The Host (The Host #1)(85)

I thought about the word misfit for a moment. It might have been the truest description of me I’d ever heard. Where had I ever fit in?

How strange that Ian, of all the humans, should have such a surprisingly gentle interior. I didn’t realize that cruelty would seem a negative to him.

He waited in silence while I considered all this.

“If you don’t want to kill me, then why did you come with me today?” I asked.

He paused again before answering.

“I’m not sure that…” He hesitated. “Jeb thinks things have calmed down, but I’m not completely sure about that. There’re still a few people… Anyway, Doc and I have been trying to keep an eye on you when we can. Just in case. Sending you down the south tunnel seemed like pushing your luck, to me. But that’s what Jeb does best—he pushes luck as far as it will go.”

“You… you and Doc are trying to protect me?”

“Strange world, isn’t it?”

It was a few seconds before I could answer.

“The strangest,” I finally agreed.

CHAPTER 25

Compelled

Another week passed, maybe two—there seemed little point in keeping track of time here, where it was so irrelevant—and things only got stranger for me.

I worked with the humans every day, but not always with Jeb. Some days Ian was with me, some days Doc, and some days only Jamie. I weeded fields, kneaded bread, and scrubbed counters. I carried water, boiled onion soup, washed clothes in the far end of the black pool, and burned my hands making that acidic soap. Everyone did their part, and since I had no right to be here, I tried to work twice as hard as the others. I could not earn a place, I knew that, but I tried to make my presence as light a burden as possible.

I got to know a little about the humans around me, mostly just by listening to them. I learned their names, at least. The caramel-skinned woman was named Lily, and she was from Philadelphia. She had a dry sense of humor and got along well with everyone because she never got ruffled. The young man with the bristly black hair, Wes, stared at her a lot, but she never seemed to notice that. He was only nineteen, and he’d escaped from Eureka, Montana. The sleepy-eyed mother was named Lucina, and her two boys were Isaiah and Freedom—Freedom had been born right here in the caves, delivered by Doc. I didn’t see much of these three; it seemed that the mother kept her children as separate from me as was possible in this limited space. The balding, red-cheeked man was Trudy’s husband; his name was Geoffrey. They were often with another older man, Heath, who had been Geoffrey’s best friend since early childhood; the three had escaped the invasion together. The pallid man with the white hair was Walter. He was sick, but Doc didn’t know what was wrong with him—there was no way to find out, not without labs and tests, and even if Doc could diagnose the problem, he had no medicine to treat it. As the symptoms progressed, Doc was starting to think it was a form of cancer. This pained me—to watch someone actually dying from something so easily fixed. Walter tired easily but was always cheerful. The white-blond woman—her eyes contrastingly dark—who’d brought water to the others that first day in the field was Heidi. Travis, John, Stanley, Reid, Carol, Violetta, Ruth Ann… I knew all the names, at least. There were thirty-five humans in the colony, with six of them gone on the raid, Jared included. Twenty-nine humans in the caves now, and one mostly unwelcome alien.

I also learned more about my neighbors.

Ian and Kyle shared the cave on my hallway with the two real doors propped over the entrance. Ian had begun bunking with Wes in another corridor in protest of my presence here, but he’d moved back after just two nights. The other nearby caves had also gone vacant for a while. Jeb told me the occupants were afraid of me, which made me laugh. Were twenty-nine rattlesnakes afraid of a lone field mouse?

Now Paige was back, next door, in the cave she shared with her partner, Andy, whose absence she mourned. Lily was with Heidi in the first cave, with the flowered sheets; Heath was in the second, with the duct-taped cardboard; and Trudy and Geoffrey were in the third, with a striped quilt. Reid and Violetta were one cave farther down the hall than mine, their privacy protected by a stained and threadbare oriental carpet.

The fourth cave in this corridor belonged to Doc and Sharon, and the fifth to Maggie, but none of these three had returned.

Doc and Sharon were partnered, and Maggie, in her rare moments of sarcastic humor, teased Sharon that it had taken the end of humanity for Sharon to find the perfect man: every mother wanted a doctor for her daughter.

Sharon was not the girl I’d seen in Melanie’s memories. Was it the years of living alone with the dour Maggie that had changed her into a more brightly colored version of her mother? Though her relationship with Doc was newer to this world than I was, she showed none of the softening effects of new love.

I knew the duration of that relationship from Jamie—Sharon and Maggie rarely forgot when I was in a room with them, and their conversation was guarded. They were still the strongest opposition, the only people here whose ignoring me continued to feel aggressively hostile.

I’d asked Jamie how Sharon and Maggie had gotten here. Had they found Jeb on their own, beaten Jared and Jamie here? He seemed to understand the real question: had Melanie’s last effort to find them been entirely a waste?

Jamie told me no. When Jared had showed him Melanie’s last note, explained that she was gone—it took him a moment to be able to speak again after that word, and I could see in his face what this moment had done to them both—they’d gone to look for Sharon themselves. Maggie had held Jared at the point of an antique sword while he tried to explain; it had been a close thing.