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 hands were trembling like leaves in a stiff breeze as Jeb prodded me through the big hole.
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 see that the unconscious smile she remembered would not physically fit on this new face. Only once had she seen his face turn dark and dangerous, and that expression was nothing to the one he wore now. She didn’t see, or maybe she didn’t care.
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 told you 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?