Invaded (Alienated, #2)(56)

“That’s hard to imagine.”

“You’ll see.” Cara wished she could give Elle a hug, but casual touches made the clones uneasy. Instead, she offered a warm smile. “But there’s no rush—don’t put so much pressure on yourself. Grieve as long as you need to.” Cara moved close enough to deliver a gentle nudge to her roommate’s shoulder. “You’re allowed to be human, you know.”

Elle returned the smile. “I’m glad you’re here.”

During rare times like these, Cara agreed.


By midafternoon, she didn’t feel quite so optimistic.

“What’s wrong with your hair?” asked the little boy tugging Cara’s braid. “I’ve never seen that kind before. It’s ugly, like fire.”

Cara reclaimed her braid and answered in L’eihr. “There’s nothing wrong with having red hair. I think it’s nice.”

“Why does your skin look so pale?” he asked. “Are you sick? Did you lose all your blood?”

“No.” Cara placed her wrist within his coppery hand to show him the pulse in her veins. “On my planet, people have lots of different skin colors. Some humans are darker than you, and some are even lighter than me.”

“But you’ve got spots,” the boy’s friend objected, pointing to the freckles splattered across Cara’s nose and cheeks. “You must be sick.”

“Why do we have to talk out loud to you?” the first boy asked.

She took a deep breath and counted to five, peering around the classroom for the instructor, who’d left Cara in charge during her bathroom break. “Because I can’t use Silent Speech.”

“I knew that,” a girl bragged from her seat on the floor. “My friend Alun told me that human brains are slow. He said they go backward.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that we’re slow…”

“He said humans are savage,” the girl added, eyeing Cara skeptically. “Do you really eat your young?”

Cara was tempted to say yes, that each freckle on her nose represented an obnoxious kid she’d devoured, but she took the high road. “No, your friend made that up.”

“Are you going to live here forever?” the girl asked.

Before thinking, Cara spat, “No,” then quickly checked herself. “I mean, yes. On the colony.”

But the Freudian slip betrayed her doubts. In truth, she wasn’t sure she could settle there. Not trapped on an island, devoid of any means of escape. Not with mindbenders like Jaxen and Aisly in power. Not with the clones spreading rumors that she ate babies and sported a backward brain. Why wouldn’t Aelyx at least consider defecting to Earth? Why did she have to make the sacrifice?

Maybe she shouldn’t think about that right now.

The young girl brought Cara back to reality with a request. “Tell us a story.”

“Please,” the others begged. “A human story!”

“Okay.” Encouraged by the children’s enthusiasm, Cara sat cross-legged and motioned for the others to form a semicircle around her. While they settled in, she decided on a simple fable that she could shorten to accommodate her limited L’eihr vocabulary: “Hansel and Gretel.”

“Once upon a time,” she began, “there were two children who lived with their father in the forest.”

Drawing on her best theatrical skills, she spun a tale that had the children transfixed, pausing only to explain unfamiliar terms like gingerbread and wicked witch. By the time she reached the scene where the witch had captured Hansel and fattened him up for cooking, the clones’ eyes were wide in rapt attention, their little bodies leaning forward to hang on Cara’s every word.

Cara led them through the story’s climax, ending with Gretel freeing her brother from his cage and pushing the witch to a fiery death. “And then,” she concluded, “they found their father and lived happily ever after.”

But instead of applauding as she’d expected, the children gasped in horror. Then the questions came flying from all directions.

“Do all human fathers abandon their children?”

“Why did they destroy that woman’s home?”

“Did they really burn her up? How barbaric!”

“See, I told you! Humans do eat their young!”

Cara tried corralling their imaginations, but the damage was done. The children backed away shrieking, as if she might spring on them and begin nibbling their eight tiny toes, Vienna sausage–style.

“Miss Sweeney…” The instructor stood in the doorway, scanning the chaos. “Why don’t you offer your assistance in the seclusion room?”

Cara’s heart sank. The seclusion room—a padded enclosure where the Terrible Twos went to scream it out. The nursery workers dodged that assignment like a jury summons. L’eihr eardrums were more sensitive to the assault of temper tantrums, likely because the spoken word was used so infrequently.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Head low, Cara slunk down the hall to her post, bracing for the worst. From the earsplitting wail that greeted her when she opened the seclusion room door, she expected to find a dozen toddlers inside. But a single child was the source of the clamor. Not quite two years old, by the looks of him, but man, the kid had a pair of banshee lungs.