“Eighteen,” he said. “Six in each car.”
“That many and your gear. You must have really been packed in.”
I walked him back toward the houses, made him pick up his shirt and put it on again. Then I spotted Wright. He came toward me, looking past me at the raider.
“Don’t worry about him,” I said. “Are Celia, Brook, and Joel all right?”
“They’re fine.”
I nodded, relieved, and told him where to find the men I’d killed and their guns and their gasoline. “Get other symbionts to help you collect them,” I said. “There should be a total of eighteen raiders, living and dead, including this one.”
“Okay,” he said. “Why is this one still alive?”
“I’ve got questions for him,” I said. “Are any of the rest of them alive?”
“Two. They’re shot, and they’ve been kicked around a little. The symbionts were pissed as hell at them.”
“Good. Make sure the dead, their cars, and the rest of their possessions are gathered and shut up out of sight in case the noise or the smoke attracts outside attention.” The Gordons had no neighbors who could be seen from the houses, but the noise might have reached some not-too-distant farm. And the smoke might be seen, although there was much less of it now. The fires were almost out. Two houses had been damaged, but none of them had been destroyed. That was amazing. “Where are the survivors?” I asked.
He pointed them out in the yard where they had been laid, then he said with concern, “Shori, your face is beginning to blister. You should get inside. If it gets any worse, you might have scars.”
I touched his throat just at the spot I had so often bitten. “I won’t scar anymore than you do when I bite you. Thank you for worrying about me, though.” I left him. My raider followed me as though I were leading him with a rope.
The two surviving raiders were battered and unconscious. They lay on the grass in front of Edward’s house. “Don’t hurt them any more,” I told the symbionts who were guarding them. “When they can talk, your Ina will want to question them. I will, too.”
“Our doctor will look at them when she gets around to them,” a man named Christian Brownlee said. He stared at my raider, then ignored him. My raider inched closer to me.
“Are all the symbionts alive?” I asked.
He nodded. “Five hurt. They’re in Hayden’s house.”
I knew the Gordons had a doctor and two nurses among the ninety or so adult humans in the community, and I went to Hayden’s house, expecting to find her at work there. She was.
The doctor was one of Hayden’s symbionts. She was an internist named Carmen Tanaka, and she was assisted not only by the two nurses, a man and a woman, but by three other symbionts. She was busy but not too busy to lecture me.
“You stay out of the sun,” she said. “You’re blistering.”
“I came to see whether I could be of use,” I told her. “I don’t know whether there is anything I can do to help heal symbionts not my own, but I want to help if I can.”
Carmen looked up from the leg wound that she was cleaning. The bullet had apparently gone straight through the man’s calf. “If any of them were in danger or likely to be in danger before their Ina awake, I’d ask for your help,” she said. “But as things are, you’d just cause them unnecessary pain and create problems between them and their Ina.”
I nodded. “Let me know if anything changes,” I said. “I’m going to do what I can for the raiders who survived. We’re going to want to talk to them later.”
“Is this one?” she looked at my companion.
“Yes.”
She looked at the bite wound on the man’s neck and nodded. “If you bite the others, you’ll help them avoid infection and they’ll heal faster and be more manageable.”
I nodded and went out to tend to the raiders. Once I finished with them, I took my raider back to the guest house, gave him a cold bottle of beer from the stock we’d found in the pantry, and sat down with him at the kitchen table.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
“Victor Colon.”
“All right, Victor. Tell me why you attacked this place.”
He frowned. “We had to.”
“Tell me why you had to.”
He frowned, looking confused. It was a kind of confusion that worried me since it seemed to me that it could mean only one thing.
Celia and Brook came into the kitchen, saw us, and stopped.
“Come in,” I said. “Did you come to get food?”
“We missed lunch,” Brook said. “We probably shouldn’t be hungry after all this, but we are.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “Eat something. Fix some for Victor here, too. And sit and talk with us.”
They didn’t understand, but they obeyed. They cooked hamburger sandwiches for themselves and one for Victor Colon. They had found loaves of multigrain bread, hamburger meat, and bags of French fries in the freezer, and had put the meat and bread in the lower part of the refrigerator to thaw. Now, they fried the meat and the potatoes in castiron pans on the stove. There was salt and pepper, mustard and catsup, and a pickle relish in the cupboard but, of course, no fresh vegetables. At some point we were going to have to find a supermarket.
Once they all had food and bottles of beer from the refrigerator, and I had a glass of water, the confused man seemed more at ease. As he ate, he watched Celia and Brook with interest. He was seeing them, I thought, simply as attractive women. He stared at Celia’s breasts, at Brook’s legs. They knew what he was doing, of course. It seemed to amuse them. After a few glances at me, they relaxed and behaved as though Victor were one of us or, at least, as though he belonged at our table.
Celia asked, “Where do you come from?”
Victor answered easily, “L.A. I still live there.”
Brook nodded. “I went down to Los Angeles a few years ago to visit my aunt—my mother’s sister. It’s too hot there.”
“Yeah, it’s hot,” Victor said. “But I wish I were there now. This thing didn’t go down the way it was supposed to.”
“If it had, we’d be dead,” Celia said. “What the hell did we ever do to you? Why do you want to kill us?” Oddly, at that moment she handed him another bottle of beer. He’d already finished two.
Victor frowned. “We had to,” he said. He shook his head, reverting to that blank confusion that so worried me.
“Oh my God,” Brook said. She looked at me, and I knew she had seen what I had seen.
Celia said, “What? What?”
“Victor,” Brook said, “who told you and your friends to kill us?”
“Nobody,” he responded, and he began to get angry. “We’re not kids! Nobody tells us what to do.” He drank several swallows of his beer.
“You know what you want to do?” Brook said.
“Yeah, I do.”
“Do you want to kill us?”
He thought about that for several seconds. “I don’t know. No. No, I’m okay here with you pretty ladies.”
I decided he was getting too relaxed. “Victor,” I began, “do you know me? Who am I?”
He surprised me. “Dirty little nigger bitch,” he said reflexively. “Goddamn mongrel cub.” Then he gasped and clutched his head between his hands. After a moment, he put his head down on the table and groaned.
It was clear that he was in pain. His face had suddenly gone a deep red.
“Didn’t mean to say that,” he whispered. “Didn’t mean to call you that.” He looked at me. “Sorry. Didn’t mean it.”
“They call me those things, don’t they?”
He nodded.
“Because I’m dark-skinned?”
“And human,” he said. “Ina mixed with some human or maybe human mixed with a little Ina. That’s not supposed to happen. Not ever. Couldn’t let you and you … your kind … your family … breed.”
So much death just to keep us from breeding. “Do you think I should die, Victor?” I asked.
“I … No!”
“Then why try to kill me?”
Confusion crept back into his eyes. “I just want to go home.”
“Victor.” I waited until he sat up and faced me. “If you leave here, do you think they’ll send you after me again?”
“No,” he said. He swallowed a little more beer. “I won’t do it. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Then you’ll have to stay here, at least for a while.”
“I … can I stay here with you?”
“For a while.” If I bit him a time or two more and then questioned him, I might get the name of our attackers from him—the name of whoever had bitten him before me, then sent him out to kill. And if I got that name, the Gordons would probably recognize it.
“Okay,” he said. He finished his beer. Celia looked at me, but I shook my head. No more beer for now.
“You’re tired, Victor,” I said. “You should get some sleep.”
“I am tired,” he said agreeably. “We drove all night. You got a spare bed?”
“I’ll show you,” I said and took him upstairs to our last empty bedroom. I had intended to give it to Theodora. We would have to get rid of Victor soon. Maybe one of the other houses would have room for him. “You’ll sleep until I awaken you,” I told him.
“Will you bite me again?” he asked.
“Shall I?” I didn’t really want to, but of course I would.
“Yeah.”
“All right. When I awaken you, I will.”
“Listen,” he said when I turned to leave. “I didn’t mean to call you … what I called you. My sister, she married a Dominican guy. Her kids are darker than you, and they’re my blood, too. I would kick the crap out of anyone who called them what I called you.”
“You only answered my question,” I said. “But I need more answers. I need to know all that you can tell me.”
He froze. “Can’t,” he said. “I can’t. My head hurts.” He held it between his hands as though to press the pain out of it somehow.
“I know. Don’t worry about it right now. Just get some sleep.”
He nodded, eyelids drooping, and went off to bed. I felt like going off to bed myself, but I went back down to the kitchen where Celia and Brook were waiting for me. Wright and Joel had joined them. Wright spoke first.
“All eighteen attackers are accounted for,” he said. “No one got away.”
I nodded. That was one good thing. None of them would be running home to tell the Ina who had sent them that they had failed, although that would no doubt be obvious before long. And what would happen then? I sighed.
Joel seemed to respond to my thought. “So some Ina is sicking these guys on us,” he said. “When he sees it didn’t work this time, he’ll send more.”
“It seems that way,” I said wearily. I sat down. “I don’t know my own people well enough to understand this. I feel comfortable with the Gordons, but I don’t really know them. I don’t know how many Ina might be offended by the part of me that’s human.” I wanted to put my head down on the table and close my eyes.
“The Gordons will help you,” Joel said. “Preston and Hayden are decent old guys. They can be trusted.”
I nodded. “I know.” But of course I didn’t know. I hoped. “Tonight we’ll talk to the prisoners. Maybe we’ll all learn something.”
“Like which Ina have been trying to kill you,” Celia said.
I nodded. “Maybe. I don’t know whether we can find that out yet. It may be too soon. But Victor isn’t really injured, so we can begin questioning him tonight. The others, though, they might need time to recover, and they might know things that Victor doesn’t. Or we might just use them to verify what Victor says.”
“You’re sure you can make Victor tell you what he knows?” Wright asked.
“I can. So could the Gordons. It will hurt him, though, stress him a lot. It might kill him. I don’t believe any of this is his fault, so I don’t want to push him that far.”
“You remember that,” he asked, “that your questioning him could kill him?”
I nodded. “I saw his face when I asked him who I was, and he answered. It hurt him. In that moment, I knew I could kill him with a few words. But he’s only a tool—one of eighteen tools used today.”
“What makes you so sure he’s not a willing tool?” Celia asked.
“His manner,” I said. “He’s confused, sometimes afraid, but not really angry or hateful.” I shrugged. “I could be wrong about him. If I am, we’ll find out over the next few days.”
“You’re sure it’s all right to leave him alone upstairs?” Wright said.
“He’ll sleep until I wake him,” I said. “And when he wakes, I won’t be the only one wanting to question him.”
I
went upstairs feeling tired and a little depressed. I didn’t know why I should feel that way. I was close to finding out who was threatening me, and I had taken a full meal from Victor, which should have restored my energy after all my running around in the sun and blistering my face until it hurt. Somehow, it hadn’t.
I had taken off my shoes and was lying down on the bed Wright and I usually shared when Brook looked in and said, “Come to my room and lie down with me for a little while.”
The moment she suggested it, it was all I wanted to do. I slid from the bed and went down the hall to her room.
I lay down beside her, and she turned me on one side and lay against me so that I could feel her all along my back.
“Better?” she asked against my neck. “Or is this hurting your face?”
I sighed. “Much better.” I pulled one of her arms around me. “My face is healing. Why do I feel better?”
“You need to touch your symbionts more,” she said. “Temporaries like Victor don’t matter in the same way, and Joel isn’t yours yet. You need to touch us and know that we’re here for you, ready to help you if you need us.” She brought her hand up to my hair and stroked gently. “And we need to be touched. It pleases us just as it pleases you. We protect and feed you, and you protect and feed us. That’s the way an Ina-and-symbiont household works, or that’s the way it
should
work. I think it will work that way with you.”
I brought her hand to my mouth and kissed it. “Thank you,” I said.
“Sleep a little,” she said. “It isn’t likely that there will be any more danger today. Take a nap.”
I drifted off to sleep in utter contentment.
“Shori?”
I awoke sometime after dark and disentangled myself from Brook as gently as I could. I got up, listening. Someone had called my name. Daniel’s voice, not speaking loudly, not in the room with me, not even in the house, but clearly speaking my name to me.