"Those that took her, did the same thing to her as the Pack has done to you, only it's worse. You received a mutation of the original. You'll keep some semblance of yourself, your hopes and desires.

Everything Zoey was will be stamped out."

"Matt Brody and his wife and Quinn?"

"Gone." Ukiah glanced to the cabin as the door creaked open; Max and Sam came out cautiously.

They must have watched everything through the windows, for Max looked as upset as Ukiah felt.

Jared blinked at Ukiah, stunned, looking younger than Ukiah remembered him ever seeming. Lost and scared. "There has to be something we can do to get Zoey back!"

Ukiah swallowed down the growls but couldn't stop pacing, his hackles raised. "No, there isn't! It will spread through her like a cancer, only like a cancer of the blood, and the flesh, and the bone. You can't cut it out. It goes through her, making her into itself, and then she isn't anymore!"

"If it's like cancer," Sam said quietly, "quickly growing cells, can't we treat it with chemotherapy?"

"I don't know how that works," Ukiah said. They had talked about chemotherapy for his Mom Lara, for her brain tumor. It proved to be unnecessary, and the doctor spoke of her recovery as miraculous.

Ukiah suddenly wondered if his blood had anything to do with her healing.

Sam explained. "You give a patient a toxic drug that affects the fastest-growing cells, like the cancer or hair. It gives normal, healthy tissue a chance to grow after the bad cells have been killed."

"I don't know if it would work," Ukiah said. "Many poisons don't work on the Pack. Our cells are able to recognize and adapt to the danger poisons pose. All that would happen, I think, is that the human cells will die."

"After two hundred years, I figure that the Pack has tried everything at least once, twice if it worked," Max said. "What happens when a Pack infects an Ontongard? Not that I'm crazy about the idea, but at least Kraynak and Zoey would be alive and somewhat individuals."

"The Pack tried once. It didn't work out," Ukiah said.

"Why not?" Sam pressed.

Ukiah had sudden sympathy with Rennie, being at a loss to explain the complexities of Pack and Ontongard to him. No wonder Rennie just gave Ukiah his memories. "Normally the Pack passes memories off to one another in the form of mice."

"Like what Rennie did with you?" Max asked.

"Yeah." Ukiah winced, remembering the hostile mouse that Rennie gave to him in a coffee can. It hadn't been pleased with being handed off to a breeder.

Max guessed at an outcome. "So, if you injected an Ontongard with Pack genetics, all that wouldhappen is that the Ontongard would gain the Pack memories?"

"No. Not really," Ukiah said. "Rennie's memories made me sick because they and my cells were hostile to one another. Somehow the two reached a compromise. While I was dead, and the Pack was looking for the remote key, Rennie and Hellena couldn't absorb my memories-they refused to be taken in.

There usually has to be mutual agreement before memories can be added."

"Couldn't Hex force a memory to cooperate?" Max asked, "Like he forced Kittanning to change from a mouse into a human infant?"

"He what?" Sam asked.

"It's a long story," Max temporized. "I'll explain later."

Ukiah considered the question. His gut reaction was that neither Hex nor his Gets would take a Pack mouse in, even if they could force it to merge. He fumbled for words to shape that instinctual feeling.

"Hex probably would think it as too dangerous to consider. Prime wiped out the entire invasion force except for Hex. Prime registered on the Ontongard's senses as one of them. He managed to hide his individuality.

Before we killed him, Hex was still bewildered by Prime and the Pack."

Sam was trying to keep up with the conversation. "The Ontongard can recognize Pack now."

"Recognize it, yes. Understand it, no. It's the Pack's experience that Hex's Gets will attack without hesitation, and fight to the death, regardless of the situation. Similarly, the Pack will attack and kill a Get-only they're willing to run away from a fight that they absolutely can't win. It's one of the reasons Pack have kept ahead of the Ontongard."

"What do you mean?" Max repeated Ukiah's phrase back to him. "The Pack tried it and it didn't work out? They tried to infect an Ontongard? What happened?"

"I was getting back to that," Ukiah said. "You sure you want to know?"

"Yes," Sam said. Max and Jared nodded.

Ukiah covered his eyes with his hands. "The Pack figured one mouse is a lost cause; the Ontongard cells would attack until it was gone." So many of Rennie's memories were cursed blessings.

Ukiah discovered ignorance was dangerous, but so much of Rennie's past was horrific. "Hex had taken over a little boy, only like six years old, and the Dog Warriors didn't want to destroy the child without trying to save it. They killed the child in order to weaken the Ontongard."

Ukiah shuddered. The killing had to be brutal to be effective. Rennie loathed every second of it.

"Then they injected a massive amount of Pack genetic material into the healing body. Several of the Dog Warriors donated blood."

"The child died," Max guessed.

"What survived wasn't a child, but a collection of animals, some Ontongard, some Pack. The boy's body just broke apart and fled in all directions. All the animals that were Pack returned to the blood donors, slightly diminished but unchanged. They hunted down the surviving Ontongard animals and killed them."

Sam held up her hand, trying to halt the flow of information. "Prime was your father, and Hex was the leader of the Ontongard. But they are both dead, so Rennie is now your father and Alicia is now Hex."

Ukiah and Max gazed at her, and then traded puzzled looks, helpless to explain better. "In very simple terms," Ukiah admitted finally. "That's more or less it."

"But you're special. How special?" Sam asked. "Can you change Ontongard into something else?"

"No!" Ukiah cried.

Max looked at him bleakly. "You told me that your blood has been transforming people and your moms' dogs without killing them or wiping out them out as individuals. You could counterinfect Kraynak and Zoey.""Make them my Get?" Ukiah jerked away from Max, shocked that his partner would even suggest it.

"While I'm glad I'm just me," Max said, "if I had to be your Get or Hex's, I'd pick being yours. I know you don't like the idea, but if it's the only way to save them, maybe we should try it."

"No, no, no!" Ukiah backed away, waving off any possibility. "If I can make Gets-Max-exact cell copies! They would probably be breeders!"

"Maybe," Max said. "The wolf dogs aren't. Your mother wasn't. Your blood changed them, but not into Gets or breeders."

"But these are Ontongard Gets, Max!" Ukiah cried. "Think of someone like Hex, but set on spawning as many children as possible. They're brutal rapists of the worse kind: they use any force they need to take a female of the host race, no matter the age or willingness."

"As your Get," Max pressed, "they would mentally be like you, have your morals."

"I'm a genetic mishmash from an alien mutant!" Ukiah warned. "My blood has done things unheard of by the Pack. My Gets could totally retain their own minds-but in this case, the hosts are already mentally Ontongard.

"Or your blood could restore their human mind," Max said.

"Max, much as I love them, I can't risk it." Ukiah shook his head. "Besides, the Pack would never let them, or me, live."

"They're letting the wolf dogs live," Max pointed out.

"That's different," Ukiah protested. "That was an accident and they're not really Gets. Besides, I think only the Dog Warriors know. The Pack tolerates Kittanning because they know I didn't have a choice in his creation, and they're reasonably sure he'll grow up to be a good person. If I made a Get, they would probably decide I wasn't the person they thought I was-and kill me, Kittanning, and the Get."

Sam seemed ready to scream from the hopelessness of the situation. "I can't believe that your people came on a spaceship with all that advanced technology, and there's no way to reverse this."

"Why would they ever want to?" Ukiah asked. "Why would they want to unmake themselves?"

Max sighed. "Ukiah, there's no technology that could reverse the effects? No drug? No antibacterial, chemotherapy, retrovirus-anything?"

Ukiah opened his mouth to say no and then considered harder. The ovipositor started as a weapon of war against the Ontongard. A race known as the Summ had welcomed the lesser-advanced Ontongard, confident that if a war became a matter of starship against starship, they would win. Only after a quarter of their race was dead or converted did they realize their danger. By then, telling friend from foe was impossible, and a racial cleansing would have needed to start at the heart of the Summ civilization.

Recognizing that the war was truly being fought at the molecular level, the Summ worked feverishly to develop tools of genetic manipulations, only to have their lead scientists fall to the Ontongard and corrupt the technology to their use. "Well, part of the ovipositor did complex genetic manipulation. It would create a viable offspring between Ontongard and the native life, a child that could breed with the native stock and produce offspring that the Ontongard could easily infect."

"So we can use this ovipositor to do genetic manipulation-like to design something that will get Zoey back," Jared said.

Ukiah shrugged. "The ovipositor was on the ship, and Prime destroyed the ship."

"Was this where your mother was taken?" Jared asked. "Up in the mountains? Buried in the ground?"

Ukiah stared at Jared in surprise for a minute before answering. "Yes.""It wasn't destroyed," Jared said. "It was damaged. You went back once."

"I did?" Two hundred years after puberty, and his voice could still crack. "You know this?"

"My great-grandfather Jay told me about it," Jared said. "The two of you had gone up in the mountains when he was young. Your mother had told you about finding her way home, when you were very young. She gave very vivid landmarks. While she was alive, she wouldn't let you go there, and she lived for a very long, long time. But after she died, you and he looked for it."

"And I found it?"

"Yes, you found it."

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

Blue Mountains, Eastern Oregon.

Friday, September 3, 2004.

Ukiah saw the excitement on Sam's and Jared's faces and winced.

Max, though, knew the truth. "Ukiah used to know where the ship was. He doesn't remember anymore."

Ukiah said, "I lost the knowing when Magic Boy was murdered. I don't have any memories of living with your family."

It hurt to see the excitement die out of Jared's face. Clearly, he felt betrayed and yet struggled to hide it. Worse, Jared had gone pale and trembling as Pack virus surged through him. Ukiah could feel the tendrils of it fighting Jared's defenses, finding ancient weaknesses created by the Kicking Deers' exposure to Ukiah's blood while Ukiah was in his mother's womb.

Ukiah scrambled to find some hope to offer Jared. The photographs had shown that Magic Boy had been chopped into many pieces. Hands severed from arms. Arms cut off at the shoulders. A nightmarish child's puzzle of body parts.

Some of Magic Boy definitely went on to form Ukiah. For his memory loss to be so drastic, he would have to start out as just a fraction of that whole. A leg, the headless torso, or perhaps just the arms changed, sometime, somehow, into Ukiah.

Which meant there had to be other parts, in some form or other. If he found one, he could conceivably recall the location of the scout ship-but would he still be Ukiah afterward?

"Maybe if I can find some memories," Ukiah offered weakly. Sam looked at him with confused, faint repulsion. "Exactly how do you find memories?"

Ukiah glanced to Max, who sighed and nodded agreement that the time had come to be completely upfront. "I'm not so much a person as a colony of cellular beings. If you cut off my hand, then my hand would reorganize itself into something that could survive. It would become a rat or a bird or a fish-and my body would grow a new hand to replace it."

Sam shuddered. "Oh, I hope you're talking theory and not practical experience."

"Theory," Max said.

"Actually," Ukiah reluctantly admitted, "maybe practical experience.""Magic Boy," Jared hissed, his eyes unfocused as he made all the connections. "When Magic Boy was dismembered, all the severed pieces became animals and ran off. That's why his body vanished."

"Yes," Ukiah said.

Max understood the implications. "But there might be other parts of Magic Boy roaming around with his memories still genetically coded."

Jared blinked back into focus, surprised. "You don't think all the parts reassembled in Ukiah?"

"And why do you need them?" Sam struggled to understand. "Don't you remember? And if you've forgotten, wouldn't have they?"

"It's possible I'm only a fraction of Magic Boy," Ukiah fumbled for words. "I could be just his torso or one of his legs. There's no telling what I went through from the time he died to a time I clearly remember. I could have existed as two rabbits and a squirrel for a decade until they merged into something large enough to make a human child."

Sam's hand slid up to cover her mouth, and from behind its protective screen, she whispered, "Oh, that's soooo weird."

"When I became human, at that point, there's a change as to how my memory is stored. Bird, squirrel, or fish-the piece of flesh was big enough to form an adult creature. When my cells decided to become human, they could probably have only formed a child-most likely there weren't enough of them to make an adult. And genetically, as a breeder, I have to grow to sexual maturity."

"And like Kittanning," Max applied what he knew to Ukiah, "your 'old' memories were lost as you grew up."

Ukiah nodded. "For Kittanning's sake, I'm glad how my father's mutation works out for us, but I wish I could have kept my memories of my mother and my family."

"What kind of animals do we need to look for?" Jared asked, already turning to the task at hand.

Ukiah spread his hands helplessly and guessed. "Mice. Snakes. Gophers. Dogs. Cats."

Sam stared at Ukiah, shaking her head. "I'm looking at you, and I just see a sweet kid. I can't believe what you're saying."

"He is a good kid," Max said. "Everyone has quirks. His are just weirder than most."

Jared ignored everything but saving Zoey. "Are you sure these lost parts will remember?"

"No," Ukiah admitted. "They've certainly lost some of Magic Boy's memories. How much depends on what's happened to that set of cells since the murder. The fewer changes and trauma, the more that piece will remember."

"These alien cats and dogs," Sam said slowly, obviously still struggling with the whole concept, "are they going to look just like other regular animals?"