I wasn’t alone for long. I didn’t know if Ian had gone to get him or if he’d been waiting for Ian to leave, but I recognized Jeb’s contemplative whistle as it approached in the darkness.

The whistling stopped a few feet from me, and there was a loud click. A beam of yellow light burned my eyes. I blinked against it.

Jeb set the flashlight down, bulb up. It threw a circle of light on the low ceiling and made a wider, more diffuse sphere of light around us.

Jeb settled himself against the wall beside me.

“Gonna starve yourself, then? Is that the plan?”

I glared at the stone floor.

If I was being honest with myself, I knew that my mourning was over. I had grieved. I hadn’t known the child or the other soul in the cave of horrors. I could not grieve for strangers forever. No, now I was angry.

“You wanna die, there are easier and faster ways.”

As if I wasn’t aware of that.

“So give me to Doc, then,” I croaked.

Jeb wasn’t surprised to hear me speak. He nodded to himself, as if this was exactly what he’d known would come out of my mouth.

“Did you expect us to just give up, Wanderer?” Jeb’s voice was stern and more serious than I had ever heard it before. “We have a stronger survival instinct than that. Of course we want to find a way to get our minds back. It could be any one of us someday. So many people we love are already lost.

“It isn’t easy. It nearly kills Doc each time he fails—you’ve seen that. But this is our reality, Wanda. This is our world. We’ve lost a war. We are about to be extinct. We’re trying to find ways to save ourselves.”

For the first time, Jeb spoke to me as if I were a soul and not a human. I had a sense that the distinction had always been clear to him, though. He was just a courteous monster.

I couldn’t deny the truth of what he was saying, or the sense of it. The shock had worn off, and I was myself again. It was in my nature to be fair.

Some few of these humans could see my side of things; Ian, at least. Then I, too, could consider their perspective. They were monsters, but maybe monsters who were justified in what they were doing.

Of course they would think violence was the answer. They wouldn’t be able to imagine any other solution. Could I blame them that their genetic programming restricted their problem-solving abilities in this way?

I cleared my throat, but my voice was still hoarse with disuse. “Hacking up babies won’t save anyone, Jeb. Now they’re all dead.”

He was quiet for a moment. “We can’t tell your young from your old.”