Jeb chuckled. “Gotta say, I’m impressed with those boys. Surprised they held up this long.”
We turned into the lit dead-end tunnel. Brandt and Aaron, both sitting as far as possible from the end of the tunnel where the Seeker paced, both with guns in their hands, sighed with relief when they saw us approaching.
“Finally,” Brandt muttered. His face was etched in hard lines of grief.
The Seeker halted in her pacing.
I was surprised to see the conditions she was kept in.
She was not stuffed into the tiny cramped hole, but comparatively free, stomping to and fro across the short width of the tunnel. On the floor, against the flat end of the tunnel, were a mat and a pillow. A plastic tray was tilted at an angle against the wall at about the midpoint of the cave; a few jicama roots lay scattered near it with a soup bowl. A little soup was splattered out from where that lay. This explained the clatter I’d just heard—she’d thrown her food. It looked as though she’d eaten most of it first, though.
I stared at this relatively humane setup and felt an odd pain in my stomach.
Who did we kill? Melanie muttered sullenly. This stung her, too.
“You want a minute with her?” Brandt asked me, and the pain stabbed again. Had Brandt ever referred to me using a feminine pronoun? I wasn’t surprised that Jeb had done this for the Seeker, but everyone else?
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Careful,” Aaron cautioned. “She’s an angry little thing.”
I nodded.
The others stayed where they were. I walked down the tunnel alone.
It was hard to lift my eyes, to meet the gaze that I could feel like cold fingers pressing against my face.
The Seeker was glaring at me, a harsh sneer twisting her features. I’d never seen a soul use that expression before.
“Well, hello there, Melanie,” she mocked me. “What took you so long to come visit?”
I didn’t answer. I walked toward her slowly, trying hard to believe that the hate coursing through my body really did not belong to me.
“Did your little friends think I would talk to you? Spill all my secrets because you carry a gagged and lobotomized soul around in your head, reflecting through your eyes?” She laughed abrasively.
I stopped two long strides away from her, my body tensed to run. She made no aggressive move toward me, but I could not relax my muscles. This was not like meeting the Seeker on the highway—I didn’t have the usual sensation of safety that I felt around the gentle others of my kind. Again, the strange conviction that she would live long after I was gone swept through me.
Don’t be ridiculous. Ask her your questions. Have you come up with any?
“So, what do you want? Did you request permission to kill me personally, Melanie?” the Seeker hissed.
“They call me Wanda here,” I said.
She flinched slightly when I opened my lips to speak, as if expecting me to shout. My low, even voice seemed to upset her more than the scream she anticipated.
I examined her face while she glared at me with her bulging eyes. It was dirty, stained with purple dust and dried sweat. Other than that, there wasn’t a mark on it. Again, this gave me an odd ache.
“Wanda,” she repeated in a flat voice. “Well, what are you waiting for? Didn’t they give you the okay? Were you planning to use your bare hands or my gun?”
“I’m not here to kill you.”
She smiled sourly. “To interrogate me, then? Where are your instruments of torture, human?”
I cringed. “I won’t hurt you.”
Insecurity flickered across her face and then vanished behind her sneer. “What are they keeping me for, then? Do they think I can be tamed, like your pet soul?”
“No. They just… they didn’t want to kill you until they had… consulted me. In case I wanted to talk to you first.”
Her lids lowered, narrowing her protruding eyes. “Do you have something to say?”
I swallowed. “I was wondering…” I only had the same question I’d been unable to answer for myself. “Why? Why couldn’t you let me be dead, like the rest of them? Why were you so determined to hunt me down? I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I just wanted… to go my own way.”
She leaped up onto her toes, shoving her face toward mine. Someone moved behind me, but I couldn’t hear more than that—she was shouting in my face.
“Because I was right!” she shrieked. “More than right! Look at them all! A vile nest of killers, lurking in wait! Just like I thought, only so much worse! I knew you were out here with them! One of them! I told them there was danger! I told them!”
She stopped, panting, and took a step back from me, staring over my shoulder. I didn’t look away to see what had made her retreat. I assumed it had something to do with what Jeb had just told me—once the guns come up, she backs right down. I analyzed her expression for a moment as her heavy breathing slowed.
“But they didn’t listen to you. So you came for us alone.”
The Seeker didn’t answer. She took another step back from me, doubt twisting her expression. She looked oddly vulnerable for a second, as if my words had stripped away the shield she’d been hiding behind.
“They’ll look for you, but in the end, they never believed you at all, did they?” I said, watching as each word was confirmed in her desperate eyes. It made me very sure. “So they won’t take the search further than that. When they don’t find you, their interest will fade. We’ll be careful, as usual. They won’t find us.”