Patrick stood back a few feet with the rest of us. Watching Ben drag Ezekiel around like a sack of trash, I felt something clench in my stomach. I was intimidated by Ben, and that feeling was made worse when I glanced over at Patrick and could tell that he was, too. It wasn’t just Ben’s ruthlessness that was scary. It was the fact that he actually seemed in his element.

He looked up at us, the scar tissue pulling into different arrangements on his face. “You’re not gonna see from back there.”

We eased forward. Alex hesitated a moment over by the duffel bag containing what remained of her best friend. Patrick rested a hand on her lower back, steering her with us.

We ringed the twitching body.

I’d not yet seen a Host up close. The eyeholes were bizarrely clean, the insides rimmed with vessels and brain matter but not dripping or bleeding at all. It was almost as if they’d been bored by a laser that cauterized as it went.

Setting his feet on either side of the flung-wide arm, Ben crouched by Ezekiel’s face and beckoned us to come in even closer. I’d seen too many horror movies to not be freaked out. But I wasn’t willing to let Ben see me scared, so I bit the inside of my cheek and bent in a little more.

Ben took a slender Maglite out of his pocket and clicked it on. He tilted the flashlight’s beam across Ezekiel’s face, and what I saw made my nerves jump.

The eyeholes weren’t holes at all. Each had a transparent membrane stretched across the surface like Saran Wrap. It looked like the liquid sheet covering the little plastic ring on a bubble wand after you dip it in the soapy solution.

Ben grabbed a handful of Ezekiel’s hair and tugged his head up off the floor so we could see through to the second membranes stretched across the backs of the tunnels.

“God in heaven,” Chatterjee said. “What in the world is that?”

“Dunno,” Ben said, breathing heavily from all his exertion. “But watch this.”

He let the head clunk back to the floor. Then he tapped the membrane with a forefinger. The membrane turned on like a computer screen but stayed transparent at the same time, so we were looking through an image and at it at the same time.