Is it supposed to be taking this long?"
The unfamiliar voice somehow breaks through the swirl. The host's feet drag across the dirt. Large hands grip the upper arms.
"Most of the guard haven't had human hosts." Tom's voice—not Tom—yanks them back under the memories. Tom alive, his face hard and the grip on her arm hurting. Her heart hurts worse because what will Jake do? Tom's dead, Jake won't survive this…No, he's alive, he's here speaking.
"Neither the hork-bajir nor the taxxons have two-sided brains, it takes a while to figure out where everything is." Tom says. No. Not Tom, that's…They know this name. The eyes of a hork-bajir and the eyes of this human aren't so different that they wouldn't recognize the face hiding the yeerk beneath.
"All right then—"
"Kosel, why were you bringing this human for infestation?" Not-Tom cuts off the other male voice. Impatient annoyance sharpening each word.
"I, she had lost consciousness in class. She was unresponsive and unaware of her surroundings." A woman's voice quavers with nerves.
Falling, Rachel yelling and reaching. The floor was there, solidly pressing against her palms. It wasn't supposed to be there. It was gone, everything all around was gone.
"Wait. What?" The unknown male speaks again. "Did you seriously just grab one of them out of class?"
"No," the woman says quickly, "I told the students that I was taking her to the nurse's office. Which is true, we were just stopping here first."
Why was everything supposed to be gone? The memories…There is the school looming above her as Rachel drags them inside. The Pool down below, down the flight of stairs that, she can't, she can't, they can't take her, no, no. It's in her head. It's in her head! No, no, no, it's over, it's her fault—
"What the hell!? We're supposed to be trying to recruit them first."
"Will, you've said it yourself. Some of them will never even consider joining the Sharing. This girl's parents make her work constantly taking care of animals." Disgust curdles the words. "It's a wonder that she even has time for school—"
"Shut up." Complete silence follows Not-Tom's command.
It's her fault. If she hadn't, if she hadn't
STOP
The yeerk wrenches back. Jagged, disjointed thoughts scrape away at her as she tries to disengage from the parts of this mind that are trying to swallow her alive.
The body stops, the two male controllers that had been dragging her along now look down in surprise. The word must have been spoken out loud. But that doesn't matter. What matters is staying above the whirling spiral tugging her under memories that lead nowhere.
"Aftran?"
The human's voice tentatively reaches out to her.
"Aftran." There are no solid memories. No first meetings or traces of hearing Aftran's name somewhere else. There is nothing attached to that name except sheer relief and the knowledge that it's been so long.
The body, no, Aftran gulps in air. Panic alights within her true form, shooting through the neural connections and kickstarting a surge of the body's adrenaline. Hosts fear infestation. Even the properly broken ones like her hork-bajir host feel nothing but deadened discomfort. They don't miss their yeerks, especially if they never met them before.
"I don't know you." The words whisper past her lips. "I don't."
"Guard, state your name and report." Not-Tom's voice cuts through, drawing Aftran back to the outside world. She turns her head and slowly looks up at the controller towering over her. The harsh frown does nothing to hide the unease in his eyes.
"Aftran 942" The ingrained habit of following orders brings forth the name past her confusion. "There's something wrong with this human. She thinks she knows me." The knees tremble with too great of weakness for her to stand. "She's happy that I'm here. I don't know her." Her own tone cracks in Aftran's ears.
Not-Tom freezes. He doesn't breathe, doesn't even blink; just stares with incomprehensible blankness.
Even with this reaction to what she's let out so far, Aftran can't stop herself because the rest needs to be said. He ordered her to report anyway.
"She knows Tom's dead, that you're dead. But that's not true. Everything is still here. It isn't gone. She believes the school, no, the Pool is supposed to be gone."
"What the hell?" The other male controller wheezes.
Not-Tom's face spasms. His grip loosens and he recoils from her. Yet, she doesn't collapse. The other controller maintains his strained grip on her arm as Aftran forces her feet under her and drives the trembling weakness from the body's knees.
The Pool sludge mingles with the sweat sliding down her face as the human sags in the back of their shared mind.
"Kosel," Not-Tom's words come out strangled. "Go back to your station."
"Sir?"
"I SAID GO." The woman controller scrambles back. She averts her eyes as she turns and hurries away. The male controller flinches against Aftran when Not-Tom turns his crazed glare to him.
"Go get Iniss and Efflit."
No hesitation exists as the other controller speeds off, leaving Aftran's arm tingling from where his grip used to be.
Not-Tom stares at her. The quick scuffle of footsteps on dirt tears her attention to the side. The other controllers who had been traveling too close to them scurry away. Heads down and gazes averted, none of them wish to attract her superior's notice when he appears so agitated.
Aftran looks around past the quickly retreating controllers. The rocky wall of the Pool's cavern reaches up and arches high above her head. A few paces away, the storage units sit far enough from the wall to allow for further expansion of the cavern system to take place if Visser Three so wishes it.
With her superior's agitation driving every intelligent yeerk in the opposite direction, it's secluded enough not to be overheard by anyone else.
I can't recall his name. Aftran admits to herself. Her own fear causes the body's hands to shake, so she grips the rims of her jean's pockets. A faulty memory in a yeerk, a creature that is capable of perfect recall of nearly every moment of its life, may not be a death sentence. But, yeerks who have grown old or feeble enough to loose track of themselves are quickly redesignated to a permanent, blind existence in the Pool.
He's staring at her, probably waiting for her to elaborate on her unbelievable words.
"I think that there is something physically wrong with the host." That has to be it. There are no other possible explanations. "Her memories and beliefs are fragmented and nonsensical. You are obviously not dead, sir. And the Pool is still here."
His hard expression shifts to no discernable degree, but the fingers on his left hand shake before he clenches them. The right side of his face spasms before his eyelids slam shut.
Breathing harshly, it takes a few moments for him to stifle the host's rebellion rampaging over his body.
The human girl tucked away in Aftran's head makes one lethargic note of this before drifting into a half-awake state. Dread pools in the bottom of Afran's stomach as bile edges up her throat. Despite the fear that should be felt and affect the human as well, the girl drifts deep enough to be considered unconscious.
Her superior's name is Temrash 114. The name branches out, connecting to the past that Aftran has shared so far with this particular lieutenant. Visser Three usually gives out the orders to the Guard himself, but there have been times when a battle has required his forces to be split apart. It has always been either Temrash 114 or Iniss 226 who have had temporary command of her unit in those cases.
Even if she's only had minimal contact with him since they've been assigned Earth, she should have remembered this immediately. Not only after the girl whose mind she has integrated with has lost consciousness
A chill tingles the back of Aftran's neck. It's as if, when it had been active, the human's awareness had been blocking Aftran's own memories.
"This host…and I have been experiencing similar problems." Despite quickly pulling
Aftran's attention back outwards, the quiet tone fails to hide the restrained apprehension burning in Temrash's now open eyes. "There have been memory encryption and retrieval problems that initially had appeared to have arisen from an instance of sufficient physical trauma." Aftran eyes surveys the male's body. No obvious injury is noted, but the clothing or dark hair could be hiding it from her sight.
"But," he continues, scorn heavily twisting his voice. "I doubt that your host has conveniently suffered a similar head injury."
Your host. Not that girl or the human. Her superior had called this body her host. Those very words imply that she will never infest her hork-bajir body again. But she can't switch hosts right now, even if she wanted a reassignment to a human body. There's a mission tonight, one that Visser Three is requiring all of his personal guard to be on duty for. She can't not be there. He'll notice!
"Temrash, sir, this isn't my host. I need my real host for tonight." The human's voice rises despite herself. A high-pitched voice is this body's natural response to anxiety, sending a pulse of irritation through Aftran that quickly disappears under the stronger wave of anxiety. "Unless the Visser himself has reassigned me. But I didn't receive any direct orders from him."
Aftran doesn't remember receiving such orders, yet she also lost Temrash's name, a yeerk who she's known for as long as she's been a member of Visser Three's guard. So, maybe she did receive orders and they were lost as well.
If that's what happened...she wouldn't survive that.
"You didn't." Temrash states evenly. "He doesn't know about this incident yet." The anxiety in his eyes dims into some sort of acceptance. "But the Visser will soon. Tell me, Aftran," His tone grows grim, "what do you know about sario rips?"
