was, so far away in the distant west that it seemed to shimmer above a mirage, floating, hovering over the
desert like a dark cloud. Every step we’d walked had been in the wrong direction. The last marker was
farther to the west than we’d come in all our journeying.
“Impossible,” I whispered again.
Melanie was frozen in my head, unthinking, blank, trying desperately to reject this new comprehension. I
waited for her, my eyes tracing the undeniably familiar shapes, until the sudden weight of her acceptance
and grief knocked me to my knees. Her silent keen of defeat echoed in my head and added one more
layer to the pain. My breathing turned ragged—a soundless, tearless sobbing. The sun crept up my back;
its heat soaked deep into the darkness of my hair.
And finally, not really sure why I did it, I started walking forward. I knew only this: that it was me who
moved and no one else. Melanie was so small in my brain—a tiny capsule of pain wrapped tightly in on
her herself. There was no help from her.
My footsteps were a slowcrunch, crunch across the brittle ground.
“He was just a deluded old lunatic, after all,” I murmured to myself. A strange shudder rocked my chest,
and a hoarse coughing ripped its way up my throat. The stream of gravelly coughs rattled on, but it
wasn’t until I felt my eyes pricking for tears that couldn’t come that I realized I was laughing.
“There was… never… ever… anything out here!” I gasped between spasms of hysteria. I staggered
forward as though I were drunk, my footprints trailing unevenly behind me.
No.Melanie uncurled from her misery to defend the faith she still clung to.I got it wrong or something.
My fault.
I laughed at her now. The sound was sucked away by the scorching wind.
Wait, wait,she thought, trying to pull my attention from the joke of it all.You don’t think… I mean, do
you think that maybe theytried this?
Her unexpected fear caught me midlaugh. I choked on the hot air, my chest throbbing from my fit of
morbid hysteria. By the time I could breathe again, all trace of my black humor was gone. Instinctively,
my eyes swept the desert void, looking for some evidence that I was not the first to waste my life this
way. The plain was impossibly vast, but I couldn’t halt my frantic search for… remains.
No, of course not.Melanie was already comforting herself.Jared’s too smart. He would never come
out here unprepared like we did. He’d never put Jamie in danger.
I’m sure you’re right,I told her, wanting to believe it as much as she did.I’m sure no one else in the
whole universe could be this stupid. Besides, he probably never came to look. He probably never
figured it out. Wish you hadn’t.
My feet kept moving. I was barely aware of the action. It meant so little in the face of the distance
ahead. And even if we were magically transported to the very base of the mesa, what then? I was
absolutely positive there was nothing there. No one waited at the mesa to save us.
“We’re going to die,” I said. I was surprised that there was no fear in my rasping voice. This was just a
fact like any other. The sun is hot. The desert is dry. We are going to die.
Yes.She was calm, too. This, death, was easier to accept than that our efforts had been guided by
insanity.
“That doesn’t bother you?”
She thought for a moment before answering.
I counted nineteen steps before I could respond. Nineteen sluggish, futile crunches across the sand.
“Then what am I dying for?” I wondered, the pricking feeling returning in my desiccated tear ducts. “I
guess it’s because I lost, then, right? Is that why?”
I counted thirty-four crunches before she had an answer to my question.
No,she thought slowly.It doesn’t feel that way to me. I think… Well, I think that maybe… you’re
dying to be human. There was almost a smile in her thought as she heard the silly double meaning to the
phrase.After all the planets and all the hosts you’ve left behind, you’ve finally found the place and
the body you’d die for. I think you’ve found your home, Wanderer.
Ten crunches.
I didn’t have the energy to open my lips anymore.Too bad I didn’t get to stay here longer, then.
I wasn’t sure about her answer. Maybe she was trying to make me feel better. A sop for dragging her
out here to die. She had won; she had never disappeared.
My steps began to falter. My muscles screamed out to me for mercy, as if I had any means to soothe
them. I think I would have stopped right there, but Melanie was, as always, tougher than I.
I could feel her now, not just in my head but in my limbs. My stride lengthened; the path I made was
straighter. By sheer force of will, she dragged my half-dead carcass toward the impossible goal.
There was an unexpected joy to the pointless struggle. Just as I could feel her, she could feel my body.
Our body, now; my weakness ceded control to her. She gloried in the freedom of moving our arms and
legs forward, no matter how useless such a motion was. It was bliss simply because shecould again.
Even the pain of the slow death we had begun dimmed in comparison.
What do you think is out there?she asked me as we marched on toward the end.What will you see,
after we’re dead?
Nothing.The word was empty and hard and sure.There’s a reason we call it the finaldeath.
The souls have no belief in an afterlife?
We have so many lives. Anything more would be… too much to expect. We die a little death every
time we leave a host. We live again in another. When I die here, that will be the end.
There was a long pause while our feet moved more and more slowly.
What about you?I finally asked.Do you still believe in something more, even after all of this? My
thoughts raked over her memories of the end of the human world.
It seems like there are some things thatcan’tdie.
Would it be a relief to be free of it? I wasn’t sure. It felt like it was part of who I was now.
We only lasted a few hours. Even Melanie’s tremendous strength of mind could ask no more than that of
our failing body. We could barely see. We couldn’t seem to find the oxygen in the dry air we sucked in
and spit back out. The pain brought rough whimpers breaking through our lips.
You’ve never had itthisbad, I teased her feebly as we staggered toward a dried stick of a tree standing
a few feet taller than the low brush. We wanted to get to the thin streaks of shade before we fell.
No,she agreed.Never this bad.
We attained our purpose. The dead tree threw its cobwebby shadow over us, and our legs fell out from
under us. We sprawled forward, never wanting the sun on our face again. Our head turned to the side on
its own, searching for the burning air. We stared at the dust inches from our nose and listened to the
gasping of our breath.
After a time, long or short we didn’t know, we closed our eyes. Our lids were red and bright inside. We
couldn’t feel the faint web of shade; maybe it no longer touched us.
How long?I asked her.
I don’t know, I’ve never died before.
An hour? More?
Your guess is as good as mine.
Where’s a coyote when you really need one?
Maybe we’ll get lucky… escaped claw beast or something…Her thought trailed off incoherently.
That was our last conversation. It was too hard to concentrate enough to form words. There was more
pain than we thought there should be. All the muscles in our body rioted, cramping and spasming as they
fought death.
We didn’t fight. We drifted and waited, our thoughts dipping in and out of memories without a pattern.
While we were still lucid, we hummed ourselves a lullaby in our head. It was the one we’d used to
comfort Jamie when the ground was too hard, or the air was too cold, or the fear was too great to sleep.
We felt his head press into the hollow just below our shoulder and the shape of his back under our arm.
And then it seemed that it wasour head cradled against a broader shoulder, and a new lullaby comforted
us.
Our lids turned black, but not with death. Night had fallen, and this made us sad. Without the heat of
day, we would probably last longer.
It was dark and silent for a timeless space. Then there was a sound.
Something shook us, pulled our numb arms, dragged at them. We couldn’t form the words to wish that it
would be quick now, but that was our hope. We waited for the cut of teeth. Instead, the dragging turned
to pushing, and we felt our face roll toward the sky.
It poured over our face—wet, cool, and impossible. It dribbled over our eyes, washing the grit from
them. Our eyes fluttered, blinking against the dripping.
We did not care about the grit in our eyes. Our chin arched up, desperately searching, our mouth
opening and closing with blind, pathetic weakness, like a newly hatched bird.
We thought we heard a sigh.
And then the water flowed into our mouth, and we gulped at it and choked on it. The water vanished
while we choked, and our weak hands grasped out for it. A flat, heavy thumping pounded our back until
we could breathe. Our hands kept clutching the air, looking for the water.
We definitely heard a sigh this time.
Something pressed to our cracked lips, and the water flowed again. We guzzled, careful not to inhale it
this time. Not that we cared if we choked, but we did not want the water taken away again.
We drank until our belly stretched and ached. The water trickled to a stop, and we cried out hoarsely in
protest. Another rim was pressed to our lips, and we gulped frantically until it was empty, too.
Our stomach would explode with another mouthful, yet we blinked and tried to focus, to see if we could
find more. It was too dark; we could not see a single star. And then we blinked again and realized that
the darkness was much closer than the sky. A figure hovered over us, blacker than the night.
There was a low sound of fabric rubbing against itself and sand shifting under a heel. The figure leaned
away, and we heard a sharp rip—the sound of a zipper, deafening in the absolute stillness of the night.
Like a blade, light cut into our eyes. We moaned at the pain of it, and our hand flew up to cover our
closed eyes. Even behind our lids, the light was too bright. The light disappeared, and we felt the breath
of the next sigh hit our face.
We opened our eyes carefully, more blind than before. Whoever faced us sat very still and said nothing.
We began to feel the tension of the moment, but it felt far away, outside ourself. It was hard to care
about anything but the water in our belly and where we could find more. We tried to concentrate, to see
what had rescued us.
The first thing we could make out, after minutes of blinking and squinting, was the thick whiteness that
fell from the dark face, a million splinters of pale in the night. When we grasped that this was a
beard—like Santa Claus, we thought chaotically—the other pieces of the face were supplied by our
memory. Everything fit into place: the big cleft-tipped nose, the wide cheekbones, the thick white brows,
the eyes set deep into the wrinkled fabric of skin. Though we could see only hints of each feature, we
knew how light would expose them.
“Uncle Jeb,” we croaked in surprise. “You found us.”
“Well, now,” he said, and his gruff voice brought back a hundred memories. “Well, now, here’s a
pickle.”
CHAPTER 13
Sentenced
Are they here?” We choked out the words—they burst from us like the water in our lungs had, expelled.
After water, this question was all that mattered. “Did they make it?”
Uncle Jeb’s face was impossible to read in the darkness. “Who?” he asked.
“Jamie, Jared!” Our whisper burned like a shout. “Jared was with Jamie. Our brother! Are they here?
Did they come? Did you find them, too?”
There was barely a pause.
“No.” His answer was forceful, and there was no pity in it, no feeling at all.
“No,” we whispered. We were not echoing him, we were protesting against getting our life back. What
was the point? We closed our eyes again and listened to the pain in our body. We let that drown out the
pain in our mind.
“Look,” Uncle Jeb said after a moment. “I, uh, have something to take care of. You rest for a bit, and
I’ll be back for you.”
We didn’t hear the meaning in his words, just the sounds. Our eyes stayed closed. His footsteps
crunched quietly away from us. We couldn’t tell which direction he went. We didn’t care anyway.
They were gone. There was no way to find them, no hope. Jared and Jamie had disappeared, something
they knew well how to do, and we would never see them again.
The water and the cooler night air were making us lucid, something we did not want. We rolled over, to
bury our face against the sand again. We were so tired, past the point of exhaustion and into some
deeper, more painful state. Surely we could sleep. All we had to do was not think. We could do that.
We did.
When we woke, it was still night, but dawn was threatening on the eastern horizon—the mountains were
lined with dull red. Our mouth tasted of dust, and at first we were sure that we had dreamed Uncle Jeb’s
appearance. Of course we had.
Our head was clearer this morning, and we noticed quickly the strange shape near our right
cheek—something that was not a rock or a cactus. We touched it, and it was hard and smooth. We
nudged it, and the delicious sound of sloshing water came from inside.
Uncle Jeb was real, and he’d left us a canteen.
Our fingers were stiff and clumsy as we twisted the cap from the top of the canteen. It wasn’t all the way
full, but there was enough water to stretch the walls of our belly again—it must have shrunk. We drank it
all; we were done with rationing.
We dropped the metal canteen to the sand, where it made a dull thud in the predawn silence. We felt
wide awake now. We sighed, preferring unconsciousness, and let our head fall into our hands. What
now?
“Why did you give it water, Jeb?” an angry voice demanded, close behind our back.
We whirled, twisting onto our knees. What we saw made our heart falter and our awareness splinter
apart.
There were eight humans half-circled around where I knelt under the tree. There was no question they
were humans, all of them. I’d never seen faces contorted into such expressions—not on my kind. These
lips twisted with hatred, pulled back over clenched teeth like wild animals. These brows pulled low over
