Hunger (Gone 2)

Tried to explain…tried to form images that explained…But the gaiaphage didn’t care, really, it had moved on, not concerned any more by the girl with the power of gravity.

Someone shot Edilio, Lana thought, marveling at the idea. Someone. Edilio.

She had a flash of sensation, the feeling of the gun bucking in her hand.

Someone…

She gasped as the gaiaphage split open her mind and poured the images into her brain. Images of monstrosities.

The largest was a shaggy thing like a grizzly bear with eighteen-inch spikes at the ends of its paws…creatures that were all sharp edges, as if they’d been assembled out of razor blades and kitchen knives…creatures of glowing inner fire. Things that flew. Things that slithered.

But when she saw them, she didn’t just see the surface. She saw them inside and out at once. Saw their construction. Saw the way they were folded into one another, one inside another, monster within monster. Like a Russian nesting doll.

Destroy one and liberate the next.

Regeneration. Adaptation. Each new incarnation as dangerous and as deadly as the one before.

The gaiaphage had conceived of the perfect biological machine.

No, not his conception. He had reached into a mind, an imagination infinitely more visionary than his own.

Nemesis. That was the gaiaphage’s name for him: Nemesis.

Nemesis with infinite power held in check only by the twists and turns, the blind alleys and sudden high walls inside his own damaged brain.

Nemesis and Healer, used and brought together here, in this way, to make the gaiaphage unstoppable, unkillable.

Only one piece was missing. The food. The fuel.

It is coming, the gaiaphage said.

Soon.

Someone had shot Edilio. And had tried to shoot Dekka.

Lana’s shattered, overwhelmed mind, flooded with the gaiaphage’s plans, held on to that single fact.

Someone had…

From far, so far away, she felt the gun buck in her hand as she squeezed the trigger.

No. No.

Edilio falling.

No.

Lana’s mind exploded in a wave of fury so powerful that the gaiaphage’s imagery faltered. The fire hose flow of plans and details faded.

I hate you! Lana screamed wordlessly.

The gaiaphage pushed back, forced her down inside her own brain.

But more slowly than it had before.

“He’s going to go after you, Caine,” Diana whispered in his ear.

Caine’s arms ached. He could no longer feel his hands. Holding them up. Using the power. Using it to carry…