We turned northeast again and drove until we found a place where we could go off a side road and camp in the woods, far enough away from the road and the highway to be invisible. I took a look around
before I went to sleep, made sure there was no one near us, no one watching us.
After I got back, I asked Celia to stay awake and keep one of the guns handy until dark. She was a good shot, she’d had some rest, and she said she wasn’t very tired. We had the three guns I had taken from the gunmen and Celia’s handgun—a semiautomatic Beretta. She told me the gunmen had used silenced Heckler & Koch submachine guns. She said she’d never seen one before, but she’d read about them.
“The gunmen meant to kill us all, but to do it quietly,” she said. “I don’t think anyone heard the shooting over the noise of the fire and the distance between houses. We need to avoid these people, at least until we find a few more friends.”
I agreed with her. But at that moment, I just wanted to sleep. I went to sleep in the backseat of Wright’s car and woke briefly as Wright lifted me out and put me down in Brook’s car, where someone had folded the back seats down and spread clothing on them to make them less uncomfortable.
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
He climbed in, lay down beside me, and pulled me against him. “Go back to sleep,” he said into my ear. I
did. The makeshift bed turned out to be not so uncomfortable after all.
Then Brook lay down on the other side of me, and her scent disturbed me, made me want to get up and go sleep somewhere else. I tried to ignore it. Her scent would change, was already beginning to change. I slept.
Sometime later, after dark, I bit her.
She struggled. I had to hold her to keep her still and silent at first. Then, after a minute, she gave a long sigh and lay as I’d positioned her, accepting me as much as she could. She didn’t enjoy herself, but after that first panic, she at least did not seem to be suffering.
I had only tasted her before. Now I took a full meal from her—not an emotionally satisfying meal, but a
physically sustaining one. Afterward, I spent time lapping at the wound until she truly relaxed against me. She eased back into sleep and never noticed when I got up, stepped over her, and got out of the car.
I closed the door as quietly as I could and stood beside it. Not being fully satisfied made me restless. I paced away from the car, then back toward it. I found myself wondering whether Brook, Celia, and Theodora would be better able to sustain me when they were as fully mine as Wright was. Would they be enough? I was much smaller than my father who had preferred to have eight symbionts. My demands must be smaller.
Mustn’t they?
I shook my head in disgust. My ignorance wasn’t just annoying. It was dangerous. How could I take care of my symbionts when I didn’t even know how to protect them from me?
I stopped beside the car and looked through its back window at Brook and Wright, now lying next to each other, both still asleep. Both had been touching me. Now that I had moved, they were almost touching one another.
My feelings shifted at once from fear for them to confusion. I wanted to crawl between them again and feel them both lying comfortably, reassuringly against me. They were both mine. And yet there was something deeply right about seeing them together as they were.
Celia came up behind me, looked at me, glanced into the car, then drew me away from it. We went to the other car and sat there. “I long for a shower,” I said.
“Me too,” Celia said. “You mind if I go to sleep now?”
“Go ahead.” She had already climbed into the backseat of Wright’s car. She put her handgun on the floor and lay on her back on the seat.
“I think I need to say something you won’t like hearing,” she said. “All right.”
She closed her eyes for several seconds, then said, “Stefan told me what happened to Hugh Tang. He told me and he told Oriana Bernardi because he knew we both loved Hugh.”
Loved? I listened to her with growing confusion. I didn’t know what to say so I said nothing.
“The relationship among an Ina and several symbionts is about the closest thing I’ve seen to a workable group marriage,” she said. “With us, sometimes people got jealous and started to pull the family apart, and ... well ... Stefan would have to talk to them. He said the first time that happened, he was still living with his mothers and one of them had to tell him what to do, and even then he could hardly do it because he was feeling so confused himself. He didn’t say ‘jealous.’ He said ‘confused.’”
I nodded. “Confused.”
“I don’t really understand that, but then, we are different species.” “How did you wind up with Hugh?”
She smiled. “Hugh had been with Stefan for a few years when Stefan asked me to join him. When I’d been there for a while, Hugh asked for me. Stefan said that was up to me, so Hugh asked me. It scared me because I didn’t understand at first how an Ina household works, that everyone went to Stefan, fed
him, loved him, but that we could have relationships with one another, too, or with other nearby symbionts. Well, I didn’t go to Hugh when he first asked, but after a while, I did. He was a good man.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish he hadn’t found me when he did.” “I know.”
I looked at her lying there, not looking at me. “Thank you for telling me,” I said.
She nodded and looked at me finally. “You’re welcome. I didn’t just say it for your benefit, though. I
figure I might want to have a kid someday.”
I wanted that—a home in which my symbionts enjoyed being with me and enjoyed one another and raised their children as I raised mine. That felt right, felt good.
I left Celia alone so she could sleep, and I checked the area again to make sure we were still as alone as we seemed to be. Once I was sure of that, I set out at a jog, then a run to find out who our nearest neighbors were. I followed my nose and found a farm where two adults and four children lived, along with horses, chickens, geese, and goats. I found three other houses, widely separated along the side road, but without farm fields around them. I found no real community on the territory I covered.
It seemed we had privacy and a little more time to recover and decide what to do. I could question Celia and, in particular, Brook.
I went back to the cars and used some of the disposable wipes that Wright and Brook had bought to clean up as best I could. Then I put on clean clothes. As I got my jeans on, I heard Brook wake up and slip out of the car behind me. She made slightly different noises breathing and moving around than Wright or Celia did.
“God, it’s dark out here,” she said. “If I weren’t a symbiont, I don’t think I could see at all. Aren’t you cold?”
I wasn’t really, but I pulled on an undershirt, then put my long-sleeved shirt on, buttoned it, and pulled on my new jacket. “I’m all right,” I said. “I’m glad you’re awake. I need to talk to you.”
“Sure.”
“Eat first. Do whatever you need to do. This will probably take a while.” “That doesn’t sound good.”
“I hope it won’t be too bad. Your neck okay?”
She pulled her collar aside and showed me the half-healed wound. “It . . . wasn’t so bad this time.” “It will get better.”
“I know.”
She pulled open the white Styrofoam cooler they had bought and filled with ice and food. She took out a plastic packet of four strips of pepper-smoked salmon and a bottle of water. She made a sandwich with the salmon and some bread from one of the grocery bags. When she’d eaten that and drunk the water, she got more water from the chest and dug out a blueberry muffin and two bananas from one of the bags. It didn’t seem to bother her that I sat in the car watching her—that I enjoyed watching her.
Finally she took the plastic can of wipes and went away into the trees to make her own effort to clean up. While she did that, Wright awoke and stumbled off in a different direction. A few moments later he came back and got another plastic can of wipes, scrubbed his face and hands, then got into the food.
“You okay?” he asked me.
“I’m fine. I’m going to see what I can learn from Brook. I need some idea where to find adult Ina. Now that I know what my parents’ communities faced—humans with gasoline and guns—I think I can ask for help without endangering other Ina or their symbionts.”
“You didn’t think so yesterday.”
“I do now. I still don’t want to stay at the cabin near your relatives. Anyone I go to will have to post guards, stop shutting down during the day, be willing to fight and kill, be able to plant false stories in the memories of any witnesses, and be able to deal with the police. Ina families with symbionts can do that if they know they should. They can survive and help remove a threat.”
He shook his head. “I just can’t figure out why human beings would be killing your kind plus a hell of a lot of their own kind unless it’s some kind of misguided vampire hunting.”
“It may be,” I said. “I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure it’s something to do with my family’s genetic experiments. Will you sit with us and speak up whenever you think of anything useful?”
“Sure. Not that I’m going to know what’s useful.”
“Unless something she says shakes loose some part of my memory, you’ll know as much as I do.” “Scary thought,” he said. Then, “Here’s Brook.”
“I’m cold,” she said, rubbing her hands together. “Let’s get back into the car.” Once
