It showed the gray early-morning sky broken by a few clouds, their shapes rendered with lines, sort of like you see on a blueprint. The picture—if you could call it that—twitched a few times, fuzzed with static like the TV back in the gym. Somewhere beneath my shock, it occurred to me that this interference might be because of the damage to the brain caused by the stun gun. Were the clouds in the image drifting? Before I could process any of this, the angle shifted, scanning across the sky.

It wasn’t a still picture. It was footage.

As the view tilted downward, the football stadium’s bleachers scrolled into sight, marked with those same odd structural outlines. It was as though some software program were tracing every edge and contour of the visual field. The point of view rose higher, about six feet off the field, and then the angle tilted forward severely so we were looking at the grass.

“What are we seeing?” Patrick asked.

The footage continued at a rapid clip, the line of the end zone coming into sight. A ninety-degree right turn spun the field on its axis, and the point of view moved forward, turf sweeping by, each blade of grass delineated by those digital-looking lines. Every now and then, the toe of a boot poked into range at the bottom.

My burning lungs told me I’d been holding my breath. I only realized that I knew the answer as I heard myself say it out loud: “We’re seeing what Ezekiel saw after he turned into a Host. This is the inside view.” My heartbeat made itself known against my ribs. “He’s being played like an avatar in a video game.”

Chatterjee blew out a breath. “It’s as though the virus was … engineered.”

For the first time, I noticed that the footage also played on the rear membrane, but upside down and reversed. Ms. Yee had taught us how pinhole cameras used to work, and it looked like a version of that.

I refocused on the front membrane. Ezekiel’s path continued in jerky fast-forward. Another turn and the ten-yard line flew by. The footage zipped forward at a dizzyingly swift rate, made even more dizzying by the close-up sight of the ground underfoot. Once the field had been covered by the gradually widening spiral, the point of view entered the bleachers, scanning them, then reversing back to solid ground. Like the male Hosts we’d seen in town, it seemed Ezekiel broke from the spiral pattern only when he encountered an obstacle or a redundancy. Then he straightened out, headed for new terrain, and started over from a different center position.

“They’re not just walking in patterns,” Ben said. “They’re covering all the ground. Searching strategically.”

“For what?” Alex asked.

“For us,” Ben said.