Finally, finally, there was a brightness around the top and bottom of my blindfold. I wished that it would slip, as I was too frightened to pull it off myself. It seemed to me that I wouldn’t be so terrified if I could just see where I was and who was with me.

With the light came noise. Strange noise, a low murmuring babble. It sounded almost like a waterfall.

The babble got louder as we moved forward, and the closer it got, the less it sounded like water. It was too varied, low and high pitches mingling and echoing. If it had not been so discordant, it might have sounded like an uglier version of the constant music I’d heard and sung on the Singing World. The darkness of the blindfold suited that memory, the memory of blindness.

Melanie understood the cacophony before I did. I’d never heard the sound because I’d never been with humans before.

It’s an argument, she realized. It sounds like so many people arguing.

She was drawn by the sound. Were there more people here, then? That there were even eight had surprised us both. What was this place?

Hands touched the back of my neck, and I shied away from them.

“Easy now,” Jeb said. He pulled the blindfold off my eyes.

I blinked slowly, and the shadows around me settled into shapes I could understand: rough, uneven walls; a pocked ceiling; a worn, dusty floor. We were underground somewhere in a natural cave formation. We couldn’t be that deep. I thought we’d hiked upward longer than we’d slid downward.

The rock walls and ceiling were a dark purpley brown, and they were riddled with shallow holes like Swiss cheese. The edges of the lower holes were worn down, but over my head the circles were more defined, and their rims looked sharp.

The light came from a round hole ahead of us, its shape not unlike the holes that peppered the cavern, but larger. This was an entrance, a doorway to a brighter place. Melanie was eager, fascinated by the concept of more humans. I held back, suddenly worried that blindness might be better than sight.

Jeb sighed. “Sorry,” he muttered, so low that I was certainly the only one to hear.

I tried to swallow and could not. My head started to spin, but that might have been from hunger. My hands were trembling like leaves in a stiff breeze as Jeb prodded me through the big hole.

The tunnel opened into a chamber so vast that at first I couldn’t accept what my eyes told me. The ceiling was too bright and too high—it was like an artificial sky. I tried to see what brightened it, but it sent down sharp lances of light that hurt my eyes.

I was expecting the babble to get louder, but it was abruptly dead quiet in the huge cavern.