Stephenie Meyer - The Host

I have no idea.

You’re trying to save her, Melanie accused, full of outrage.

There’s no way to do that.

No. There isn’t. And you want her dead anyway. So let them shoot her.

I cringed.

“You okay?” Jamie asked.

I nodded, not trusting my voice enough to speak.

“You don’t have to,” Jeb told me, his eyes sharp on my face.

“It’s okay,” I whispered.

Jamie’s hand wrapped around mine, but I shook it off. “Stay here, Jamie.”

“I’ll come with you.”

My voice was stronger now. “Oh, no, you will not. ”

We stared at each other for a moment, and for once I won the argument. He stuck his chin out stubbornly but slouched back against the wall.

Ian, too, seemed inclined to follow me out of the kitchen, but I stopped him in his tracks with a single look. Jared watched me go with an unfathomable expression.

“She’s a complainer,” Jeb told me in a low voice as we walked back toward the hole. “Not quiet like you were. Always asking for more-food, water, pillows… She threatens a lot, too. ‘The Seekers will get you all!’ That kinda thing. It’s been hard on Brandt especially. She’s pushed his temper right to the edge.”

I nodded. This did not surprise me one bit.

“She hasn’t tried to escape, though. A lot of talk and no action. Once the guns come up, she backs right down.”

I recoiled.

“My guess is, she wants to live pretty dang bad,” Jeb murmured to himself.

“Are you sure this is the… safest place to keep her?” I asked as we started down the black, twisting tunnel.

Jeb chuckled. “You didn’t find your way out,” he reminded me. “Sometimes the best hiding place is the one that’s in plain sight.”

My answer was flat. “She’s more motivated than I was.”

“The boys’re keepin’ a sharp eye on her. Nothin’ to worry about.”

We were almost there. The tunnel turned back on itself in a sharp V.

How many times had I rounded this corner, my hand tracing along the inside of the pointed switchback, just like this? I’d never traced along the outside wall. It was uneven, with jutting rocks that would leave bruises and cause me to trip. Staying on the inside was a shorter walk anyway.

When they’d first showed me that the V was not a V but a Y-two branches forking off from another tunnel, the tunnel-I’d felt pretty stupid. Like Jeb said, hiding things in plain sight was sometimes the cleverest route. The times I’d been desperate enough to even consider escaping the caves, my mind had skipped right over this place in my speculations. This was the hole, the prison. In my head, it was the darkest, deepest well in the caves. This was where they’d buried me.

Even Mel, sneakier than I was, had never dreamed that they’d held me captive just a few paces from the exit.

It wasn’t even the only exit. But the other was small and tight, a crawl space. I hadn’t found that one because I’d walked into these caves standing upright. I hadn’t been looking for that kind of tunnel. Besides, I’d never explored the edges of Doc’s hospital; I’d avoided it from the beginning.

The voice, familiar even though it seemed part of another life, interrupted my thoughts.

“I wonder how you’re still alive, eating like this. Ugh!”

Something plastic clattered against the rocks.

I could see the blue light as we rounded the last corner.

“I didn’t know humans had the patience to starve someone to death. That seems like too complex a plan for you shortsighted creatures to grasp.”

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.”