The Host (The Host 1)

Chapter 1: Remembered

I knew it would begin with the end, and the end would look like death to these eyes. I had been warned.

Not these eyes. My eyes. Mine. This was me now.

The language I had found myself using was odd, but it made sense.

Choppy, boxy, blind, and linear. Impossibly crippled in comparision to many I'd used, yet still it managed to find fluidity and expression.

Sometimes beauty. My language now. My native tounge.

With the truest instinct of my kind, I'd bound myself securely into the body's center of thought, twined myself inescapably into its every breath and reflex until it was no longer a seperate entity. It was me.

Not the body, mybody.

I felt the sedation wearing off and lucidity taking its place.

I braced myself for the onslaught of the first memory, which would really be the last memory ?C the last moments this body had experienced, the memory of the end.

I had been warned thorougly of what would happen now. These human emotions would be stronger, more vital than the feelings of any other species I had been. I tried to prepare myself.

The memory came. And, as I'd been warned, it was not something that could ever be prepared for.

It seared with sharp color and ringing sound. Cold on her skin, pain gripping her limbs, burning them. The taste was fiercely metallic in her mouth.

And there was the new sense, the fifth sense I'd never had, that took the particles from the air and transformed them into strange messages and pleasaures and warnings in her brain ?C scents. They were distracting, confusing to me, but not to her memory. The memory had no time for the novelties of smell. The memory was only fear.

Fear locked her in a vise, goading the blunt, clumsy limbd forward but hampering them at the same time. To flee, to run ?C it was all she could do.

I've failed.

The memory that was not mine was so frighteningly strong and clear that it sliced through my control ?C overwhelmed the detachment, the knowledge that this was just a memory and not me.

Sucked into the hell that was the last minute of her life, I was she, and we were running.

It's so dark. I can't see. I can't see the floor. I can't see my hands streched out in front of me. I run blind and try to hear the pursuit I can feel behind me, but the pulse is so loud behind my ears it drowns everything else out.

It's cold. It shouldn't matter now, but it hurts. I'm so cold.

The air in her nose was uncomfortable. Bad. A bad smell. For one second, that discomfort pulled me free of the memory. But it was only a second, and then I was dragged in again, and my eyes filled with horrified tears.

I'm lost, we're lost. It's over.

They're right behind me now, loud and close. There are so many footsteps! I am alone. I've failed.

The Seekers are calling. The sound of their voices twists my stomach. I'm going to be sick.

"It's fine, it's fine," one lies, trying to calm me, to slow me. Her voice is disturbed by the effort of her breathing.

"Be careful!" another shouts in warning.

"Don't hurt yourself," one of them pleads. A deep voice, full of concern. Concern!

Heat shot trough my veins, and a violent hatred nearly choked me.

I had never felt such an emotion as this in all my lives. For another second, my revulision pulled me away from the memory. A high, shrill keening pierced my ears and pulsed in my head. The sound scraped through my airways. There was a weak pain in my throat.

Screaming, my body explained. You're screaming.

I froze in shock, and the sound broke off abruptly.

This was not a memory.

My body ?C she was thinking! Speakingto me!

But the memory was stronger, in that moment, than my astonishment.