Alien- Chestburster Maturing

  I can’t stop thinking about the thing I saw slide out of Kora’s mother when the creature ripped her open. It had been small, and pale, and not ready to survive in the world yet, but it had been close to being ready—I’d seen that closeness in the angle of its long limbs and the slope of its eyeless head, in the way it had twitched and thrashed before going finally, lifelessly still. It was so close to being ready, but there was no way it had been inside her for more than a few hours. These things don’t just reproduce fast, they mature fast, and that means we’re not running out of time: we are out of time.

Echo, Chapter 22