Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,66

indicated breathing, and he wasn’t moving. Once the truck was stopped, its ability to detect motion was as good as its hearing. Put the two together and we could detect breathing and heartbeat—or their absence. We’ve tried to trick it—fool it into mistaking one of us playing dead for an actual corpse—and we’ve never been able to. That’s comforting.

“All right,” Harry said, looking up from his screen. “How’s Zee?”

“Alive,” I told him. “Are all the shooters down?”

“Down and dead, all five of them.” He drew a deep breath. “Bankole, let’s go pick up Zahra.”

“Has anyone given Gray an all-clear?” I asked.

“I have,” Bankole answered. “You know, I’ve got the next watch. In another hour, I would have relieved Zahra.”

“For the rest of the night,” I said, “whoever’s on duty should watch from the truck. Whoever these guys are, they might have friends.”

Bankole nodded.

He stopped us as close to Zahra’s watch station as the truck could get. We all took one more look around, then Harry opened the door. Before we could call her, Zahra darted from cover and jumped into the truck. She was bleeding from the left side of her face and neck, and that took me by surprise. At once, I felt pain in my own face and neck, but managed not to react. Habit. Harry grabbed Zahra and yelled for Bankole.

“I’m okay,” Zahra said. “I just got hit by broken rock when those guys were shooting. There was rock flying everywhere.”

I went up to take Bankole’s place, and he went back to check on her. I’m a pretty decent driver now, so I got us back to the houses. “I’ll take what’s left of Zahra’s watch,” I said. “Your watch, too, Bankole. I think you’re going to be busy.”

“Watch from the truck!” Bankole ordered as though I hadn’t just made the same suggestion myself.

“Of course.”

“Whatever happened to the two people those gunmen were chasing?” Zahra asked.

We all looked at her.

“They were staggering toward Acorn,” she said. “They couldn’t have gotten far. I didn’t shoot them. They were already hurt.”

This was the first we knew of the running pair. Zahra thought they were both wounded, and both men. Yet we hadn’t spotted them. Of course, we hadn’t looked back toward Acorn for more intruders. I hadn’t even used the aft screens to do that. Stupid of me.

We looked around Acorn now, and found the usual signs of life—plenty of heat and some sound from the houses. The people were no doubt watching, but in the middle of the night, they wouldn’t come rushing out until they got an all-clear from us. The older kids would be keeping an eye on the younger ones, and the adults would be watching us. No one was showing a light or moving around where they could be seen. The only loud sound was that of a baby crying from the Douglas house. Even that came to an abrupt stop.

If this had been a drill, it would have been a good drill.

But where were the two runners? Were they hiding? Had they found their way into the school or into one of the houses? Were they crouching behind one of the trees?

Were they armed?

“I don’t think they had guns,” Zahra said when I asked her.

Then I spotted them—or spotted something. I drove toward it, toward our own cabin, in fact—Bankole’s and mine.

“The truck says they’re still alive,” I said. “They’re not moving much, and Zee’s right. They’re not armed. But they’re alive.”

The runners were Dan Noyer and a young girl. The moment I saw her—tall like Dan, but slender, pretty, dark-haired with a sharp little chin like Mercy’s—I knew she must be one of Dan’s sisters. As it turned out, she was Nina Noyer.

Both brother and sister had been beaten bloody with both fists, and with something else. Bankole says they look as though they’ve been lashed with whips.

“I suppose,” he said with great bitterness, “that people who don’t have access to convict collars might have to exert themselves—resort to older methods of torture.”

Brother and sister have rope burns at their wrists, ankles, and necks. Also, Bankole says, they’ve suffered a great deal of sexual abuse. The girl told him they were forced “to do it with strangers for money.” Dan has endured even more beating than Nina has, and both have what Bankole calls, “the usual infections and tissue damage.” Nina says she got pregnant, but one night during her captivity, she had a miscarriage. She hadn’t known what was happening, but