Six men and two women, some of them very big, most of them bigger than me. I felt the blood drain from my face as I realized why they held their hands so oddly—gripped tightly in front of them, each balancing an object. They held weapons. Some held blades—a few short ones like those I had kept in my kitchen, and some longer, one huge and menacing. This knife had no purpose in a kitchen. Melanie supplied the name: a machete.

Others held long bars, some metal, some wooden. Clubs.

I recognized Uncle Jeb in their midst. Held loosely in his hands was an object I’d never seen in person, only in Melanie’s memories, like the big knife. It was a rifle.

I saw horror, but Melanie saw all this with wonder, her mind boggling at their numbers. Eight human survivors. She’d thought Jeb was alone or, in the best case scenario, with only two others. To see so many of her kind alive filled her with joy.

You’re an idiot, I told her. Look at them. See them.

I forced her to see it from my perspective: to see the threatening shapes inside the dirty jeans and light cotton shirts, brown with dust. They might have been human—as she thought of the word—once, but at this moment they were something else. They were barbarians, monsters. They hung over us, slavering for blood.

There was a death sentence in every pair of eyes.

Melanie saw all this and, though grudgingly, she had to admit that I was right. At this moment, her beloved humans were at their worst—like the newspaper stories we’d seen in the abandoned shack. We were looking at killers.

We should have been wiser; we should have died yesterday.

Why would Uncle Jeb keep us alive for this?

A shiver passed through me at the thought. I’d skimmed through the histories of human atrocities. I’d had no stomach for them. Perhaps I should have concentrated better. I knew there were reasons why humans let their enemies live, for a little while. Things they wanted from their minds or their bodies…

Of course it sprang into my head immediately—the one secret they would want from me. The one I could never, never tell them. No matter what they did to me. I would have to kill myself first.

I did not let Melanie see the secret I protected. I used her own defenses against her and threw up a wall in my head to hide behind while I thought of the information for the first time since implantation. There had been no reason to think of it before.

Melanie was hardly even curious on the other side of the wall; she made no effort to break through it. There were much more immediate concerns than the fact that she had not been the only one keeping information in reserve.