I had never had to mourn on the Origin. I didn’t know how it was done there, in the truest home of my kind. So I settled for the way of the Bats. It seemed appropriate, here where it was as black as being blind. The Bats mourned with silence—not singing for weeks on end until the pain of the nothingness left behind by the lack of music was worse than the pain of losing a soul. I’d known loss there. A friend, killed in a freak accident, a falling tree in the night, found too late to save him from the crushed body of his host. Spiraling… Upward… Harmony; those were the words that would have held his name in this language. Not exact, but close enough. There had been no horror in his death, only grief. An accident.

The bubbling stream was too discordant to remind me of our songs. I could grieve beside its harmony-free clatter.

I wrapped my arms tightly around my shoulders and mourned for the child and the other soul who had died with it. My siblings. My family. If I had found a way free of this place, if I had warned the Seekers, their remains would not be so casually mangled and mixed together in that blood-steeped room.

I wanted to cry, to keen in misery. But that was the human way. So I locked my lips and hunched in the darkness, holding the pain inside.

My silence, my mourning, was stolen from me.

It took them a few hours. I heard them looking, heard their voices echo and warp in the long tubes of air. They were calling for me, expecting an answer. When they received no answer, they brought lights. Not the dim blue lanterns that might never have revealed my hiding place here, buried under all this blackness, but the sharp yellow lances of flashlights. They swept back and forth, pendulums of light. Even with the flashlights, they didn’t find me until the third search of the room. Why couldn’t they leave me alone?

When the flashlight’s beam finally disinterred me, there was a gasp of relief.

“I found her! Tell the others to get back inside! She’s in here after all!”

I knew the voice, but I didn’t put a name to it. Just another monster.

“Wanda? Wanda? Are you all right?”

I didn’t raise my head or open my eyes. I was in mourning.

“Where’s Ian?”

“Should we get Jamie, do you think?”

“He shouldn’t be on that leg.”

Jamie. I shuddered at his name. My Jamie. He was a monster, too. He was just like the rest of them. My Jamie. It was a physical pain to think of him.

“Where is she?”

“Over here, Jared. She’s not… responding.”

“We didn’t touch her.”