She sounded scornful, as though she could not believe I could provide an answer. But what else was there left to want? Everything I had yearned for, a home that was a sanctuary, a place in the stars, a window where I could look upon the universe with Nadra and Anwar beside me and know they were well, it was impossible, it had always been impossible, a barren dream with no more chance of lasting than a desert thunderstorm, every violent crack of thunder fading even as it reverberated from the flanks of the mountains.

“I only want people to know the truth,” I said. “And to stop Homestead from coming here. That’s all.”

Finally, carefully, Bhattacharya reached to take the weapon from my hand.

JAS

The silver threads danced, gleaming with blood, slow, searching, reaching out from their dead hosts. The motion of one thread was tugging Ariana’s arm and making her fingers bend. Another made the muscles in Panya’s cheek twitch. The parasites moving through each body looked, on the outside, like puppet strings tugging from the inside.

I didn’t know what to do with the gun, so I tucked it into my belt.

“We could kill you right now,” Xiomara said to Zahra.

“Xi,” Baqir said. His voice was weak, barely more than breath. He needed medical help, more than we could provide, and soon.

Xiomara looked at me, looked at Zahra, then said, “If you do a single thing to fuck us over . . .”

“I won’t,” Zahra said.

“What was that guy talking about, don’t let them cover it up?” Xiomara asked.

“Malachi was . . .” Zahra swallowed. “He was a SPEC agent. I didn’t know until today.”

“That’s not possible,” Xiomara said. “SPEC wouldn’t have let this happen. They would have stopped you.”

They weren’t looking at the dead anymore, but I could not stop staring. Thin lines rippled beneath their skin, moving like shadows along Malachi’s arms, under the rainbow spikes of Ariana’s hair, along the curve of Panya’s neck. It was easy to see now what had been moving my father’s body behind the bathroom door, and why it had been so much clumsier than Ariana when she was under the parasite’s control. There was no life there, no thought, no sentience. There was only that elegant silver worm trying to manipulate the clumsy husk of its dead host.

“They didn’t want to stop them,” I said.

I tore my eyes away from the dead to find the living staring at me.

“SPEC has wanted to come back here for years, but the Councils keep shutting down any proposal for another attempt,” I explained. “Maybe some people decided to try anyway.”

“What do you mean? In secret?” Xiomara said.

“I don’t know. It’s possible.”

“Malachi thought it was too,” Zahra said.