For a second it just looked like a heap of purple crap, but then it started to take shape, a massive torso that oozed into squat legs, a bulging head without a neck to hold it up. And stuck on the front of that head like sequins from a Bedazzler, a dozen shiny black eyes.
The smell hit her next, like a cross between stinkbug and sulfur. It was lucky Atleigh had come across a few purpuramorphs last year, because she knew to keep her face passive. They were harmless unless you commented on or otherwise reacted to their stench. Then things could get ugly.
Well. Uglier.
“Thanks for obliging,” Atleigh said. “You know, most ETs don’t bother to wear a digital skin unless they’ve got something to hide.”
She lowered her weapon, slow, and slid it back into the holster on her belt.
“What is it that you want, kid?” the purpuramorph asked her, in a low rumble, almost subvocal. Purpuramorphs were one of the few offplanet races that didn’t need some kind of tech to speak like a human. Their vocal cords—buried somewhere in that purple mush—were actually similar to her own, somehow.
Atleigh took her phone out of her pocket and lit it up. On the screen was a picture of a woman with long hair—the same auburn color as Atleigh’s own. She had deep lines in her forehead, and a glint in her murky green eyes, like she was telling you to get to the goddamn point.
“You seen her? She was in here last week sometime.”
A dozen glittering eyes swiveled toward the phone, and Atleigh schooled her features into neutrality as a wave of odor washed over her, so pungent it almost made her eyes water.
“And if I have?”
“I just need to know if you spotted her talking to anybody,” Atleigh said.
“My customers are guaranteed a certain level of discretion,” the purpuramorph said. “I can’t go violating that just because some little girl asks me to.”
Atleigh’s smile turned into more of a gritted-teeth situation.
“First of all, I’m a little girl who can make your insides come out of you before you even notice it’s happening,” she said. “And second, that woman is my mom, and she’s dead now, so if you don’t tell me who she was talking to, I might do something out of grief that we’ll both later regret, get me?”
She rested the heel of her hand on the holster at her side.
“So what’s it gonna be?” she said. “Carrot, or stick? Because I gotta tell you …” She drew the modified gun, hooked her middle finger in the metal loop just under the barrel, and tugged on it so the mechanism extended the needle again. Click click click. “I’m pretty fond of the stick, myself.”
A couple of minutes later, Atleigh slid into the driver’s side of an old green Volvo, patted the urn buckled into the seat next to her, and started the engine. She knew exactly where she was headed next.
Atleigh Kent was a bounty hunter, and her bounty was exclusively leeches.
Not all extraterrestrials were leeches—in fact, 99.9 percent of them weren’t. Most of the ETs who settled on Earth were decent enough, and made things more interesting. When Atleigh saw pictures of the way her planet had been when there were only humans on it, she was always struck by how boring it was, all the same texture, like a bowl of plain oatmeal. It was better now, with beings of all shapes and sizes and colors, hearing half a dozen languages burbling or beeping or buzzing when you walked down the street.
She mostly dealt in the ones who had something to hide. Digital skin was illegal for a reason—mostly people wore it when they were on the run from something. But leeches …
Well. Leeches were a different story. They were a predatory race. They attached their silvery, centipede-like bodies to a person’s spinal cord and took control of their body and brain. As long as they kept the back of their neck covered, they could pass for human perfectly, absorbing the host body’s knowledge and experiences and integrating it into their new, joint self.
Meanwhile, the host suffered in silence, suppressed by the alien until they apparently fizzled out of existence. If the alien was attached too long, and then detached, the person was just a vegetable. Their bodies could go on living, if cared for, but their minds were gone.
All the alien races were vulnerable to leeches, but none more than human beings, their ideal prey. The easiest hosts to suppress, for whatever reason.
It had happened to Atleigh’s father. He—well, it hadn’t really been him, but they hadn’t known that at the time—had lived among them for weeks, dodging their mother and pretending at fatherhood. Then their mom had discovered the thing on their dad’s neck, and tried to stab it with a kitchen knife, and he had bailed.
They had gone on the hunt, as a family, the two little girls too young to remember much before the endless road trip their childhood turned into. Their mom had learned everything she could about the thing that had claimed her husband. It had taken her years to find him, in a lonely gas station in Iowa. Then she had ripped the thing off his spinal cord and gutted it. But their dad never came back to himself.
Atleigh had helped dig his grave, right there on the side of the road, by the mile marker, so they would always know where to find him. And since that day, she had been determined to save the human race, one leech at a time.
Lacey Kent’s hand went to her throat, to the buttons that fastened her collar closed. Just checking on them, as she had done a dozen times in the past ten minutes as she waited for the shuttle to reach the station.
There weren’t many students on the shuttle from the American Selenic Military Academy, and none that Lacey knew personally. A few teachers—including the famously volatile arachnoid, Mr. Zag—a few parents visiting ailing or troublesome children, a couple of fulguvore emissaries from their home planet, and of course, Lacey herself. She was in her sixth year, a secondary school transfer, so she didn’t quite have the posture that the lifers had—she could stand up straight, sure, but when no one was looking, she sagged like an old tree.
“Headed home, Ms. Kent?” Mr. Zag’s metallic voice asked. Arachnoids spoke through a complex system of pincer-clicking that no human had yet been able to decipher, so Zag had a voice box hanging from his pedicle. Even though the voice was computer-generated, Lacey thought she could hear some judgment in it. After all, she was going home in the middle of a semester.
“Yes, sir,” Lacey said. “My mother just died.”
“My condolences.” Zag’s pincers were clicking. Lacey had never gotten used to the sound. She hadn’t been in Zag’s class since her first year at the academy, but she still shivered when he spoke to her, the response Pavlovian. “Though perhaps it is some relief that you will not have to tell her—”
“I appreciate the sentiment,” Lacey said, cutting him off. She didn’t want to hear about all the things she wouldn’t have to tell her mother now, because it just reminded her of what she wouldn’t get to tell her.
Zag’s multiple eyes blinked at her, but he seemed to get the hint, and fell silent.
Finally the chime went off for docking, and Lacey went to the window to look down at Peoria, Illinois, one of the shuttle’s few stops. Peoria had once been home to a major machinery manufacturer that had later moved to the Chicago area. The population of the city had dwindled almost dangerously until the local government made a bid for one of the space academies. Now, by all accounts, Peoria was booming.
Lacey didn’t care much about the city either way. She wasn’t from there—wasn’t from anywhere, really, unless you counted the back of her mom’s old Jeep. Her official place of birth was a town in Minnesota, and even that was just a word she wrote on official papers, not a place she felt much tied to.
She spotted the wide stretch of the Illinois River, the