“. . . thought she’d have guessed what we were up to. Looks like I was wrong,” Jared was murmuring.
“You think that’s what happened?” Ian’s voice cut hard in the quiet tunnel. “That she was scared
because Doc was trying to take the other souls out? That she was afraid for herself?”
Jared didn’t answer for a minute. “You don’t?”
Ian made a sound in the back of his throat. “No. I don’t. As disgusted asI am that you would bring back
more… victims for Doc, bring them backnow! —as much as that turns my stomach, that’s not what
upset her. How can you be so blind? Can’t you imagine what that must have looked like to her in there?”
“I know we had the bodies covered before —”
“Thewrong bodies, Jared. Oh, I’m sure Wanda would be upset by a human corpse—she’s so gentle;
violence and death aren’t a part of her normal world. But think what the things on that table must have
meant to her.”
It took him another moment. “Oh.”
“Yes. If you or I had walked in on a human vivisection, with torn body parts, with blood splattered on
everything, it wouldn’t have been as bad for us as it was for her. We’d have seen it all before—even
before the invasion, in horror movies, at least. I’d bet she’s never been exposed to anything like that in all
I was getting sick again. His words were bringing it back. The sight. The smell.
“Let me go,” I whispered. “Put me down.”
“I didn’t mean to wake you. I’m sorry.” The last words were fervent, apologizing for more than waking
me.
“Let me go.”
“You’re not well. I’ll take you to your room.”
“No. Put me down now.”
“Wanda —”
“Now!” I shouted. I shoved against Ian’s chest, kicking my legs free at the same time. The ferocity of
my struggle surprised him. He lost his hold on me, and I half fell into a crouch on the floor.
I sprang up from the crouch running.
“Wanda!”
“Let her go.”
“Don’t touch me! Wanda, come back!”
It sounded like they were wrestling behind me, but I didn’t slow. Of course they were fighting. They
were humans. Violence was pleasure to them.
I didn’t pause when I was back in the light. I sprinted through the big cavern without looking at any of
the monsters there. I could feel their eyes on me, and I didn’t care.
I didn’t care where I was going, either. Just somewhere I could be alone. I avoided the tunnels that had
people near them, running down the first empty one I could find.
It was the eastern tunnel. This was the second time I’d sprinted through this corridor today. Last time in
joy, this time in horror. It was hard to remember how I’d felt this afternoon, knowing the raiders were
home. Everything was dark and gruesome now, including their return. The very stones seemed evil.
This way was the right choice for me, though. No one had any reason to come here, and it was empty.
I ran to the farthest end of the tunnel, into the deep night of the empty game room. Could I really have
played games with them such a short time ago? Believed the smiles on their faces, not seeing the beasts
underneath…
I moved forward until I stumbled ankle deep into the oily waters of the dark spring. I backed away, my
hand outstretched, searching for a wall. When I found a rough ridge of stone—sharp-edged beneath my
fingers—I turned into the depression behind the protrusion and curled myself into a tight ball on the
ground there.
GET OUT OF MY HEAD!I shrieked.
As I thrust her away from me—gagged her so that I wouldn’t have to bear her justifications—I realized
how weak she’d grown in all these months of friendliness. How much I’d been allowing. Encouraging.
It was almost too easy to silence her. As easy as it should have been from the beginning.
It was only me now. Just me, and the pain and the horror that I would never escape. I would nevernot
have that image in my head again. I would never be free of it. It was forever a part of me.
I didn’t know how to mourn here. I could not mourn in human ways for these lost souls whose names I
would never know. For the broken child on the table.
I had never had to mourn on the Origin. I didn’t know how it was done there, in the truest home of my
kind. So I settled for the way of the Bats. It seemed appropriate, here where it was as black as being
blind. The Bats mourned with silence—not singing for weeks on end until the pain of the nothingness left
behind by the lack of music was worse than the pain of losing a soul. I’d known loss there. A friend,
killed in a freak accident, a falling tree in the night, found too late to save him from the crushed body of
his host. Spiraling… Upward… Harmony; those were the words that would have held his name in this
language. Not exact, but close enough. There had been no horror in his death, only grief. An accident.
The bubbling stream was too discordant to remind me of our songs. I could grieve beside its
harmony-free clatter.
I wrapped my arms tightly around my shoulders and mourned for the child and the other soul who had
died with it. My siblings. My family. If I had found a way free of this place, if I had warned the Seekers,
their remains would not be so casually mangled and mixed together in that blood-steeped room.
I wanted to cry, to keen in misery. But that was the human way. So I locked my lips and hunched in the
darkness, holding the pain inside.
My silence, my mourning, was stolen from me.
It took them a few hours. I heard them looking, heard their voices echo and warp in the long tubes of
air. They were calling for me, expecting an answer. When they received no answer, they brought lights.
Not the dim blue lanterns that might never have revealed my hiding place here, buried under all this
blackness, but the sharp yellow lances of flashlights. They swept back and forth, pendulums of light. Even
with the flashlights, they didn’t find me until the third search of the room. Why couldn’t they leave me
alone?
When the flashlight’s beam finally disinterred me, there was a gasp of relief.
“I found her! Tell the others to get back inside! She’s in here after all!”
I knew the voice, but I didn’t put a name to it. Just another monster.
“Wanda? Wanda? Are you all right?”
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“Where’s Ian?”
“Should we get Jamie, do you think?”
“He shouldn’t be on that leg.”
Jamie. I shuddered at his name. My Jamie. He was a monster, too. He was just like the rest of them. My
Jamie. It was a physical pain to think of him.
“Where is she?”
“Over here, Jared. She’s not… responding.”
“We didn’t touch her.”
“Here, give me the light,” Jared said. “Now, the rest of you, get out of here. Emergency over. Give her
some air, okay?”
There was a shuffling noise that didn’t travel far.
“Seriously, people. You’re not helping. Leave. All the way out.”
The shuffling was slow at first, but then became more productive. I could hear many footsteps fading
away in the room and then disappearing out of it.
Jared waited until it was silent again.
“Okay, Wanda, it’s just you and me.”
He waited for some kind of answer.
“Look, I guess that must have been pretty… bad. We never wanted you to see that. I’m sorry.”
Sorry? Geoffrey’d said it was Jared’s idea. He wanted to cut me out, slice me into little pieces, fling my
blood on the wall. He’d slowly mangle a million of me if he could find a way to keep his favorite monster
alive with him. Slash us all to slivers.
He was quiet for a long time, still waiting for me to react.
“You look like you want to be alone. That’s okay. I can keep them away, if that’s what you want.”
I didn’t move.
Something touched my shoulder. I cringed away from it, into the sharp stones.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
I heard him stand, and the light—red behind my closed eyes—began to fade as he walked away.
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“Where is she?”
“She wants to be alone. Let her be.”
“Don’t get in my way again, Howe.”
“Do you think she wants comfort from you? From a human?”
“I wasn’t party to this —”
Jared answered in a lower voice, but I could still hear the echoes. “Notthis time. You’re one of us, Ian.
Her enemy. Did you hear what she said in there? She was screamingmonsters. That’s how she sees us
now. She doesn’t want your comfort.”
“Give me the light.”
They didn’t speak again. A minute passed, and I heard one set of slow footsteps moving around the
edge of the room. Eventually, the light swept across me, turning my lids red again.
I huddled myself more tightly together, expecting him to touch me.
There was a quiet sigh, and then the sound of him sitting on the stone, not as close beside me as I would
have expected.
With a click, the light disappeared.
I waited in the silence for a long time for him to speak, but he was just as silent as I was.
Finally, I stopped waiting and returned to my mourning. Ian did not interrupt. I sat in the blackness of the
big hole in the ground and grieved for lost souls with a human at my side.
CHAPTER 41
Vanished
Ian sat with me for three days in the darkness.
He left for only a few short minutes at a time, to get us food and water. At first, Ian ate, though I did not.
Then, as he realized that it wasn’t a loss of appetite that left my tray full, he stopped eating, too.
I used his brief absences to deal with the physical needs that I could not ignore, thankful for the
proximity of the odorous stream. As my fast lengthened, those needs vanished.
I couldn’t keep from sleeping, but I did not make myself comfortable. The first day, I woke to find my
head and shoulders cradled on his lap. I recoiled from him, shuddering so violently that he did not repeat
the gesture. After that, I slumped against the stones where I was, and when I woke, I would curl back up
into my silent ball at once.
“Please,” Ian whispered on the third day—at least I thought it was the third day; there was no way to be
again.”
He would never stop them. He was just one among many. And, as Jared had said, he’d had no
objections before. I was the enemy. Even in the most compassionate, humankind’s limited scope of
mercy was reserved for their own.
I knew Doc could never intentionally inflict pain on another person. I doubted he would even be capable
of watching such a thing, tender as his feelings were. But a worm, a centipede? Why would he care about
the agony of a strange alien creature? Why would it bother him to murder a baby—slowly, slicing it apart
piece by piece—if it had no human mouth to scream with?
“I should have told you,” Ian whispered.
Would it have mattered if I’d simply been told rather than having seen the tortured remains for myself?
Would the pain be less strong?
“Please eat.”
The silence returned. We sat in it for a while, maybe another hour.
Ian got up and walked quietly away.
I could make no sense of my emotions. In that moment, I hated the body I was bound to. How did it
make sense that his going depressed me? Why should it pain me to have the solitude I craved? I wanted
the monster back, and that was plainly wrong.
I wasn’t alone for long. I didn’t know if Ian had gone to get him or if he’d been waiting for Ian to leave,
but I recognized Jeb’s contemplative whistle as it approached in the darkness.
The whistling stopped a few feet from me, and there was a loud click. A beam of yellow light burned my
eyes. I blinked against it.
Jeb set the flashlight down, bulb up. It threw a circle of light on the low ceiling and made a wider, more
diffuse sphere of light around us.
Jeb settled himself against the wall beside me.
“Gonna starve yourself, then? Is that the plan?”
I glared at the stone floor.
If I was being honest with myself, I knew that my mourning was over. I had grieved. I hadn’t known the
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s
angry.
“You wanna die, there are easier and faster ways.”
As if I wasn’t aware ofthat.
“So give me to Doc, then,” I croaked.
Jeb wasn’t surprised to hear me speak. He nodded to himself, as if this was exactly what he’d known
would come out of my mouth.
“Did you expect us to just give up, Wanderer?” Jeb’s voice was stern and more serious than I had ever
heard it before. “We have a stronger survival instinct than that. Of course we want to find a way to get
our minds back. It could be any one of us someday. So many people we love are already lost.
“It isn’t easy. It nearly kills Doc each time he fails—you’ve seen that. But this is our reality, Wanda. This
is our world. We’ve lost a war. We are about to be extinct. We’re trying to find ways to save ourselves.”
For the first time, Jeb spoke to me as if I were a soul and not a human. I had a sense that the distinction
had always been clear to him, though. He was just a courteous monster.
I couldn’t deny the truth of what he was saying, or the sense of it. The shock had worn off, and I was
myself again. It was in my nature to be fair.
Some few of these humans could see my side of things; Ian, at least. Then I, too, could consider their
perspective. They were monsters, but maybe monsters who were justified in what they were doing.
Of course they would think violence was the answer. They wouldn’t be able to imagine any other
solution. Could I blame them that their genetic programming restricted their problem-solving abilities in
this way?
I cleared my throat, but my voice was still hoarse with disuse. “Hacking up babies won’t save anyone,
Jeb. Now they’reall dead.”
He was quiet for a moment. “We can’t tell your young from your old.”
“No, I know that.”
“Your kind don’t spare our babies.”
“We don’t torture them, though. We never intentionally cause anyone pain.”
“You do worse than that. You erase them.”
“You do both.”
“We do, yes—because we have to try. We have to keep fighting. It’s the only way we know. It’s keep
trying or turn our faces to the wall and die.” He raised one eyebrow at me.
That must have been what it looked like I was doing.
“It will never work, Jeb. You can keep cutting us out in pieces, but you’ll just murder more and more
sentient creatures of both species. We do not willingly kill, but our bodies are not weak, either. Our
