course we had.
Our head was clearer this morning, and we noticed quickly the strange shape near our right cheek-something that was not a rock or a cactus. We touched it, and it was hard and smooth. We nudged it, and the delicious sound of sloshing water came from inside.
Uncle Jeb was real, and he'd left us a canteen.
We sat up carefully, surprised when we didn't break in two like a withered stick. Actually, we felt better. The water must have had time to work its way through some of our body. The pain was dull, and for the first time in a long while, we felt hungry again.
Our fingers were stiff and clumsy as we twisted the cap from the top of the canteen. It wasn't all the way full, but there was enough water to stretch the walls of our belly again-it must have shrunk. We drank it all; we were done with rationing.
We dropped the metal canteen to the sand, where it made a dull thud in the predawn silence. We felt wide awake now. We sighed, preferring unconsciousness, and let our head fall into our hands. What now?
"Why did you give it water, Jeb?" an angry voice demanded, close behind our back.
We whirled, twisting onto our knees. What we saw made our heart falter and our awareness splinter apart.
There were eight humans half-circled around where I knelt under the tree. There was no question they were humans, all of them. I'd never seen faces contorted into such expressions-not on my kind. These lips twisted with hatred, pulled back over clenched teeth like wild animals. These brows pulled low over eyes that burned with fury.
Six men and two women, some of them very big, most of them bigger than me. I felt the blood drain from my face as I realized why they held their hands so oddly-gripped tightly in front of them, each balancing an object. They held weapons. Some held blades-a few short ones like those I had kept in my kitchen, and some longer, one huge and menacing. This knife had no purpose in a kitchen. Melanie supplied the name: a machete.
Others held long bars, some metal, some wooden. Clubs.
I recognized Uncle Jeb in their midst. Held loosely in his hands was an object I'd never seen in person, only in Melanie's memories, like the big knife. It was a rifle.
I saw horror, but Melanie saw all this with wonder, her mind boggling at their numbers. Eight human survivors. She'd thought Jeb was alone or, in the best case scenario, with only two others. To see so many of her kind alive filled her with joy.
You're an idiot, I told her. Look at them. See them.
I forced her to see it from my perspective: to see the threatening shapes inside the dirty jeans and light cotton shirts, brown with dust. They might have been human-as she thought of the word-once, but at this moment they were something else. They were barbarians, monsters. They hung over us, slavering for blood.
There was a death sentence in every pair of eyes.
Melanie saw all this and, though grudgingly, she had to admit that I was right. At this moment, her beloved humans were at their worst-like the newspaper stories we'd seen in the abandoned shack. We were looking at killers.
We should have been wiser; we should have died yesterday.
Why would Uncle Jeb keep us alive for this?
A shiver passed through me at the thought. I'd skimmed through the histories of human atrocities. I'd had no stomach for them. Perhaps I should have concentrated better. I knew there were reasons why humans let their enemies live, for a little while. Things they wanted from their minds or their bodies...
Of course it sprang into my head immediately-the one secret they would want from me. The one I could never, never tell them. No matter what they did to me. I would have to kill myself first.
I did not let Melanie see the secret I protected. I used her own defenses against her and threw up a wall in my head to hide behind while I thought of the information for the first time since implantation. There had been no reason to think of it before.
Melanie was hardly even curious on the other side of the wall; she made no effort to break through it. There were much more immediate concerns than the fact that she had not been the only one keeping information in reserve.
Did it matter that I protected my