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 child or the other soul in the cave of horrors. I could not grieve for strangers forever. No, now I was angry.
“You wanna die, there are easier and faster ways.”
As if I wasn’t aware of that.
“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’re all 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.
I sighed and took the water bottle Ian had left close to my foot. I drained it in one long pull, and then cleared my throat again.
“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 attachments may look like soft silver hair, but they’re stronger than your organs. That’s what’s happening, isn’t it? Doc slices up my family, and their limbs shred through the brains of yours.”
“Like cottage cheese,” he agreed.
I gagged and then shuddered at the image.
“It makes me sick, too,” he admitted. “Doc gets real bent out of shape. Every time he thinks he’s got it cracked, it goes south again. He’s tried everything he can think of, but he can’t save them from getting turned into oatmeal. Your souls don’t respond to injected sedation… or poison.”
My voice came out rough with new horror. “Of course not. Our chemical makeup is completely different.”
“Once, one of yours seemed to guess what was going to happen. Before Doc could knock the human out, the silver thingy tore up his brain from the inside. Course, we didn’t know that until Doc opened him up. The guy just collapsed.”
I was surprised, strangely impressed. That soul must have been very brave. I had not had the courage to take that step, even in the beginning when I was sure they were going to try to torture this very information from me. I didn’t imagine they would try to slash the answer out for themselves; that course was so obviously doomed to failure, it had never occurred to me.
“Jeb, we are relatively tiny creatures, utterly dependent on unwilling hosts. We wouldn’t have lasted very long if we didn’t have some defenses.”
“I’m not denying that your kind have a right to those defenses. I’m just telling you that we’re gonna keep fighting back, however we can. We don’t mean to cause anyone pain. We’re makin’ this up as we go. But we will keep fighting.”
We looked at each other.
“Then maybe you should have Doc slice me up. What else am I good for?”
“Now, now. Don’t be silly, Wanda. We humans aren’t so logical as all that. We have a greater range of good and bad in us than you do. Well, maybe mostly the bad.”
I nodded at that, but he kept going, ignoring me.
“We value the individual. We probably put too much emphasis on the individual, if it comes right down to it. How many people, in the abstract, would… let’s say Paige… how many people would she sacrifice to keep Andy alive? The answer wouldn’t make any sense if you were looking at the whole of humanity as equals.