hair—when the sound changed. The grinding steps that I barely heard anymore turned to echoes ahead
of me. Jeb’s feet still crunched against the sand like mine, but someone in front of us had reached a new
terrain.
“Careful, now,” Jeb warned me. “Watch your head.”
I hesitated, not sure what I was watching for, or how to watch with no eyes. His hand left my back and
pressed down on my head, telling me to duck. I bent forward. My neck was stiff.
He guided me forward again, and I heard our footsteps make the same echoing sound. The ground
didn’t give like sand, didn’t feel loose like rock. It was flat and solid beneath my feet.
The sun was gone—I could no longer feel it burn my skin or scorch my hair.
I took another step, and a new air touched my face. It was not a breeze. This was stagnant—Imoved
intoit. The dry desert wind was gone. This air was still and cooler. There was the faintest hint of moisture
to it, a mustiness that I could both smell and taste.
There were so many questions in my mind, and in Melanie’s. She wanted to ask hers, but I kept silent.
There was nothing either of us could say that would help us now.
“Okay, you can straighten up,” Jeb told me.
I raised my head slowly.
Even with the blindfold, I could tell that there was no light. It was utterly black around the edges of the
bandanna. I could hear the others behind me, shuffling their feet impatiently, waiting for us to move
forward.
“This way,” Jeb said, and he was guiding me again. Our footsteps echoed back from close by—the
space we were in must have been quite small. I found myself ducking my head instinctively.
We took another turn, and then the floor started to climb upward. My legs were so numb and wooden
that as the path got steeper, Jeb had to half drag me up the incline. The air got mustier and moister the
farther we went, but the blackness didn’t change. The only sounds were our footsteps and their nearby
echoes.
The pathway flattened out and began to turn and twist like a serpent.
Finally, finally, there was a brightness around the top and bottom of my blindfold. I wished that it would
slip, as I was too frightened to pull it off myself. It seemed to me that I wouldn’t be so terrified if I could
justsee where I was and who was with me.
With the light came noise. Strange noise, a low murmuring babble. It sounded almost like a waterfall.
The babble got louder as we moved forward, and the closer it got, the less it sounded like water. It was
too varied, low and high pitches mingling and echoing. If it had not been so discordant, it might have
sounded like an uglier version of the constant music I’d heard and sung on the Singing World. The
darkness of the blindfold suited that memory, the memory of blindness.
Melanie understood the cacophony before I did. I’d never heard the sound because I’d never been with
humans before.
It’s an argument,she realized.It sounds like so many people arguing.
She was drawn by the sound. Were there more people here, then? That there were even eight had
surprised us both. What was this place?
Hands touched the back of my neck, and I shied away from them.
“Easy now,” Jeb said. He pulled the blindfold off my eyes.
I blinked slowly, and the shadows around me settled into shapes I could understand: rough, uneven
walls; a pocked ceiling; a worn, dusty floor. We were underground somewhere in a natural cave
formation. We couldn’t be that deep. I thought we’d hiked upward longer than we’d slid downward.
The rock walls and ceiling were a dark purpley brown, and they were riddled with shallow holes like
Swiss cheese. The edges of the lower holes were worn down, but over my head the circles were more
defined, and their rims looked sharp.
The light came from a round hole ahead of us, its shape not unlike the holes that peppered the cavern,
but larger. This was an entrance, a doorway to a brighter place. Melanie was eager, fascinated by the
concept of more humans. I held back, suddenly worried that blindness might be better than sight.
Jeb sighed. “Sorry,” he muttered, so low that I was certainly the only one to hear.
I tried to swallow and could not. My head started to spin, but that might have been from hunger. My
The tunnel opened into a chamber so vast that at first I couldn’t accept what my eyes told me. The
ceiling was too bright and too high—it was like an artificial sky. I tried to see what brightened it, but it
sent down sharp lances of light that hurt my eyes.
I was expecting the babble to get louder, but it was abruptly dead quiet in the huge cavern.
The floor was dim compared to the brilliant ceiling so far above. It took a moment for my eyes to make
sense of all the shapes.
A crowd. There was no other word for it—there was a crowd of humans standing stock-still and silent,
all staring at me with the same burning, hate-filled expressions I’d seen at dawn.
Melanie was too stunned to do anything more than count. Ten, fifteen, twenty… twenty-five, twenty-six,
twenty-seven…
I didn’t care how many there were. I tried to tell her how little it mattered. It wouldn’t take twenty of
them to kill me. To kill us. I tried to make her see how precarious our position was, but she was beyond
my warnings at the moment, lost in this human world she’d never dreamed was here.
One man stepped forward from the crowd, and my eyes darted first to his hands, looking for the
weapon they would carry. His hands were clenched in fists but empty of any other threat. My eyes,
adjusting to the dazzling light, made out the sun-gilded tint of his skin and then recognized it.
Choking on the sudden hope that dizzied me, I lifted my eyes to the man’s face.
CHAPTER 14
Disputed
It was too much for both of us, seeing him here, now, after already accepting that we’d never see him
again, after believing that we’d lost him forever. It froze me solid, made me unable to react. I wanted to
look at Uncle Jeb, to understand his heartbreaking answer in the desert, but I couldn’t move my eyes. I
stared at Jared’s face, uncomprehending.
Melanie reacted differently.
“Jared,” she cried; through my damaged throat the sound was just a croak.
She jerked me forward, much the same way as she had in the desert, assuming control of my frozen
body. The only difference was that this time, it was by force.
I wasn’t able to stop her fast enough.
She lurched forward, raising my arms to reach out for him. I screamed a warning at her in my head, but
she wasn’t listening to me. She was barely aware that I was even there.
No one tried to stop her as she staggered toward him. No one but me. She was within inches of
touching him, and still she didn’t see what I saw. She didn’t see how his face had changed in the long
months of separation, how it had hardened, how the lines pulled in different directions now. She didn’t
His reach was longer than mine.
Before Melanie could make my fingers touch him, his arm shot out and the back of his hand smashed
into the side of my face. The blow was so hard that my feet left the ground before my head slammed into
the rock floor. I heard the rest of my body hit the floor with dull thumps, but I didn’t feel it. My eyes
rolled back in my head, and a ringing sound shimmered in my ears. I fought the dizziness that threatened
to spin me unconscious.
Stupid, stupid,I whimpered at her.I toldyou not to do that!
Jared’s here, Jared’s alive, Jared’s here.She was incoherent, chanting the words like they were lyrics
to a song.
I tried to focus my eyes, but the strange ceiling was blinding. I twisted my head away from the light and
then swallowed a sob as the motion sent daggers of agony through the side of my face.
I could barely handle the pain of this one spontaneous blow. What hope did I have of enduring an
intensive, calculated onslaught?
There was a shuffle of feet beside me; my eyes moved instinctively to find the threat, and I saw Uncle
Jeb standing over me. He had one hand half stretched out toward me, but he hesitated, looking away. I
raised my head an inch, stifling another moan, to see what he saw.
Jared was walking toward us, and his face was the same as those of the barbarians in the desert—only it
was beautiful rather than frightening in its fury. My heart faltered and then beat unevenly, and I wanted to
laugh at myself. Did it matter that he was beautiful, that I loved him, when he was going to kill me?
I stared at the murder in his expression and tried to hope that rage would win out over expediency, but a
true death wish evaded me.
Jeb and Jared locked eyes for a long moment. Jared’s jaw clenched and unclenched, but Jeb’s face was
calm. The silent confrontation ended when Jared suddenly exhaled in an angry gust and took a step back.
Jeb reached down for my hand and put his other arm around my back to pull me up. My head whirled
and ached; my stomach heaved. If it hadn’t been empty for days, I might have thrown up. It was like my
feet weren’t touching the ground. I wobbled and pitched forward. Jeb steadied me and then gripped my
elbow to keep me standing.
Jared watched all this with a teeth-baring grimace. Like an idiot, Melanie struggled to move toward him
again. But I was over the shock of seeing him here and less stupid than she was now. She wouldn’t
break through again. I locked her away behind every bar I could create in my head.
Just be quiet. Can’t you see how he loathes me? Anything you say will make it worse. We’re
dead.
But Jared’s alive, Jared’s here,she crooned.
My eyes darted around the mob of humans—every one of them an adult, no smaller, younger figure
among them. My heart ached at the absence, and Melanie fought to voice the question. I hushed her
firmly. There wasn’t anything to see here, nothing but anger and hatred on strangers’ faces, or the anger
and hatred on Jared’s face.
Until another man pushed his way through the whispering throng. He was built slim and tall, his skeletal
structure more obvious under his skin than most. His hair was washed out, either pale brown or a dark,
nondescript blond. Like his bland hair and his long body, his features were mild and thin. There was no
anger in his face, which was why it held my eye.
The others made way for this apparently unassuming man as if he had some status among them. Only
Jared didn’t defer to him; he held his ground, staring only at me. The tall man stepped around him, not
seeming to notice the obstacle in his path any more than he would a pile of rock.
“Okay, okay,” he said in an oddly cheery voice as he circled Jared and came to face me. “I’m here.
What have we got?”
It was Aunt Maggie who answered him, appearing at his elbow.
“Jeb found it in the desert. Used to be our niece Melanie. It seemed to be following the directions he
gave her.” She flashed a dirty look at Jeb.
“Mm-hm,” the tall, bony man murmured, his eyes appraising me curiously. It was strange, that appraisal.
He looked as if he liked what he saw. I couldn’t fathom why he would.
My gaze shied away from his, to another woman—a young woman who peered around his side, her
hand resting on his arm—my eyes drawn by her vivid hair.
Sharon!Melanie cried.
Melanie’s cousin saw the recognition in my eyes, and her face hardened.
I pushed Melanie roughly to the back of my head.Shhh!
“Mm-hm,” the tall man said again, nodding. He reached one hand out to my face and seemed surprised
when I recoiled from it, flinching into Jeb’s side.
“It’s okay,” the tall man said, smiling a little in encouragement. “I won’t hurt you.”
He reached toward my face again. I shrunk into Jeb’s side like before, but Jeb flexed his arm and
nudged me forward. The tall man touched my jaw below my ear, his fingers gentler than I expected, and
turned my face away. I felt his finger trace a line on the back of my neck, and I realized that he was
examining the scar from my insertion.
I watched Jared’s face from the corner of my eye. What this man was doing clearly upset him, and I
thought I knew why—how he must have hated that slender pink line on my neck.
Jared frowned, but I was surprised that some of the anger had drained from his expression. His
The tall man dropped his hands and stepped away from me. His lips were pursed, his eyes alight with
some challenge.
“She looks healthy enough, aside from some recent exhaustion, dehydration, and malnourishment. I think
you’ve put enough water back into her so that the dehydration won’t interfere. Okay, then.” He made an
odd, unconscious motion with his hands, as if he were washing them. “Let’s get started.”
Then his words and his brief examination fit together and I understood—this gentle-seeming man who
had just promised not to hurt me was the doctor.
Uncle Jeb sighed heavily and closed his eyes.
The doctor held a hand out to me, inviting me to put mine in his. I clenched my hands into fists behind my
back. He looked at me carefully again, appraising the terror in my eyes. His mouth turned down, but it
was not a frown. He was considering how to proceed.
“Kyle, Ian?” he called, craning his neck to search the assembly for the ones he summoned. My knees
wobbled when the two big black-haired brothers pressed their way forward.
“I think I need some help. Maybe if you were to carry —” the doctor, who did not look quite so tall
standing beside Kyle, began to say.
“No.”
Everyone turned to see where the dissent had come from. I didn’t need to look, because I recognized
the voice. I looked at him anyway.
Jared’s eyebrows pressed down hard over his eyes; his mouth was twisted into a strange grimace. So
many emotions ran across his face, it was hard to pin one down. Anger, defiance, confusion, hatred,
fear… pain.
The doctor blinked, his face going slack with surprise. “Jared? Is there a problem?”
“Yes.”
Everyone waited. Beside me, Jeb was holding the corners of his lips down as if they were trying to lift
into a grin. If that was the case, then the old man had an odd sense of humor.
“And it is?” the doctor asked.
Jared answered through his teeth. “I’ll tell you the problem, Doc. What’s the difference between letting
you have it or Jeb putting a bullet in its head?”
I trembled. Jeb patted my arm.
The doctor blinked again. “Well” was all he said.
