?Run away??
?Yes.?
?The Humans would catch us!?
?No. We?d travel at night, hide during the day, take to the nearest river when it?s safe.?
?Can you breathe underwater?? Akin asked Amma.
?Not yet,? she answered, ?but I?m a good swimmer. I always went in whenever Shkaht did. If I get into trouble, Shkaht helps?links with me and breathes for me.?
As Akin?s sibling would have been able to help him. He withdrew from them, reminded by their unity of his own solitude. He could talk to them, communicate with them nonvocally, but he could never have the special closeness with them that they had with each other. Soon he would be too old for it?if he wasn?t already. And what was happening to his sibling?
?I don?t believe they?re leaving me with the Humans deliberately,? he said. ?My parents wouldn?t do that. My Human mother would come alone if no one would come with her.?
Both girls were back in contact with him at once. ?No!? Shkaht was saying. ?When resisters find women alone, they keep them. We saw it happen at a village where our captors tried to trade us.?
?What did you see??
?Some men came to the village. They lived there, but they had been traveling. They had a woman with them, her arms tied with rope and a rope tied around her neck. They said they had found her and she was theirs. She screamed at them, but no one knew her language. They kept her.?
?No one could do that to my mother,? Akin said. ?She wouldn?t let them. She travels alone whenever she wants to.?
?But how would she find you alone? Maybe every resister village she went to would try to tie her up and keep her. Maybe if they couldn?t they would hurt her or kill her with guns.?
Maybe they would. They seemed to do such things so easily. Maybe they already had.
Some communication he did not catch passed between Amma and Shkaht. ?You have three Oankali parents,? Shkaht whispered aloud. ?They know more about resisters than we do. They wouldn?t let her go alone, would they? If they couldn?t stop her, they would go with her, wouldn?t they??
?
yes,? Akin answered, feeling no certainty at all. Amma and Shkaht did not know Lilith, did not know how she became so frightening sometimes that everyone stayed away from her. Then she vanished for a while. Who knew what might happen to her while she roamed the forests alone?
The girls had placed him between them. He did not realize until it was too late that they were calming him with their own deliberate calm, soothing him, putting themselves and him to sleep.
Akin awoke the next day still miserable, still frightened for his mother and lonely for his sibling. Yet he went to Tate and asked her to carry him for a while so that he could talk to her.
She picked him up at once and took him to the small, fast-running stream where the camp had gotten its water.
?Wash,? she said, ?and talk to me here. I don?t want people watching the two of us whispering together.?
He washed and told her about Neci?s efforts to have Amma?s and Shkaht?s tentacles removed. ?They would grow back,? he said. ?And until they did, Shkaht wouldn?t be able to see at all or breathe properly. She would be very sick. She might die. Amma probably wouldn?t die, but she would be crippled. She wouldn?t be able to use any of her senses to their full advantage. She wouldn?t be able to recognize smells and tastes that should be familiar to her?as though she could touch them, but not grasp them?until her tentacles grew back. They would always grow back. And it would hurt her to have them cut off?maybe the way it would hurt you to have your eyes cut out.?
Tate sat on a fallen log, ignoring its fungi and its insects. ?Neci has a way of convincing people,? she said.
?I know,? he said. ?That?s why I came to you.?
?Gabe said something to me about a little surgery on the girls. Are you sure it was Neci?s idea??
?I heard her talking about it on the first night after we left Phoenix.?
?God.? Tate sighed. ?And she won?t quit. She never quits. If the girls were older, I?d like to give her a knife and tell her to go try it.? She stared at Akin. ?And since neither of those two is an ooloi, I assume that would be fatal to her. Wouldn?t it, Akin??
?
yes.?
?What if the girls were unconscious??
?It wouldn?t matter. Even if they
Even if they were dead and hadn?t been dead very long, their tentacles would still sting anyone who tried to cut them or pull them.?
?Why didn?t you tell me that instead of telling me how badly the girls would be hurt??
?I didn?t want to scare you. We don?t want to scare anyone.?
?No? Well, sometimes it?s a good thing to scare people. Sometimes fear is all that will keep them from doing stupid things.?
?You?re going to tell them??
