I felt as though I would never be able to move again. That I would turn into part of the stone wall. I wanted to be stone.

If they dug a hole for Jamie in the empty desert, they would have to put me in it, too.

Not good enough, Melanie growled.

I was despairing, but she was filled with fury.

They tried.

Trying solves nothing. Jamie will not die. They have to go back out.

For what purpose? Even if they did find your old antibiotics, what are the chances they would still be any good? They only worked half the time anyway. Inferior. He doesn’t need your medicine. He needs more than that. Something that really works…

My breathing sped up, deepened as I saw it.

He needs mine, I realized.

Mel and I were both awestruck by the obviousness of this idea. The simplicity of it.

My stone lips cracked apart. “Jamie needs real medicines. The ones the souls have. We need to get him those.”

Doc frowned at me. “We don’t even know what those things do, how they work.”

“Does it matter?” Some of Melanie’s anger was seeping into my voice. “They do work. They can save him.”

Jared stared at me. I could feel Ian’s eyes on me, too, and Kyle’s, and all the rest in the room. But I saw only Jared.

“We can’t get ’em, Wanda,” Jeb said, his tone already one of defeat. Giving up. “We can only get into deserted places. There’s always a bunch of your kind in a hospital. Twenty-four hours a day. Too many eyes. We won’t do Jamie any good if we get caught.”

“Sure,” Kyle said in a hard voice. “The centipedes will be only too happy to heal his body when they find us here. And make him one of them. Is that what you’re after?”

I turned to glare at the big, sneering man. My body tensed and leaned forward. Ian put his hand on my shoulder as if he were holding me back. I didn’t think I would have made any aggressive move toward Kyle, but maybe I was wrong. I was so far from my normal self.

When I spoke, my voice was dead even, no inflection. “There has to be a way.”

Jared was nodding. “Maybe someplace small. The gun would make too much noise, but if there were enough of us to overwhelm them, we could use knives.”

“No.” My arms came unfolded, my hands falling open in shock. “No. That’s not what I meant. Not killing —”

No one even listened to me. Jeb was arguing with Jared.

“There’s no way, kid. Somebody’d get a call off to the Seekers. Even if we were in and out, something like that would bring ’em down on us in force. We’d be hard-pressed to make it out at all. And they’d follow.”

“Wait. Can’t you —”