Tom looked down to where my fingers encircled his forearm. He seemed transfixed by it, lost in some random thought or memory and it was all I could do not to grab him and shake him back to reality.

After a few seconds, he sighed and pulled his arm away, scratching idly at his skin, whether to rid himself of the goose-bumps or the ghost of my touch, I wasn't sure.

'Every one of us is important,' he said. 'We are the hive.'

'But there are so many of you. What does it matter if the hive loses one?'

'Does it only matter when you lose a large number of your kind? Does it hurt more when you lose a hundred? A thousand? I would have thought you would have understood the significance of losing just one, Evie.'

'Really?' I said, glowering at him. 'You really want to throw that in my face after I kindly didn't put a bullet in your chest downstairs?'

Tom had half the decency to look crestfallen, or at least, appeared to be. 'Sorry, I didn't mean to...'

'Yes, you did. You always do,' I accused. He flinched. 'Anyway, it's hardly the same,' I added.

'Why not?'

'Because...' I stopped. I wasn't sure if it was the same or not. Did the Greys even have loved ones? Family? Emotional connections, as opposed to this collective consciousness called the hive? Everything he had said and everything I had seen them do, just made me think they were cold, heartless, unfeeling – nothing but a tyrannical race intent on wiping out any species they chose. But the truth was, I didn't really know anything about them at all.

Tom looked down at his hands, pensive. 'You're right,' he conceded, softly. 'It's not the same. But that doesn't mean each one of us is not important to the hive.'

'You're expecting me to believe that they would still be hunting you after two years? I'm pretty sure they have more important things to be getting along with, you know, like conquering a whole world?'

'They did that already.'

I hated it when he did this, when he said these things that sounded so cold, so alien, that I couldn't work out whether his intention was to hit hard or whether he just had no idea of the impact of his words.

I moved away and shrugged the backpack off my shoulders, leaving it on the floor by the dresser. Sitting down on the end of the bed, I felt deflated and all of a sudden, wracked with a weighty exhaustion. I was tired of this. Tired of second guessing him all the time. Tired of being constantly on edge around him. Tired of my suspicions and paranoia. It was relentless, this never-ending circle of mistrust and fear and hatred.

'All I'm saying is that two years just seems a long time for someone who is apparently no one special in the great scheme of things. You must have some significance if they're going to send an army looking for you.'

Tom stared at me, before looking away, clearly troubled. Removing his backpack too, along with his SA80, he placed both carefully on a cream velvet padded armchair in the corner, before moving back to the window. He watched the street outside for a few seconds in silence, picking anxiously at the skin around his fingernails.

'Do you remember when I told you how long I'd been on Earth?' he said.

I nodded, recalling how shocked I'd been to hear how he'd already been here for fifty years. How Tom had been the seventh human life he'd stolen. That was it. Lucky number seven.

'I arrived after the embryo stages of the experiment. Our First Wave of missions to infiltrate life here on your planet. Things were good at first. Perfect, even. We couldn't quite believe how easy it all was.' He smiled thinly, coldly, almost to himself. 'We never once for a moment believed it would be a problem. The human race seemed so... so arrogant. So quick to turn on each other. Content to encourage division and wage wars. The whole experiment seemed fool-proof.'

'But it wasn't? Why not? What happened?' I said.

'Humanity happened. Your DNA happened,' he said, 'Something happened when we came here. In our efforts to clone you, we became you. We didn't just claim a life, we absorbed it. We absorbed thoughts and emotions. We absorbed connections and relationships and everything about you that makes you what you are. There we were, assuming we were the superior species. The stronger species. The smarter species. We have the technology, after all. We are the hive. We have conquered countless worlds. Torn apart more civilisations than you can even imagine exist. There was nothing you had that we desired for ourselves, apart from your submission and your destruction.'

'Why?' I gasped. 'Why do you hate us so much?'

'It wasn't about hatred, not at the beginning. It was about power and dominion. There were no emotions attached to it whatsoever. That changed quite quickly when we realised everything was starting to go wrong.'

'No offence, but considering how the human race have been all but wiped out, and our world and everything we know has been destroyed, I fail to see what's gone wrong here? Seems to me the great Grey plan to conquer has been a roaring success.'

'A success?' Tom scoffed; his eyes scornful. 'Oh Evie, you really have no idea.' Rubbing his palm over his short beard, he moved over to the other window. I shifted on the bed, twisting around and pulling my leg up underneath me so I could see him.

'No, I guess I really don't. We practically gave you the Earth ourselves,' I said. 'We did all the work for you. You're right, there's nothing we love more than a war and we gave you that. We crippled ourselves before the Final Wave, and all you had to do was pick at the carcass of what was left. Tell me what about all this hasn't been successful?'

'We're still here, aren't we?' he said, almost spitting out the words. 'You only have to look outside this window to see that. Do you really think we like to spend this much time on a world that isn't our own? We're not caretakers, Evie. We destroy. We conquer. We do what we set out to do, and we leave. We don't stick around.'

'Then why are they still here?'

'Because everything went wrong, that's why. All our plans. All our efforts. Everything... changed.'

I didn't understand any of this. They'd destroyed our world. They'd won. And yet, here he was, claiming that wasn't the case. 'What changed?' I said.

'We did. We changed. Or at least, some of us did.'

Staring out at the street again, when he spoke, his voice took on an almost haunted tone.

'The initial experiments were a success. They were. Targets were identified and claimed. The transition was seamless. It was decided that we would commence with the Second Wave, despatching a much higher number of subjects across different countries and start really constructing the network. This time, it didn't go so well. Within weeks we started getting reports that something wasn't right, and it wasn't just an isolated incident. One subject in Rio complained of constant sickness, said they couldn't think straight or focus. Another in Mumbai reported long periods of confusion. At first, we thought it might be some kind of virus, something humans carried that we hadn't anticipated.'

'But it wasn't a virus?'

'No,' he said. 'Not a virus, although the hive might like to refer to it as such. More and more cases of similar reports started to occur. Don't get me wrong, for the most part, the plan was successful, and we continued to feed into it, with more subjects, more targets, but the ones that were experiencing problems were a concern. Then the unthinkable happened. We had our first disconnection.'

I couldn't help it. I was fascinated. Hooked. I wondered if there was a human alive apart from me that knew this story.

'Someone disconnected from the hive,' I murmured, and he nodded. 'And that was the first one on Earth?'

Tom snorted softly. 'Evie, it was the first one ever. Thousands of years of superior evolution. Countless worlds invaded and conquered. Not a single subject had disconnected. Not until we came here. And what was almost as shocking as the disconnection itself, was that we never saw it coming. This particular subject – Subject Zero – never reported a single problem. In fact, we would have cited him as a success story. He was in the military, a very key placement for us. A lot of power, a lot of influence. Then, suddenly...' He snapped his fingers. 'Gone. The disconnection hit us hard. Imagine the devastation of an earthquake as it tears through your world and then the aftershocks constantly shaking foundations. That's what it did to us. We all felt it. The pain was immeasurable.'

I said nothing, not trusting myself not to bite back with something spiteful, as the deliciously sadistic kick of pleasure rose at the thought of the hive being in agony.

'The plan then became two-fold,' he continued. 'We sent a squadron down to hunt Zero and we doubled our efforts with the Second Wave. It was a show of strength, our way of fighting back and reasserting our power. That was when I first came to be here.'

My eyes narrowed. 'As part of the Second Wave or the hunting party?'

Tom stared me down. 'I am not a skrycha, Evie. I claimed my assigned target and took my place here.'

'And what happened to Zero? Was he found?'

'Not without a great deal of difficulty. He was military, after all. He knew how to hide, how to run, how to fight. And he put up one Hell of a fight.' Tom shot me a tight half-smile. 'His mistake – and the one thing we defectors learned to do after Zero – was that he never switched targets. We might not have been connected to him, but we knew his identity, and because of that, we were able to locate him after he was spotted in Kabul. The skrycha tracked him and his family down to a house on the outskirts of the Surobi district.'

Dread seeped into the base of my stomach, thick and heavy. 'They killed them, didn't they?'

Tom's face changed, a deep sadness dragging on his features. 'No. He did. Zero killed his human wife and child and then turned the gun on himself. He knew the skrycha would kill them, and he didn't want to give them that victory, so he did it himself and when he knew that the hive would force him to reconnect, he denied them that too.'

I looked sharply at him. 'Wait,' I said, 'so you're saying, after all that, there was to be no torture, no execution, the hive were just going to make Zero reconnect to them?'

'Don't you get it? To reconnect is torture,' Tom replied, anger darkening his brow. 'To reconnect is death. It's death to who you have become. It's death to who you are. You would re-join the hive with no recollection of the life you had or the people you loved.'

I was floored by the anger and pain in his voice. Each word seemed to tear him apart, as if he himself had been Zero, as if he knew exactly what agony it would be to lose his human life. Each word tore me apart too, because I sensed the truth in what he was saying, and I hated that. I hated that he'd made me feel an ounce of sympathy for him, especially when I'd been convinced all along that this was all an act. I still wasn't convinced by him, but this... this felt almost genuine.

'So, this thing that happened to Zero, started happening to others too?'

Tom seemed to have pulled himself together, the sadness from before cast aside, but I could see the tension in the way he stood, stone-stiff and rigid. He nodded.

'Many among us haven't been affected at all,' he said, staring over at the gilded-framed mirror over the dresser. I realised he could see his reflection from where he was standing. Who did he see? Grey or human? Alien or Tom?

'After Zero, things just got worse,' he continued. 'The truth is, humanity has been by far our hardest challenge and we never once expected it. We never saw it coming.'

I stared at him. 'Rico said something similar that day in the Gallery. He said, you'd been here too long?'

'And he was telling the truth. He might have been a twisted fuck-up, but he was right about what was happening to us. The longer we have remained here, the worse it has become. There have even been some who have suffered terrible memory loss. And I mean, complete memory loss of who and what they really were. They really believed they were the human target they had claimed. Can you imagine what that must be like? To forget you weren't even human? To forget that you were another species entirely, one that was here to wipe out everyone you had come to care for and love?'

I held his gaze for as long as I could bear, before glancing away. The truth was I couldn't imagine what it must be like. I couldn't marry any of what he said with the Greys. To me, they were cold-hearted monsters who just wanted humanity wiped out, and yet according to Tom, some of them didn't want the same? My skin prickled and I knew he was still looking at me.

'You find it difficult, don't you?' he said. 'To believe we might be capable of emotional attachments? Feelings?'

I said nothing and refused to look his way. I couldn't.

'You'd be right, if you did think that,' he said.

I turned to face him again, surprised at his admission.

'We weren't capable,' he explained. 'Not until we came here. We've transitioned into more species than you could ever imagine existed, but none have ever affected us in the way you humans do. You are unique. You are complex in ways we never expected.'

Silence settled again on the room, heavy and pregnant with unspoken words. Instead, my mind ticked over with everything he had said, a constant barrage of thoughts and questions. I raised my hand to my head, raking my fingers through my hair, pausing when I saw Tom staring, his eyes wide, his mouth open.

'You're hurt,' he said. 'Why didn't you say something?'

'Oh, yeah,' I said absently, glancing down at the underside of my arms where I'd scraped them as I'd fallen down the rubble barricade on Queen Street. They still stung, but I'd been so busy with my plan to kill him and then our almost run-in with the Grey and now listening to his story, that I'd forgotten. As if on cue, they began to burn a little. 'It's nothing. Just a graze.'

'It doesn't look like just a graze,' he said, his tone reproachful as if scolding one of his pupils at school. 'Wait...' He walked briskly over to the bathroom and disappeared inside. When he came back out, he was carrying a small white face cloth. 'Compliments of the hotel,' he said, before grabbing a bottle of water from the side pocket on his backpack and pouring it onto the cloth.

'It's really fine,' I said, drawing back as he knelt down in front of me and went to grab my arms.

Tom looked up at me, a momentary flicker of hurt in his eyes, before reaching for me again. This time, I relented, letting him dab gently at the burning skin. I winced, but even I had to admit the coolness of the damp cloth on my arms felt good. He didn't look at me the whole time, in fact, he seemed like he was making a concerted effort not to look at me, and instead concentrated on smoothing the cloth over my skin, each movement soft and slow.

I, on the other hand, found it hard to drag my eyes away and while he wasn't looking at me, I took the opportunity to study his face. I was looking for a flaw, something, anything, that wasn't Tom, but there was nothing. There wasn't a single detail that wasn't him.

'What happened to you?' I said, noting how he paused for a second, his brow creasing. 'You said that when you took Tom, you were on the run. You were being hunted.'

'Yes,' he said, swallowing, resuming his slow, gentle dabs with the cloth.

'So, the same thing that happened to Zero and the others, began to happen to you too? Even before you became Tom?'

He nodded, working his way to the end of the graze, before dousing the cloth in more water and starting on the other arm.

'When the reports first started coming back, it was a concern, but I believed we would overcome it. We are the hive, after all. We are superior. Infallible. But then the mess with Zero happened and... it was like someone flipped a switch in here.' He tapped at his forehead. 'It started with questions. So many questions. Turns out you humans question everything. We're not used to that, we obey without dissent, we obey without even thinking about it, because we are the hive and whatever the hive wants, is what we want.'

'Until you become human?'

'Yes,' he replied, wetting his lips. 'I couldn't stop questioning. Thinking. Feeling.' He glanced at me. 'Turns out you humans don't stop feeling either. Each day it got worse and each day I knew I was getting one step closer to being the next Zero.'

'You had six targets before Tom. When did it start going wrong? Which target was the one?'

'The first.'

My eyes widened. 'The first?'

'So much for being infallible, huh?' He smiled but still wouldn't meet my eyes.

'You're ashamed,' I said. 'You're ashamed of what you've become.'

'No,' he shot back, a sharp firmness in his tone. 'No, I'm not, I would never...'

Breaking off, he left the cloth on my arm and pulled away, sitting back on his heels. He seemed smaller somehow, defeated and I couldn't help but see how lost and alone he looked then, this strange creature that was neither one thing nor the other. I wondered if that's what he'd seen in the mirror, a being that was stuck between two species, torn between two worlds and belonging to neither.

Grabbing the bottle of water, he took a sip, before lifting his head. His eyes met mine. Firm. Challenging.

'I'm not ashamed of what I've become, Evie,' he said. 'I should be. I should detest this flesh, this body. I should hate every second because that is what the hive wants us to feel. Because we are the hive and you are nothing but the chattel. The target. The conquered. But I feel none of those things. Each day I find myself moving farther and farther away from everything I ever knew and the life I once had. Some days, I can barely even remember it at all. It's confusing and... terrifying sometimes, but I'm notashamed of what I've become.'

He faltered, looking down again at my arms, while chewing broodingly on his lip. 'The only thing I'm ashamed of is what my becoming has done to you. I'm ashamed my actions have caused you pain. I hate that when you look at me, you don't see him, you only see what I did.'

My chest tightened. He was wrong. I did see Tom. I couldn't help it. There was so much to see that was Tom. I exhaled slowly, trying to ignore why that bothered me so much, just as it bothered me that he sounded so genuine. 'What about the others you took after the first target?

'They were only temporary. Plan B...' He gave a wry smile. 'And C, D, E, and F. Initially, I think I was just trying to prove that the first one was a glitch in the system. What happened to Zero couldn't possibly happen to me? I made an excuse and engineered it so I had no choice but to switch targets, but the truth was I'd already failed the mission.'

'Is that how you see it? A failure?' I said, frowning. 'No offence, but that doesn't sound so much like the alien Che Guevara to me. It sounds like someone who thinks he failed the hive and that only comes if you still feel some loyalty to the cause.'

Tom's face darkened. 'Do you think it's that easy to cast off something so engrained? My whole existence had been devoted to advancing the dominion of my species. The hive was everything. It's impossible to exist like that and then suddenly start doubting everything you have ever known, without feeling like you have failed. And anyway, those were the early days and things were different before...'

I stiffened, sensing what he'd been about to say.

Before Tom.

Why did everything feel like it came down to that? Before Tom. After Tom. It hit me then – acutely, sharply – that the Grey and I were the same in how our existence could be categorised into these two distinct time periods, except in his after Tom, Tom had still been alive whereas in mine, Tom had been lost to me since the Grey had claimed him.

Until now. Until this.

'He saved me. Tom saved me,' he said. 'And I know you won't want to hear this, but I am glad it was him. I'm glad he was the one. He's a good man. I feel it.'

'Yes,' I said, my voice cracking. 'I know.'

Despite his intentions, it did hurt. It hurt so bloody much. I closed my eyes, as if not being able to see his face would stop the pain from clawing at my heart.

When I opened them again, his head was tilted slightly to one side as he studied me. Tom had always had a way of looking at me that sent my nerve-endings into overdrive. My mouth felt dry and I was aching to ask him for the water bottle in his hands.

'What else do you feel?' I asked instead. 'What else do you think about him?'

'You really want to know?' he replied, his expression wary.

'Yes.' And I did. Strangely, I really did.

Tom swallowed, his gaze breaking from mine, as he seemed to focus on something else. He blinked. Once. Slowly. Then, he smiled.

'I feel... I think... he is resourceful. Far more than I would ever have given him credit for. He adapts quickly to every situation. He is not a soldier. What he now knows about fighting, I have taught him, but he has a warrior's heart and he is brave. He is... always thinking.' He laughed softly and touched a finger to his temple. 'Doesn't stop thinking actually. Or feeling. He's compassionate. Hugely compassionate. Now that is something I've struggled with, because we are not known for our compassion.'

He shrugged and raised a brow, picking at the label on the bottle with his thumbs.

'Passionate.'

He paused, swallowing again.

'He loves deeply. He wants people to be happy. Sometimes insecure. He worries he's not good enough or deserving enough of good things. He has an interesting way of looking at the world. The way he sees things, the way he sees people. Even now, even after everything that has happened, he still has faith in humanity. He has hope. I like that about him.'

My gaze flickered over his face. Tom's face. His face.

'I like that about him too,' I whispered.

His eyes met mine and I couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. All I could hear and feel was the low, constant thrum of my heartbeat, the warm, welcoming vibration of it in my chest. The tingle in my scalp cascading down my neck, gentle kisses down my spine. I clutched the edge of the bed, as if I was elevated so high that my feet couldn't even reach the floor.

Why was I suddenly so scared I might fall?

'Tom...' I began, but before I could say anymore, he clambered quickly up from the floor and moved back to the window, sniffing and rubbing the back of his hand across his mouth. He was trying not to look at me once more, I could tell. He looked lost and alone again, and it struck me just how much I hated to see that. I didn't want him to feel alone.

'What's happening out there?' I asked, trying to coax him back into conversation.

I'd missed his voice. Our chats. The way he looked at me.

'It's thinned out,' he said, his tone distant. 'They'll have broken into small squadrons, to cover more ground.'

'Tom...' I tried again.

'You look exhausted. You should try and get some sleep while you can,' he said. 'It's okay, I'll keep watch.'

He smiled softly, as if to reassure me, but I knew that the conversation was over. A small pang of sadness tolled in my chest, but I didn't want to push him. Without another word, I crawled up the bed, and grabbed one of the pillows. Shaking it to remove any dust, I turned it over and laid my head down. It was luxuriously plump, and I felt myself sink into it, my body giving in to how damn good it was to lay on a decent bed for a change.

I lay there for a while, curled up on my side, watching him as he stood guard.

For the first time since he'd invaded my life all over again, the thought of being asleep knowing that he was here didn't seem to bother me at all and instead, felt strangely comforting.

Familiar. Good. Normal.

As dusk slowly settled in, and the room darkened, I heard Tom sigh deeply, contently, and I wrapped myself in the warmth of the sound and took it down with me into slumber.