“No!” Kyle grunted.
“I’m takin’ her back,” Jeb said, and for the first time there was a harsher tone to his voice. Under his beard, his jaw flexed into a stubborn line.
“Jeb!” Maggie protested.
“’S my place, Mag. I’ll do what I want.”
“Old fool!” she snapped again.
Jeb reached down and grabbed my hand from where it lay curled into a fist against my thigh. He yanked me to my feet. It was not cruelty; it was merely as if he was in a hurry. Yet was it not the very worst form of cruelty to prolong my life for the reasons he had?
I rocked unsteadily. I couldn’t feel my legs very well—just prickles like needle points as the blood flowed down.
There was a hiss of disapproval behind him. It came from more than one mouth.
“Okay, whoever you are,” he said to me, his voice still kind. “Let’s get out of here before it heats up.”
The one who must have been Kyle’s brother put his hand on Jeb’s arm.
“You can’t just show it where we live, Jeb.”
“I suppose it doesn’t matter,” Maggie said harshly. “It won’t get a chance to tell tales.”
Jeb sighed and pulled a bandanna—all but hidden by his beard—from around his neck.
“This is silly,” he muttered, but he rolled the dirty fabric, stiff with dry sweat, into a blindfold.
I kept perfectly still as he tied it over my eyes, fighting the panic that increased when I couldn’t see my enemies.
I couldn’t see, but I knew it was Jeb who put one hand on my back and guided me; none of the others would have been so gentle.
We started forward, toward the north, I thought. No one spoke at first—there was just the sound of sand grinding under many feet. The ground was even, but I stumbled on my numb legs again and again. Jeb was patient; his guiding hand was almost chivalrous.
I felt the sun rise as we walked. Some of the footsteps were faster than others. They moved ahead of us until they were hard to hear. It sounded like it was the minority that stayed with Jeb and me. I must not have looked like I needed many guards—I was faint with hunger, and I swayed with every step; my head felt dizzy and hollow.
“You aren’t planning to tell him, are you?”
It was Maggie’s voice; it came from a few feet behind me, and it sounded like an accusation.
“He’s got a right to know,” Jeb replied. The stubborn note was back in his voice.
“It’s an unkind thing you are doing, Jebediah.”
“Life is unkind, Magnolia.”
It was hard to decide who was the more terrifying of the two. Was it Jeb, who seemed so intent on keeping me alive? Or Maggie, who had first suggested the doctor—an appellation that filled me with instinctive, nauseated dread—but who seemed more worried about cruelty than her brother?
We walked in silence again for a few hours. When my legs buckled, Jeb lowered me to the ground and held a canteen to my lips as he had in the night.
“Let me know when you’re ready,” Jeb told me. His voice sounded kind, though I knew that was a false interpretation.
Someone sighed impatiently.
“Why are you doing this, Jeb?” a man asked. I’d heard the voice before; it was one of the brothers. “For Doc? You could have just told Kyle that. You didn’t have to pull a gun on him.”
“Kyle needs a gun pulled on him more often,” Jeb muttered.
“Please tell me this wasn’t about sympathy,” the man continued. “After all you’ve seen…”
“After all I’ve seen, if I hadn’t learned compassion, I wouldn’t be worth much. But no, it was not about sympathy. If I had enough sympathy for this poor creature, I would have let her die.”
I shivered in the oven-hot air.
“What, then?” Kyle’s brother demanded.
There was a long silence, and then Jeb’s hand touched mine. I grasped it, needing the help to get back on my feet. His other hand pressed against my back, and I started forward again.
“Curiosity,” Jeb said in a low voice.
No one replied.
As we walked, I considered a few sure facts. One, I was not the first soul they’d captured. There was already a set routine here. This “Doc” had tried to get his answer from others before me.
Two, he had tried unsuccessfully. If any soul had forgone suicide only to crack under the humans’ torture, they would not need me now. My death would have been mercifully swift.
Oddly, I couldn’t bring myself to hope for a quick end, though, or to try to effect that outcome. It would be easy to do, even without doing the deed myself. I would only have to tell them a lie—pretend to be a Seeker, tell them my colleagues were tracking me right now, bluster and threaten. Or tell them the truth—that Melanie lived on inside me, and that she had brought me here.