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away from this alien insanity. “I want to see
your boss. Right now. This can’t be the welcome your leaders approved.”
    One of the aliens approached her with something in his hand. A
long, skinny stick cased in slick, white material. Without warning, he shoved it
up her nose. Her nose .
    Reflexively, she tried to swing her arm up to pull it out, but
the table held her captive. The stick beeped as she started coughing.
    Erratic heartbeats pounded against her ribcage, hard enough to
feel. Her nostril stung from being stretched and tears of panic blurred both
eyes.
    The stick lengthened and crawled up into her sinuses,
slithering around in her head. Aching cold engulfed her. She was trapped. Pinned
like a seventh-grade science project. These aliens had no idea who they were
dealing with. Obviously. This could not be
happening.
    Tears dribbled into her hair. “What is that thing?” She choked
on the last syllable as bile burned up her esophagus. But still, they didn’t
speak.
    Unbearable, piercing pain stabbed at the backs of her eyes. She
cried out and twisted against the hard restraints in uncontrolled spasms. With a
tug, the alien removed the white stick from her nose.
    The stick disappeared, but the thing in her head stayed. It moved . Frigid tentacles slid around in her
brain, worming through tissue with sickening squelches she could feel and hear
simultaneously.
    It was alive. And it was inside her.
    Screams echoed through her head. Scraped past her raw throat.
Her hands clawed at the clamps. The alien thing in her skull couldn’t be there.
It couldn’t stay.
    But it was.
    Would it kill her? Carve up her brain with finely honed
blades?
    A panel in the ceiling flipped and another skeletal arm
descended. More? Shoving foreign stuff into her body and letting it creep around
in her brain wasn’t enough? She shrieked as it whirred toward her.
    A probe touched her forehead, between her eyebrows.
    Click . Click - click .
    Images flashed through her head, of the pyramid at the other
end of the hall, of the other people on the list. Schematic diagrams she’d
copiously studied to become a scientist. Her mom, smiling, and telling Ashley
she’d be an Academy Award nominated actress soon...
    What ?
    More images flashed—faster and sharper—of reams of text from
her papers on thermodynamics...
    Dr. Khan saying, “...equilibrate in an isolated physical system
so as to result...”
    Senator Blanchard’s pasty white thighs... The front page of Star , with a spread of her passed out in a
club... Her manager telling her she’d been replaced in Coyote Princess ...
    All of her worst moments, and then some, flashed by like street
signs at ninety.
    The orange couch burst into her mind. That awful orange.
Orange, and flashes of a male leg, a male hand. Sick waves rolled through her
stomach as the shame and humiliation gnawed through her all over again. Slick
with sweat now, she tried to block the memories but they came back, almost as if
pulled by an unseen force.
    Terror numbed her legs, her throat. She couldn’t swallow. Both
eye sockets burned but no tears formed. Orange flooded through her mind,
churning her insides. More bile crawled up her throat, nasty and bitter.
    She longed to hold her lipstick case. The hard, solid shape
never failed to center her. Losing that last link with home broke open a torrent
of tears.
    She was going to die here, alone. Killed in cold blood by the
alien octopus implanted inside her skull. She would die without fixing her
career. Die without ever falling in love, the real kind of love, like in the
movies. What happened when you died? Did it hurt? Nothing could hurt worse than
the shredder the aliens had set loose in her brain.
    If she died, none of her fans would know what happened.
Disappearing into this role hadn’t saved her after all. The aliens had stripped
away Dr. Jonsson and left Ashley V on the table. The final mistake in a long
line of bad decisions and even worse luck.
    The already