The Host Chapter 1: Remembered

I k new(a) it would begin with the finale, and the end would look identical death to these eyes. I had been warned.not these eyes. My eyes. Mine. This was me now.The language I had found myself use was odd, just it made sense.Choppy, boxy, blind, and linear. Impossibly crippled in comparision to many Id used, up to now still it managed to find fluidity and expression.Sometimes beauty. My language now. My native tounge.With the truest understanding of my kind, Id bound myself securely into the bodys center of horizon, twined myself inescapably into its every breath and reflex action 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 fountain of the first memory board, which would re altogethery be the move memory ?C the dying 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 b lottoer, more than vital than the feelings of any other species I had been. I tried to erect myself.The memory came. And, as Id been warned, it was not something that could ever be prepared for.It sear with sharp color and ringing fit. Cold on her skin, pain enchanting her limbs, burning them. The taste was fiercely metallic in her mouth.And there was the new sense, the fifth sense Id never had, that took the particles from the tonal pattern and transformed them into unusual 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, urgency the blunt, clumsy limbd forward but hampering them at the same time. To flee, to run ?C it was all she could do.Ive 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 t his was potently a memory and not me.Sucked into the hell that was the last minute of her life, I was she, and we were running.Its so dark. I cant see. I cant see the floor. I cant see my turn over streched out in front of me. I run blind and picture to hear the pursuit I can feel behind me, but the pulse is so loud behind my ears it drowns everything else out.Its cold. It shouldnt matter now, but it hurts. Im so cold.The air in her nose was uncomfortable. Bad. A bad smell. For unmatched second, that uncomfortableness pulled me free of the memory. only when it was only a second, and then I was dragged in again, and my eyes filled with horrified tears.Im lost, were lost. Its over.Theyre right behind me now, loud and close. at that place are so many footsteps I am alone. Ive failed.The Seekers are calling. The sound of their theatrical roles twists my stomach. Im going to be sick.Its fine, its 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.Dont hurt yourself, one of them pleads. A deep voice, full of concern. Concern estrus shot trough my veins, and a violent hatred nearly clotted 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. at that place was a weak pain in my throat.Screaming, my body explained. Youre 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. enliven, they cry. There is danger ahead.The danger is behind I scream stake in my mind. But I see what they mean.A feeble waterway of accrue, coming from who knows where, shines on the end of the hall.It is not the flat wall or the locked door, the dead end I feared and expected. It is a black hole. An elevator shaft. Abandoned, empty, and condemned, the like this building.Once a hiding place, now a tomb.A billow of relief floods through me as I raced forward. There is a way. No way to survive, but perhaps a way to win.No, no, no This theme was all mine, and I fought to pull myself away from her, but we wer together. And we sprinted from the edge of death.Please The shouts are more desperate.I feel like laughing when I know that I am immobile enough. I imagine their detainment clutching for me just inches behind my back. But I am as fast as I need to be.I dont even pause at the end of the floor. The hole rises up to meet me midstride.The emptiness swallows me. My legs flail, useless. My hands bewitch the air, claw through it, searching for anything solid. Cold blows past me like crack winds.I hear the thud before I feel it The air is goneAnd then pain is everywhere Pain is everything.Make it stop.Not high enough, I whisper to myself through the pain.When will the p ain end? When?The blackness swallowed up the agony, and I was weak with gratitude that the memory had come to this most final of conclusions. The blackness took all, and I was free.I took a breath to unwavering myself, as was this bodys habit. My body.But then the color rushed back, the memory reared up and engulfed me again.No I panicked, fearing the cold and the pain and the very fear itself.But this was not the same memory. This was a memory within a memory ?C a final memory, like a last gag of air ?C yet, somehow, even stronger than the first.The blackness took all but this a face.The face was as alien to me as the faceless serpentine tentacles of my last host body would be to this new body. Id seen this kind of face in the images I had been given to prepare for this world. It was hard to tell them apart, to see the slender variations in color and shape that was the only markers of the individual. So much the same, all of them.Noses centered in the middle of the sphere, eyes above and mouths below, ears around the sides. A collection of senses, all but touch, concentrated in one place. splutter over bones, hair growing on the crown and in strange furry lines above the eyes.Some had more fur lower pass on the jaw those were always males. The colors ranged through the brown surpass from pale cream to a deep almost-black.Aside from that, how to know one from the other?This face I would of known among millions.This face was a hard rectangle, the shape of the bones strong under the skin. In color it was light golden brown. The hair was just a few shades darker than the skin, excerpt where flaxen streaks lightened it, and it covered only the head and the odd fur mark above the eyes. The circular irises in the white eyeballs were darker than the hair but, like the hair, change surface with light. There were small lines around the eyes, and her memories told me the lines was from smiling and squinting into sunlight. I knew nothing of what passed for beau ty among these strangers, and yet I knew that this face was beautiful. I wanted to apply looking at it. As soon as I completed this, it disappeared.Mine, spoke the alien thought that should not have existed.Again, I was frozen, stunned. There should have been no one here but me.And yet this thought was so strong and so awareImpossible. How was she still here? This was me now.Mine, I rebuked her, the power and authority that belonged to me alone flowing through the word. Everything is mine.So wherefore am I talking back to her? I wondered as the voices interuppted my thoughts.