Imago

“Do you feel well, Santos?” Paz asked.

“What do you care?” Santos demanded.

Paz looked at me. “Why do you want him? Wish him a good day, and he’ll spit on you.”

“He needs more healing than I can give him here,” I said. I turned my head so that he would know I was looking at him. “He’ll have less reason to spit when I’m finished with him, so maybe he’ll do less spitting. Perhaps then I’ll find mates for him.”

He watched me while I spoke, then let his eyes slide away from me. He stared, unseeing, I think, at the rough wooden table.

“Will others come up here today?” I asked Paz.

“No,” she said. “Today is still our watch. Juana and Santiago will come tomorrow to relieve us.”

Santos spoke abruptly, urgently. “Are you really going with them?”

“Of course,” Paz said.

“Why? You should be afraid of them. You should be terrified. When we were children they told us the devil had four arms.”

“We’re not children anymore,” Javier said. “Look at my right hand.” He held it up, pale brown and smooth. “I have a right hand again. It’s been a frozen claw for years, and now—”

“Not enough!”

Javier opened his mouth, his expression suddenly angry. Then, without speaking, he closed his mouth.

“I want to go,” Paz said quietly. “I’m tired of telling myself lies about this place and watching my children die.” She pushed very long black hair from her face. As she sat at the table, most of her hair hung to the floor behind her. “Santos, if you had seen our last child before it died, you would thank God for the beauty you had even before your healing.”

Santos looked away from her, shamefaced but stubborn. “I know all that,” he said. “I don’t mean to be cruel. I do know. But

we have been taught all our lives that the aliens would destroy us if they found us. Why did our belief and our fear slip away so quickly?”

Javier sighed. “I don’t know.” He looked at Aaor. “They’re not very fearsome, are they? And they are

very interesting. I don’t know why.” He looked up. “Santos, do you believe we are building a new people here?”

Santos shook his head. “I’ve never believed it. I have eyes. But that’s no reason for us to consent to go away with people we’ve been taught were evil.”

“Did you consent?” Paz asked

“

yes.”

“What else is there, then?”

“Why are they here!” He turned to me. “Why are you here?”

“To get Human mates for Aaor,” I said. “And now I have to get my own Human mates back. They are—”

“Jesusa and TomÁs, we know,” Paz said. “Aaor said they were imprisoned below. We can show you where they’re probably being held but I don’t know how you can get them out.”

“Show us,” I said.

We went outside where the stone village lay below us, spread like a Human-made map. The buildings seemed tiny in the distance, but they could all be seen. The whole flattened ridge was visible.

“See the round building there,” Javier said, pointing.

I didn’t see it at first. So many gray buildings with gray-brown thatched roofs, all tiny in the distance. Then it was clear to me—a stone half-cylinder built against a stone wall.

“There are rooms in it and under it,” Paz said. “Prisoners are kept there. The elders believe people who travel must be made to spend time alone to be questioned and prove they are who they say they are, and that they have not betrayed the people.” She stopped, looked at Javier. “They would say that we’ve betrayed the people.”

“We didn’t bring the aliens here,” he said. “And why do the people need us to produce more dead children?”

“They won’t say that if they catch us.”

“What will they do to you?” I asked.

“Kill us,” Paz whispered.

Aaor stepped between them, one sensory arm around each. “Jodahs, can we take them out, then come back for Jesusa and TomÁs?”

I stared down at the village, at the hundreds of green terraces. “I’m afraid for them. The longer we’re separated, the more likely they are to give themselves away. If only they had told us

Paz, did people watch the canyon from up here before Jesusa and TomÁs left home?”

“No,” she said. “We do this now because they left. The elders were afraid we would be invaded. We made more guns and ammunition, and we posted new guards. Many new guards.”

“This isn’t really a good place to watch from,” Javier said. “We’re too high and the canyon is too heavily forested. People would have to almost make an effort to attract our attention. Light a fire or something.”

I nodded. We had made cold camps for days before we reached the village. Yet we had been spotted. New guards. More vigilance. “You have to help us get you away from here,” I said. “You know where the guards are. We don’t want to hurt them, but we have to get you away and I have to get Jesusa and TomÁs out.”

“We can help you get away,” Paz said. “But we can’t help you reach TomÁs and Jesusa. You’ve seen that they’re guarded and in the middle of town.”

“If they’re where you say, I can get almost to them by climbing around the slope. It looks steep, but there’s good cover.”

“But you can’t get Jesusa and TomÁs out that way.”

I looked at her, liking the way she stood close to Aaor, the way she had put one hand up to hold the sensory arm that encircled her throat. And, though she was a few years older, she was painfully like Jesusa.

I spoke in Oankali to Aaor. “Take your mates tonight and get clear of this place. Wait at the cave down the canyon.”

“You didn’t desert me,” Aaor said obstinately in Spanish.

“I can reach them,” I said. “Alone and focused, I can come up through the terraces and avoid the guards—or surprise them and sting them unconscious. And no door will keep me from Jesusa and TomÁs. I can take them down the slope to the canyon. You’ve seen them climb. Especially Jesusa. I’ll carry TomÁs on my back if I have to—whether he wants me to or not. So tonight, you take your mates to safety. And take Santos for me. I intend to keep my promise to him.”

After a while, Aaor nodded. “I’ll come back for you if you don’t meet us.”

“It might be better for you if you didn’t,” I said.

“Don’t ask the impossible of me,” it said, and guided its mates back into the stone cabin.

9

We meant to leave late that night—Aaor with the Humans down their back-and-forth pathway, then down terraces and a neglected, steep, overgrown path to the canyon floor. I meant to go down the other side of the mountain and work my way around as close as possible to the place where Jesusa and TomÁs were being held.

It would have worked. The mountain village would be free of us and able to continue in isolation until Nikanj sent a shuttle to gas it and collect the people.

But that afternoon a party of armed males came up the trail to the stone cabin.

We heard them, smelled their sweat and their gunpowder long before we saw them. There was no time for Aaor to change Javier and Paz, give them back the deformities it had taken from them.

“Were their faces distorted?” I asked Aaor.

It nodded. “Small tumors. Very visible.”

And nowhere to hide. We could climb up to Santos’s cave, but what good would that do? If villagers found no one in the cabin, they would be bound to check the cave. If we began to climb down the other side of the mountain, we could be picked off. There was nothing to do but wait.

“Four of them?” I asked Aaor.

“I smell four.”

“We let them in and we sting them.”

“I’ve never stung anyone.”

I glanced toward its mates. “Didn’t you make at least one of them unconscious last night?”

Its sensory tentacles knotted against his body in embarrassment, and its mates looked at one another and smiled.

“You can sting,” I said. “And I hope you can stand being shot now. You might be.”