“You work too hard, Wanda. You’re the only one who never takes a day off.”
“It gives me something to do,” I mumbled.
“Everyone is taking a break today, so you might as well.”
I looked at him curiously. The light from the mirrors threw double shadows through the cornstalks that crisscrossed over him like zebra stripes. Under the lines and the dirt, his pale face was weary.
“You look like you’ve been working.”
His eyes tightened. “But I’m resting now.”
“Jamie won’t tell me what’s going on,” I murmured.
“No. And neither will I.” He sighed. “It’s nothing you want to know anyway.”
I stared at the ground, at the dark purple and brown dirt, as my stomach twisted and rolled. I could think of nothing worse than not knowing, but maybe I was just lacking in imagination.
“It’s not really fair,” Ian said after a silent moment, “seeing as I won’t answer your question, but do you mind if I ask you one?”
I welcomed the distraction. “Go ahead.”
He didn’t speak at once, so I looked up to find the reason for his hesitation. He was staring down now, looking at the dirt streaked across the backs of his hands.
“I know you’re not a liar. I know that now,” he said quietly. “I’ll believe you, whatever your answer is.”
I waited again while he continued to stare at the dirt on his skin.
“I didn’t buy Jeb’s story before, but he and Doc are pretty convinced.… Wanda?” he asked, looking up at me. “Is she still in there with you? The girl whose body you wear?”
This was not just my secret anymore—both Jamie and Jeb knew the truth. Neither was it the secret that really mattered. At any rate, I trusted Ian not to go blabbing to anyone who would kill me over it. “Yes,” I told him. “Melanie is still here.”
He nodded slowly. “What is it like? For you? For her?”
“It’s… frustrating, for us both. At first I would have given anything to have her disappear the way she should have. But now I… I’ve gotten used to her.” I smiled wryly. “Sometimes it’s nice to have the company. It’s harder for her. She’s like a prisoner in many ways. Locked away in my head. She prefers that captivity to disappearing, though.”
“I didn’t know there was a choice.”
“There wasn’t in the beginning. It wasn’t until your kind discovered what was happening that any resistance started. That seems to be the key—knowing what’s going to happen. The humans who were taken by surprise didn’t fight back.”
“So if I were caught?”
I appraised his fierce expression—the fire in his brilliant eyes.
“I doubt you would disappear. Things have changed, though. When they catch full-grown humans now, they don’t offer them as hosts. Too many problems.” I half smiled again. “Problems like me. Going soft, getting sympathetic to my host, losing my way…”
He thought about that for a long time, sometimes looking at my face, sometimes at the cornstalks, sometimes at nothing at all.
“What would they do with me, then, if they caught me now?” he finally asked.
“They’d still do an insertion, I think. Trying to get information. Probably they’d put a Seeker in you.”
He shuddered.
“But they wouldn’t keep you as a host. Whether they found the information or not, you would be… discarded.” The word was hard to say. The idea sickened me. Odd—it was usually the human things that made me sick. But I’d never looked at the situation from the body’s perspective before; no other planet had forced me to. A body that didn’t function right was quickly and painlessly disposed of because it was as useless as a car that could not run. What was the point of keeping it around? There were conditions of the mind, too, that made a body unusable: dangerous mental addictions, malevolent yearnings, things that could not be healed and made the body unsafe to others. Or, of course, a mind with a will too strong to be erased. An anomaly localized on this planet.
I had never seen the ugliness of treating an unconquerable spirit as a defect as clearly as I did now, looking into Ian’s eyes.
“And if they caught you?” he asked.
“If they realized who I was… if anyone is still looking for me…” I thought of my Seeker and shuddered as he had. “They would take me out and put me in another host. Someone young, tractable. They would hope that I would be able to be myself again. Maybe they would ship me off-planet—get me away from the bad influences.”
“Would you be yourself again?”
I met his gaze. “I am myself. I haven’t lost myself to Melanie. I would feel the same as I do now, even as a Bear or a Flower.”
“They wouldn’t discard you?”
“Not a soul. We have no capital punishment for our kind. Or any punishment, really. Whatever they did, it would be to save me. I used to think there was no need for any other way, but now I have myself as proof against that theory. It would probably be right to discard me. I’m a traitor, aren’t I?”
Ian pursed his lips. “More of an expatriate, I’d say. You haven’t turned on them; you’ve just left their society.”
We were quiet again. I wanted to believe what he said was true. I considered the word expatriate, trying to convince myself that I was nothing worse.
Ian exhaled loudly enough to make me jump. “When Doc sobers up, we’ll get him to take a look at your face.” He reached over and put his hand under my chin; this time I didn’t flinch. He turned my head to the side so he could examine the wound.