I smile, but I don’t turn around, still protecting her from seeing my face.
“That’s true, sweetie,” I reply. “Why do you think that?”
Marlo is quiet.
Noah lifts his shirt, wincing as he pulls the sticky fabric away from his leaking wound. A chunk of flesh is missing, leaving a ragged patch of exposed muscle and fat in its wake, but it also lacks any substantial depth. Eddie was going for skin.
“The cancer,” I murmur.
There’s a huge problem here, two very important“mind files” directly contradicting each other. I’ve been so careful arranging these mental folders, laying them out on the floor of my consciousness and adding to each one. This attention to detail is the only reason I’m still alive—the only reasonanyof us are still alive—but now an odd inconsistency has emerged.
Eddie’s biology is unlike anything this world has ever known, and he subsists on a particular type of cancerous growth during this part of his life cycle. He’s spent all night devouring sheets and sheets of skin from people with metastatic cancer, building up his strength for a horrible rebirth. Suddenly, however, it appears to be the one thing that could take him down.
“Let’s just hide out for a while,” Noah says. “We can walk out into the desert. Avoid people. Disappear.”
“He’ll find us,” I sigh.
As if called upon by these words, something catches my attention in the rearview mirror. At the far end of the street, a foggy sheen of rosy pink dust has rolled under one of the streetlights. It’s a faint, thin haze, barely visible and suggesting some distance, but it’s there.
Noah follows my gaze, noticing the cloud, too. “Isn’t one of your neighbors a private investigator?” he asks. “There could be a tracker hidden somewhere on the car.”
“She is,” I confirm. “There’s no time to search for a tracker, though.”
“Then let’s switch cars.”
“The kid three houses down from us has a drone,” I add.
Noah’s gaze lifts to the dark sky above.
“I’m not running anymore,” I continue, firm in my convictions. “The only thing running does is force Eddie to kill more people. He won’t stop.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I wouldn’t.”
Noah sits with this for a moment, not quite understanding the implication here, but accepting my analysis all the same.
This is what he does. He accepts. He trusts.
I turn to Noah. “Youshould go, though. He’s after Marlo and me.”
Noah’s expression wavers for a moment. He glances back at Marlo and bites his lip, then finally shakes his head and lets out a long sigh. “I can’t just abandon my post.”
I reach out and place my hand on Noah’s shoulder, sitting with this for a moment, then I put the car in gear and pull back onto the road. We’re cruising now—a moving target.
I pull Eddie’s folded paper from my pocket and hand it over.
“Eddie needs to eat the skin of people with skin cancer before jumping into a new host,” I explain. “This is who he visited tonight.”
Noah unfolds the page. He looks it over, studying the words.
“So the question is: What’s the difference with you?” I press. “Eddie is damn near indestructible, but nibbling you looked like it almost killed him.”
Noah remains deep in thought. “It’s hard to say.”
The mental filing cabinet springs open, folders erupting and pages flying everywhere as I sort through the tornado. I start transmuting thoughts into words. “I mean, if he needs cancer to shift bodies, then chemotherapy can’t be great for him,” I suggest. “Your body is pumped full of radiation, right?”
“Afraid so,” Noah replies. “But these people are also stage four. They’re probably getting the same treatments I am.”
