered at the raw edges of it—“if you surrendered. The process is painless. Let Mother embrace you and find bliss. With us you can be loved, with us you can be believed.”

His skin felt on fire. Those weren’t his words at all now. But the Foxfire had made a mistake. Bliss. Tokyo Bliss Station. His favorite artist was on the stage, the horn soaring, the drumming vibrating in his shoes. He knew this song and he forced himself to hum it. A good memory could drown out the monster in his head. The monster that had begun to sound just like his real mother.

And so he hummed, and hoped it would be enough to drag him to the surface.