Where the two xenos touched, they wrestled with fierce contention. At first neither seemed to gain the advantage, so closely matched were they in ability, but then—to Kira’s alarm—she noticed her second skin starting to dissolve into the attacking threads. Alarm turned to horror as she realized the xenos wanted to merge. To the Seed, there was no difference in kind between the part of itself bound to her and the part of itself bound to the Maw. They were two halves of the same organism, and they were seeking to again become whole.

Kira screamed with frustration as the outer surface of the Seed continued to melt into the Maw, and with it, any sense of control. Then a shock hit her body and she convulsed, feeling as if a thousand sparking wires had touched her. Blood filled her mouth, hot and copper-tasting.

A flood of sensory information coursed through her nerves, and for a moment, Kira lost all awareness of where she was.

She could feel the Maw, same as she could feel her own body. Flesh piled upon flesh, and most of it throbbing with the agony of exposed nerves, as well as the torment of limbs, muscles, and organs assembled all out of order. Human and Jelly parts had been grafted one onto the other with no care taken for proper structure or function. Ichor oozed through veins made for blood, and blood gushed through spongelike tissues intended for thicker secretions; bones scraped against tendons, cartilage, and other bones; tentacles pressed against misplaced intestines; and everything quivered with the physical equivalent of a scream.

Without the fibers of the xeno laced throughout the Maw—supporting and sustaining it—the entire abomination would have died within minutes, if not seconds.

Accompanying the pain was a grinding hunger—a primal yearning to eat and grow and spread without end, as if the protective safeguards built into the Seed had broken and fallen away, leaving behind only the desire to expand. There was also a certain sadistic glee to the Maw’s emotions, and that didn’t surprise Kira. Selfishness was more fundamental than kindness. But what she didn’t expect was the wandering, childlike confusion that accompanied it. The intelligence born of Carr and Qwon’s joined minds seemed unable to comprehend its circumstances. All it knew was its suffering, its hate, and its desire to multiply until it had blanketed every centimeter of every planet and asteroid in the universe—until its offspring clotted the space around every star in the sky, and each ray of light was sucked up by the life, the life, the LIFE, it had seeded from its misbegotten loins.

This it so desired. And this it needed.