The Hosts moved in synchronicity, each bent to his or her task. Watching them work was like observing the insides of an intricate cuckoo clock. It might have been fascinating if what they were doing weren’t so gruesome.
Hosts crawled like worker bees over the equipment, reconfiguring the compound into a torture camp of sorts. Kids were strapped at intervals to the conveyer belt, bound at the ankles, thighs, chests, and foreheads so they could barely wiggle. Industrial-strength plier clips secured the straps to ridges on either side of the belt. The belt jerked along in lurches and pauses. It snaked around the expansive factory floor before exiting through a freshly sawed opening in the building’s side that allowed it to continue on. I guess they needed more room. Crates and cages rose in a giant wall lining an entire side of the cannery, each filled with a sobbing kid. Worming fingers, mashed faces, the glint of shattered eyeglasses—it was almost too terrible to look at. In front of this backdrop of bars and flesh, Afa Similai pulled kids squirming from their crates. With the help of several other Hosts, he bound them to the starting point of the belt.
Once a kid was secured, Sheriff Blanton hit a red button and the belt slid forward one stop before halting again. The lurching belt movement must have been calibrated for filling batches of cans or bottles.
I’d known most of these adults. Afa and Sheriff Blanton, Mr. Tomasi and Gene Durant. I remembered their faces when they held not just blank focus but human emotion. They’d been subverted and overridden, their brains hijacked. But that didn’t make any difference to me right now. Watching them do what they did made me hate them anyways.
Thump. Squelch.
I couldn’t see the end point of the assembly line, only where it disappeared into the hatch cut into the side of the building.
Thump. Squelch.
I had to walk around to see where that conveyer belt continued. Where it ended. And what was happening there.
Mindful of the Hosts patrolling the compound’s perimeter, I lowered into the scratchy brush and crawled down to the storage warehouse below me. I kept my head beneath the yellow weeds, pushing the Stetson in front of me, moving one cautious foot at a time. For all I knew, Chasers had spotted me and were hurtling up the hill already.
But I safely reached the big pile of gravel beside the bulldozer and leaned against it, catching my breath. A few pebbles trickled over my shoulders. From here I’d be able to see the outside of the building where that belt emerged. Shuffling off the backpack, I peered around the edge of the gravel.
I couldn’t take it all in at once; it was too overwhelming. I did my best to make sense of it, to assemble it in my mind piece by piece.
To the side of the cannery, several acres of forest had been cleared and a giant foundation poured for future construction. Before the Dusting the factory had evidently been in the process of a huge expansion. That explained all the supplies stashed around the area. The new foundation was enormous, three or four times the size of the original cannery.
Cratering the corner of the foundation was a massive meteor, cracked jaggedly open around the midpoint. But the inside didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen.
It was smooth and perfectly rounded, coated with transparent screens that seemed as if they were made of organic matter like the eye membranes of the Hosts. Various images flashed on the screens, though I could make out little more than shifting bluish lights.
It wasn’t just a meteor. It had been co-opted as a spaceship.
Thump. Squelch.
My attention was drawn to where the assembly belt emerged from that roughly cut hatch in the cannery wall. A twenty-foot length of the belt had been reassembled outside so the assembly line could continue to the edge of the new foundation.
Thump. Squelch.
My gaze landed at the spot where the belt ended.
A figure stood there at the receiving end like some kind of high priestess from ancient times. Something about her posture and contours suggested she was female. Everything about her was futuristic, from the sleek black suit to the polished helmet with its dark-tinted sheet of a face mask. No flesh was visible; she was completely sealed in seamless armor, which looked like an astronaut suit from another millennium.
I stared at the perfectly smooth protective suit, shaped like a human. It seemed to be airtight. No gaps between gloves and sleeves. No break at the neckline below the helmet. Just one flexible cover adhering to the shape as if poured on, unbroken from torso to waist to boots.
Was there a human beneath it? An eyeless Host? Or was this another creature altogether, shaped like one of us? Her movements inside the suit were oddly fluid and robotic at the same time. Like the eye membranes, the suit seemed to be formed from some sort of biological technology.