“Is that what you want, Wanderer? To lose? To fade away, erased by another awareness? To be no better than a host body?”

I couldn’t breathe.

“It only gets worse. You won’t be you anymore. She’ll beat you, and you’ll disappear. Maybe someone will intervene.… Maybe they’ll move you like they did Kevin. And you’ll become some child named Melanie who likes to tinker with cars rather than compose music. Or whatever it is she does.”

“The success rate is under twenty percent?” I whispered.

She nodded, trying to suppress a smile. “You’re losing yourself, Wanderer. All the worlds you’ve seen, all the experiences you’ve collected—they’ll be for nothing. I saw in your file that you have the potential for Motherhood. If you gave yourself to be a Mother, at least all that would not be entirely wasted. Why throw yourself away? Have you considered Motherhood?”

I jerked away from her, my face flushing.

“I’m sorry,” she muttered, her face darkening, too. “That was impolite. Forget I said that.”

“I’m going home. Don’t follow.”

“I have to, Wanderer. It’s my job.”

“Why do you care so much about a few spare humans? Why? How do you justify your job anymore? We’ve won! It’s time for you to join society and do something productive!”

My questions, my implied accusations, did not ruffle her.

“Wherever the fringes of their world touch ours there is death.” She spoke the words peacefully, and for a moment I glimpsed a different person in her face. It surprised me to realize that she deeply believed in what she did. Part of me had supposed that she only chose to seek because she illicitly craved the violence. “If even one soul is lost to your Jared or your Jamie, that is one soul too many. Until there is total peace on this planet, my job will be justified. As long as there are Jareds surviving, I am needed to protect our kind. As long as there are Melanies leading souls around by the nose…”

I turned my back on her and headed for my apartment with long strides that would force her to run if she wanted to keep up.

“Don’t lose yourself, Wanderer!” she called after me. “Time is running out for you!” She paused, then shouted more loudly. “Inform me when I’m to start calling you Melanie!”

Her voice faded as the space between us grew. I knew she would follow at her own pace. This last uncomfortable week—seeing her face in the back of every class, hearing her footsteps behind me on the sidewalk every day—was nothing compared to what was coming. She was going to make my life a misery.

It felt as if Melanie were bouncing violently against the inner walls of my skull.

Let’s get her canned. Tell her higher-ups that she did something unacceptable. Assaulted us. It’s our word against hers —

In a human world, I reminded her, almost sad that I didn’t have access to that sort of recourse. There are no higher-ups, in that sense. Everyone works together as equals. There are those whom many report to, in order to keep the information organized, and councils who make decisions about that information, but they won’t remove her from an assignment she wants. You see, it works like —