Keeping up appearances was not something they’d worried about before. Of course, I was the only one who had to look as if I were a part of civilization from close up. The men wore jeans and dark T-shirts now, things that didn’t show dirt or attract attention in the brief moments they might be seen.
They all hated sleeping in the roadside inns—succumbing to unconsciousness inside the very mouth of the enemy. It scared them more than anything else we did. Ian said he’d rather charge an armed Seeker.
Kyle simply refused. He mostly slept in the van during the day and then sat up at night, acting as sentry.
For me, it was as easy as shopping in the stores. I checked us in, made conversation with the clerk. Told the story about my photographer partner and the friend who was traveling with us (just in case someone saw all three of us enter the room). I used generic names from unremarkable planets. Sometimes we were Bats: Word Keeper, Sings the Egg Song, and Sky Roost. Sometimes we were See Weeds: Twisting Eyes, Sees to the Surface, and Second Sunrise. I changed the names every time, not that anyone was trying to trace our path. It just made Melanie feel safer to do that. All this made her feel like a character in a human movie about espionage.
The hard part, the part I really minded—not that I would say this in front of Kyle, who was so quick to doubt my intentions—was all the taking without giving anything back. It had never bothered me to shop in San Diego. I took what I needed and nothing more. Then I spent my days at the university giving back to the community by sharing my knowledge. Not a taxing Calling, but one I took seriously. I took my turns at the less-appealing chores. I did my day collecting garbage and cleaning streets. We all did.
And now I took so much more and gave nothing in return. It made me feel selfish and wrong.
It’s not for yourself. It’s for others, Mel reminded me when I brooded.
It still feels wrong. Even you can feel that, can’t you?
Don’t think about it was her solution.
I was glad we were on the homestretch of our long raid. Tomorrow we would visit our growing cache—a moving truck we kept hidden within a day’s reach of our path—and clean out the van for the last time. Just a few more cities, a few more days, down through Oklahoma, then New Mexico, and then a straight drive through Arizona with no stops.
Home again. At last.
When we slept in hotels rather than in the crowded van, we usually checked in after dark and left before dawn to keep the souls from getting a good look at us. Not really necessary.
Jared and Ian were beginning to realize that. This night, because we’d had such a successful day—the van was completely full; Kyle would have little space—and because Ian thought I looked tired, we stopped early. The sun had not set when I returned to the van with the plastic key card.
The little inn was not very busy. We parked close to our room, and Jared and Ian went straight from the van to the room in a matter of five or six steps, their eyes on the ground. On their necks, small, faint pink lines provided camouflage. Jared carried a half-empty suitcase. No one looked at them or me.
Inside, the room-darkening curtains were drawn, and the men relaxed a little bit.
Ian lounged on the bed he and Jared would use, and flipped on the TV. Jared put the suitcase on the table, took out our dinner—cooled greasy breaded chicken strips I’d ordered from the deli in the last store—and passed it around. I sat by the window, peeking through the corner at the falling sun as I ate.
“You have to admit, Wanda, we humans had better entertainment,” Ian teased.
On the television screen, two souls were speaking their lines clearly, their bodies held with perfect posture. It wasn’t hard to pick up what was happening in the story because there wasn’t a lot of variety in the scripts souls wrote. In this one, two souls were reconnecting after a long separation. The male’s stint with the See Weeds had come between them, but he’d chosen to be human because he guessed his partner from the Mists Planet would be drawn to these warm-blooded hosts. And, miracle of miracles, he’d found her here.
They all had happy endings.
“You have to consider the intended audience.”
“True. I wish they’d run old human shows again.” He flipped through the channels and frowned. “Used to be a few of them on.”
“They were too disturbing. They had to be replaced with things that weren’t so… violent.”
“The Brady Bunch?”
I laughed. I’d seen that show in San Diego, and Melanie knew it from her childhood. “It condoned aggression. I remember one where a little male child punched a bully, and that was portrayed as being the right thing to do. There was blood.”
Ian shook his head in disbelief but returned to the show with the former See Weed. He laughed at the wrong parts, the parts that were supposed to be touching.
I stared out the window, watching something much more interesting than the predictable story on television.
Across the two-lane road from the inn was a small park, bordered on one side by a school and on the other by a field where cows grazed. There were a few young trees, and an old-fashioned playground with a sandbox, a slide, a set of monkey bars, and one of those hand-pulled merry-go-rounds. Of course there was a swing set, too, and that was the only equipment being used currently.
A little family was taking advantage of the cooler evening air. The father had some silver in his dark hair at the temples; the mother looked many years his junior. Her red brown hair was pulled back in a long ponytail that bobbed when she moved. They had a little boy, no more than a year old. The father pushed the child in the swing from behind, while the mother stood in front, leaning in to kiss his forehead when he swung her way, making him giggle so hard that his chubby little face was bright red. This had her laughing, too—I could see her body shake with it, her hair dancing.