Zoe`s Tale

TWELVE

There was a rattle and then a thump and then a whine as the shuttle's lifters and engines died down. That was it; we had landed on Roanoke. We were home, for the very first time.

"What's that smell?" Gretchen said, and wrinkled her nose.

I took a sniff and did some nose wrinkling of my own. "I think the pilot landed in a pile of rancid socks," I said. I calmed Babar, who was with us and who seemed excited about something; maybe he liked the smell.

"That's the planet," said Anna Faulks. She was one of the Magellan crew, and had been down to the planet several times, unloading cargo. The colony's base camp was almost ready for the colonists; Gretchen and I, as children of colony leaders, were being allowed to come down on one of the last cargo shuttles rather than having to take a cattle car shuttle with everyone else. Our parents had already been on planet for days, supervising the unloading. "And I've got news for you," Faulks said. "This is about as pretty as the smells get around here. When you get a breeze coming in from the forest, then it gets really bad."

"Why?" I asked. "What does it smell like then?"

"Like everyone you know just threw up on your shoes," Faulks said.

"Wonderful," Gretchen said.

There was a grinding clang as the massive doors of the cargo shuttle opened. There was a slight breeze as the air in the cargo bay puffed out into the Roanoke sky. And then the smell really hit us.

Faulks smiled at us. "Enjoy it, ladies. You're going to be smelling it every day for the rest of your lives."

"So are you," Gretchen said to Faulks.

Faulks stopped smiling at us. "We're going to start moving these cargo containers in a couple of minutes," she said. "You two need to clear out and get out of our way. It would be a shame if your precious selves got squashed underneath them." She turned away from us and started toward the rest of the shuttle cargo crew.

"Nice," I said, to Gretchen. "I don't think now was a smart time to remind her that she's stuck here."

Gretchen shrugged. "She deserved it," she said, and started toward the cargo doors.

I bit the inside of my cheek and decided not to comment. The last several days had made everyone edgy. This is what happens when you know you're lost.

On the day we skipped to Roanoke, this is how Dad broke the news that we were lost.

"Because I know there are rumors already, let me say this first: We are safe," Dad said to the colonists. He stood on the platform where just a couple of hours earlier we had counted down the skip to Roanoke. "The Magellan is safe. We are not in any danger at the moment."

Around us the crowd visibly relaxed. I wondered how many of them caught the "at the moment" part. I suspected John put it in there for a reason.

He did. "But we are not where we were told we would be," he said. "The Colonial Union has sent us to a different planet than we had expected to go to. It did this because it learned that a coalition of alien races called the Conclave were planning to keep us from colonizing, by force if necessary. There is no doubt they would have been waiting for us when we skipped. So we were sent somewhere else: to another planet entirely. We are now above the real Roanoke.

"We are not in danger at the moment," John said. "But the Conclave is looking for us. If it finds us it will try to take us from here, again likely by force. If it cannot remove us, it will destroy the colony. We are safe now, but I won't lie to you. We are being hunted."

"Take us back!" someone shouted. There were murmurings of agreement.

"We can't go back," John said. "Captain Zane has been remotely locked out of the Magellan's control systems by the Colonial Defense Forces. He and his crew will be joining our colony. The Magellan will be destroyed once we have landed ourselves and all our supplies on Roanoke. We can't go back. None of us can."

The room erupted in angry shouts and discussions. Dad eventually calmed them down. "None of us knew about this. I didn't. Jane didn't. Your colony representatives didn't. And certainly Captain Zane didn't. This was kept from all of us equally. The Colonial Union and the Colonial Defense Forces have decided for reasons of their own that it is safer to keep us here than to bring us back to Phoenix. Whether we agree with this or not, this is what we have to work with."

"What are we going to do?" Another voice from the crowd.

Dad looked out in the direction the voice came from. "We're going to do what we came here to do in the first place," he said. "We're going to colonize. Understand this: When we all chose to colonize, we knew there were risks. You all know that seed colonies are dangerous places. Even without this Conclave searching for us, our colony would still have been at risk for attack, still a target for other races. None of this has changed. What has changed is that the Colonial Union knew ahead of time who was looking for us and why. That allowed them to keep us safe in the short run. It gives an advantage in the long run. Because now we know how to keep ourselves from being found. We know how to keep ourselves safe."

More murmurings from the crowd. Just to the right of me a woman asked, "And just how are we going to keep ourselves safe?"

"Your colonial representatives are going to explain that," John said. "Check your PDAs; each of you has a location on the Magellan where you and your former worldmates will meet with your representative. They'll explain to you what we'll need to do, and answer the questions you have from there. But there is one thing I want to be clear about. This is going to require cooperation from everyone. It's going to require sacrifice from everyone. Our job of colonizing this world was never going to be easy. It's just become a lot harder.

"But we can do it," Dad said, and the forcefulness with which he said it seemed to surprise some people in the crowd. "What's being asked of us is hard, but it's not impossible. We can do it if we work together. We can do it if we know we can rely on each other. Wherever we've come from, we all have to be Roanokers now. This isn't how I would have chosen for this to happen. But this is how we are going to have to make it work. We can do this. We have to do this. We have to do it together."

I stepped out of the shuttle, and put my feet on the ground of the new world. The ground's mud oozed over the top of my boot. "Lovely," I said. I started walking. The mud sucked at my feet. I tried not to think of the sucking as a larger metaphor. Babar bounded off the shuttle and commenced sniffing his surroundings. He was happy, at least.

Around me, the Magellan crew was on the job. Other shuttles that had landed before were disgorging their cargo; another shuttle was coming in for a landing some distance away. The cargo containers, standard-sized, littered the ground. Normally, once the contents of the containers were taken out, the containers would be sent back up in the shuttles to be reused; waste not, want not. This time, there was no reason to take them back up to the Magellan. It wasn't going back; these containers wouldn't ever be refilled. And as it happened, some of these containers wouldn't even be unpacked; our new situation here on Roanoke didn't make it worth the effort.

But it didn't mean that the containers didn't have a purpose; they did. That purpose was in front of me, a couple hundred meters away, where a barrier was forming, a barrier made from the containers. Inside the barrier would be our new temporary home; a tiny village, already named Croatoan, in which all twenty-five hundred of us—and the newly-resentful Magellan crew—would be stuck while Dad, Mom and the other colony leaders did a survey of this new planet to see what we needed to do in order to live on it.

As I watched, some of the Magellan crew were moving one of the containers into place into the barrier, using top lifters to set the container in place and then turning off their power and letting the container fall a couple of millimeters to the ground with a thump. Even from this distance I felt the vibration in the ground. Whatever was in that container, it was heavy. Probably farming equipment that we weren't allowed to use anymore.

Gretchen had already gotten far ahead of me. I thought about racing to catch up with her but then noticed Jane coming out from behind the newly placed container and talking to one of the Magellan crew. I walked toward her instead.

When Dad talked about sacrifice, in the immediate term he was talking about two things.

First: no contact between Roanoke and the rest of the Colonial Union. Anything we sent back in the direction of the Colonial Union was something that could give us away, even a simple skip drone full of data. Anything sent to us could give us away, too. This meant we were truly isolated: no help, no supplies, not even any mail from friends and loved ones left behind. We were alone.

At first this didn't seem like much of a big deal. After all, we left our old lives behind when we became colonists. We said good-bye to the people who we weren't taking with us, and most of us knew it would be a very long time if ever until we saw those people again. But even for all that, the lines weren't completely severed. A skip drone was supposed to leave the colony on a daily basis, carrying letters and news and information back to the Colonial Union. A skip drone was supposed to arrive on a daily basis, too, with mail, and news and new shows and songs and stories and other ways that we could still feel that we were part of humanity, despite being stuck on a colony, planting corn.

And now, none of that. It was all gone. The no new stories and music and shows were what hit you first—a bad thing if you were hooked on a show or band before you left and were hoping to keep up with it—but then you realized that what it really meant was from now on you wouldn't know anything about the lives of the people you left behind. You wouldn't see a beloved baby nephew's first steps. You wouldn't know if your grandmother had passed away. You wouldn't see the recordings your best friend took of her wedding, or read the stories that another friend was writing and desperately trying to sell, or see pictures of the places you used to love, with the people you still love standing in the foreground. All of it was gone, maybe forever.

When that realization hit, it hit people hard—and an even harder hit was the realization that everyone else that any of us ever cared about knew nothing about what happened to us. If the Colonial Union wasn't going to tell us where we were going in order to fool this Conclave thing, they certainly weren't going to tell everyone else that they had pulled a fast one with our whereabouts. Everyone we ever knew thought we were lost. Some of them probably thought we had been killed. John and Jane and I didn't have much to worry about on this score—we were each other's family, and all the family we had—but everyone else had someone who was even now mourning them. Savitri's mother and grandmother were still alive; the expression on her face when she realized that they probably thought she was dead made me rush over to give her a hug.

I didn't even want to think about how the Obin were handling our disappearance. I just hoped the Colonial Union ambassador to the Obin had on clean underwear when the Obin came to call.

The second sacrifice was harder.

"You're here," Jane said, as I walked up to her. She reached down to pet Babar, who had come bounding up to her.

"Apparently," I said. "Is it always like this?"

"Like what?" Jane said.

"Muddy," I said. "Rainy. Cold. Sucky."

"We're arriving at the beginning of spring here," Jane said. "It's going to be like this for a little while. I think things will get better."

"You think so?" I asked.

"I hope so," Jane said. "But we don't know. The information we have on the planet is slim. The Colonial Union doesn't seem to have done a normal survey here. And we won't be able to put up a satellite to track weather and climate. So we have to hope it gets better. It would be better if we could know. But hoping is what we have. Where's Gretchen?"

I nodded in the direction I saw her go. "I think she's looking for her dad," I said.

"Everything all right between you two?" Jane said. "You're rarely without each other."

"It's fine," I said. "Everyone's twitchy these last few days, Mom. So are we, I guess."

"How about your other friends?" Jane asked.

I shrugged. "I haven't seen too much of Enzo in the last couple of days," I said. "I think he's taking the idea of being stranded out here pretty badly. Even Magdy hasn't been able to cheer him up. I went to go visit him a couple of times, but he doesn't want to say much, and it's not like I've been that cheerful myself. He's sending me poems, still, though. On paper. He has Magdy deliver them. Magdy hates that, by the way."

Jane smiled. "Enzo's a nice boy," she said.

"I know," I said. "I think I didn't pick a great time to decide to make him my boyfriend, though."

"Well, you said it, everyone's twitchy the last few days," Jane said. "It'll get better."

"I hope so," I said, and I did. I did moody and depressed with the best of them, but even I have my limits, and I was getting near them. "Where's Dad? And where's Hickory and Dickory?" The two of them had gone down in one of the first shuttles with Mom and Dad; between them making themselves scarce on the Magellan and being away for the last few days, I was starting to miss them.

"Hickory and Dickory we have out doing a survey of the surrounding area," Jane said. "They're helping us get a lay of the land. It keeps them busy and useful, and keeps them out of the way of most of the colonists at the moment. I don't think any of them are feeling very friendly toward nonhumans at the moment, and we'd just as soon avoid someone trying to pick a fight with them."

I nodded at this. Anyone who tried to pick a fight with Hickory or Dickory was going to end up with something broken, at least. Which would not make the two of them popular, even (or maybe especially) if they were in the right. Mom and Dad were smart to get them out of the way for now.

"Your dad is with Manfred Trujillo," Jane said, mentioning Gretchen's dad. "They're laying out the temporary village. They're laying it out like a Roman Legion encampment."

"We're expecting an attack from the Visigoths," I said.

"We don't know what to expect an attack from," Jane said. The matter-of-fact way she said it did absolutely nothing to cheer me up. "I expect you'll find Gretchen with them. Just head into the encampment and you'll find them."

"It'd be easier if I could just ping Gretchen's PDA and find her that way," I said.

"It would be," Jane agreed. "But we don't get to do that anymore. Try using your eyes instead." She gave me a quick peck on the temple and then walked off to talk to the Magellan crew. I sighed and then headed into the encampment to find Dad.

The second sacrifice: Every single thing we had with a computer in it, we could no longer use. Which meant we couldn't use most things we had.

The reason was radio waves. Every piece of electronic equipment communicated with every other piece of electronic equipment through radio waves. Even the tiny radio transmissions they sent could be discovered if someone was looking hard enough, as we were assured that they were. But just turning off the connecting capability was not enough, since we were told that not only did our equipment use radio waves to communicate with each other, they used them internally to have one part of the equipment talk to other parts.

Our electronics couldn't help transmitting evidence that we were here, and if someone knew what frequencies they used to work, they could be detected simply by sending the radio signal that turned them on. Or so we were told. I'm not an engineer. All I knew was that a huge amount of our equipment was no longer usable—and not just unusable, but a danger to us.

We had to risk using this equipment to land on Roanoke and set up the colony. We couldn't very well land shuttles without using electronics; it wasn't the trip down that would be a problem, but the landings would be pretty tricky (and messy). But once everything was on the ground, it was over. We went dark, and everything we had in cargo containers that contained electronics would stay in those containers. Possibly forever.

This included data servers, entertainment monitors, modern farm equipment, scientific tools, medical tools, kitchen appliances, vehicles and toys. And PDAs.

This was not a popular announcement. Everyone had PDAs, and everyone had their lives in them. PDAs were where you kept your messages, your mail, your favorite shows and music and reading. It's how you connected with your friends, and played games with them. It's how you made recordings and video. It's how you shared the stuff you loved, to the people you liked. It was everyone's outboard brain.

And suddenly they were gone; every single PDA among the colonists—slightly more than one per person—was collected and accounted for. Some folks tried to hide them; at least one colonist tried to sock the Magellan crew member who'd been assigned to collect them. That colonist spent the night in the Magellan brig, courtesy of Captain Zane; rumor had it the captain cranked down the temperature in the brig and the colonist spent the night shivering himself awake.

I sympathized with the colonist. I'd been without my PDA for three days now and I still kept catching myself reaching for it when I wanted to talk to Gretchen, or listen to some music, or to check to see if Enzo had sent me something, or any one of a hundred different things I used my PDA for on a daily basis. I suspected that part of the reason people were so cranky was because they'd had their outboard brains amputated; you don't realize how much you use your PDA until the stupid thing is gone.

We were all outraged that we didn't have our PDAs anymore, but I had this itchy feeling in the back of my brain that one of the reasons people were so worked up about their PDAs was that it kept them from having to think about the fact that so much of the equipment we needed to use to survive, we couldn't use at all. You can't just disconnect the computers from our farm equipment; it can't run without it, it's too much a part of the machine. It'd be like taking out your brain and expecting your body to get along without it. I don't think anyone really wanted to face the fact of just how deep the trouble was.

In fact, only one thing was going to keep all of us alive: the two hundred and fifty Colonial Mennonites who were part of our colony. Their religion had kept them using outdated and antique technology; none of their equipment had computers, and only Hiram Yoder, their colony representative, had used a PDA at all (and only then, Dad explained to me, to stay in contact with other members of the Roanoke colonial council). Working without electronics wasn't a state of deprivation for them; it's how they lived. It made them the odd folks out on the Magellan, especially among us teens. But now it was going to save us.

This didn't reassure everyone. Magdy and a few of his less appealing friends pointed to the Colonial Mennonites as evidence that the Colonial Union had been planning to strand us all along and seemed to resent them for it, as if they had known it all along rather than being just as surprised as the rest of us. Thus we confirmed that Magdy's way of dealing with stress was to get angry and pick nonexistent fights; his near-brawl at the beginning of the trip was no fluke.

Magdy got angry when stressed. Enzo got withdrawn. Gretchen got snappish. I wasn't entirely sure how I got.

"You're mopey," Dad said to me. We were standing outside the tent that was our new temporary home.

"So that's how I get," I said. I watched Babar wander around the area, looking for places to mark his territory. What can I say. He's a dog.

"I'm not following you," Dad said. I explained how my friends were acting since we'd gotten lost. "Oh, okay," Dad said. "That makes sense. Well, if it's any comfort, if I have the time to do anything else but work, I think I would be mopey, too."

"I'm thrilled it runs in the family," I said.

"We can't even blame it on genetics," Dad said. He looked around. All around us were cargo containers, stacks of tents under tarps and surveyor's twine, blocking off where the streets of our new little town will be. Then he looked back to me. "What do you think of it?"

"I think this is what it looks like when God takes a dump," I said.

"Well, yes, now it does," Dad said. "But with a lot of work and a little love, we can work our way up to being a festering pit. And what a day that will be."

I laughed. "Don't make me laugh," I said. "I'm trying to work on this mopey thing."

"Sorry," Dad said. He wasn't actually sorry in the slightest. He pointed at the tent next to ours. "At the very least, you'll be close to your friend. This is Trujillo's tent. He and Gretchen will be living here."

"Good," I said. I had caught up with Dad with Gretchen and her dad; the two of them had gone off to look at the little river that ran near the edge of our soon-to-be settlement to find out the best place to put the waste collector and purifier. No indoor plumbing for the first few weeks at least, we were told; we'd be doing our business in buckets. I can't begin to tell you how excited I was to hear that. Gretchen had rolled her eyes a little bit at her dad as he dragged her off to look at likely locations; I think she was regretting taking the early trip. "How long until we start bringing down the other colonists?" I asked.

Dad pointed. "We want to get the perimeter set up first," he said. "We've been here a couple of days and nothing dangerous has popped out of those woods over there, but I think we want to be safer rather than sorrier. We're getting the last containers out of the cargo hold tonight. By tomorrow we should have the perimeter completely walled and the interior blocked out. So two days, I think. In three days everyone will be down. Why? Bored already?"

"Maybe," I said. Babar had come around to me and was grinning up at me, tongue lolling and paws caked with mud. I could tell he was trying to decide whether or not to leap up on two legs and get mud all over my shirt. I sent him my best don't even think about it telepathy and hoped for the best. "Not that it's any less boring on the Magellan right now. Everyone's in a foul mood. I don't know, I didn't expect colonizing to be like this."

"It's not," Dad said. "We're sort of an exceptional case here."

"Oh, to be like everyone else, then," I said.

"Too late for that," Dad said, and then motioned at the tent. "Jane and I have the tent pretty well set up. It's small and crowded, but it's also cramped. And I know how much you like that." This got another smile from me. "I've got to join Manfred and then talk to Jane, but after that we can all have lunch and try to see if we can't actually enjoy ourselves a little. Why don't you go in and relax until we get back. At least that way you don't have to be mopey and windblown."

"All right," I said. I gave Dad a peck on the cheek, and then he headed off toward the creek. I went inside the tent, Babar right behind.

"Nice," I said to Babar, as I looked around. "Furnished in tasteful Modern Refugee style. And I love what they've done with those cots."

Babar looked up at me with that stupid doggy grin of his and then leaped up on one of the cots and laid himself down.

"You idiot," I said. "You could have at least wiped off your paws." Babar, notably unconcerned with criticism, yawned and then closed his eyes.

I got on the cot with him, brushed off the chunkier bits of mud, and then used him as a pillow. He didn't seem to mind. And a good thing, too, since he was taking up half my cot.

"Well, here we are," I said. "Hope you like it here."

Babar made some sort of snuffling noise. Well said, I thought.

Even after everything was explained to us, there were still some folks who had a hard time getting it through their heads that we were cut off and on our own. In the group sessions headed by each of the colonial representatives, there was always someone (or someones) who said things couldn't be as bad as Dad was making them out to be, that there had to be some way for us to stay in contact with the rest of humanity or at least use our PDAs.

That's when the colony representatives sent each colonist the last file their PDAs would receive. It was a video file, shot by the Conclave and sent to every other race in our slice of space. In it, the Conclave leader, named General Gau, stood on a rise over-looking a small settlement. When I first saw the video I thought it was a human settlement, but was told that it was a settlement of Whaid colonists, the Whaid being a race I knew nothing about. What I did know was that their homes and buildings looked like ours, or close enough to ours not to matter.

This General Gau stood on the rise just long enough for you to wonder what it was he was looking at down there in the settlement, and the settlement disappeared, turned into ash and fire by what seemed like a thousand beams of light stabbing down from what we were told were hundreds of spaceships floating high above the colony. In just a few seconds there was nothing left of the colony, or the people who lived in it, other than a rising column of smoke.

No one questioned the wisdom of hiding after that.

I don't know how many times I watched the video of the Conclave attack; it must have been a few dozen times before Dad came up to me and made me hand over my PDA—no special privileges just because I was the colony leader's kid. But I wasn't watching because of the attack. Or, well, I should say that wasn't really what I was looking at when I watched it. What I was looking at was the figure, standing on the rise. The creature who ordered the attack. The one who had the blood of an entire colony on his hands. I was looking at this General Gau. I was wondering what he was thinking when he gave the order. Did he feel regret? Satisfaction? Pleasure? Pain?

I tried to imagine what it would take to order the deaths of thousands of innocent people. I felt happy that I couldn't wrap my brain around it. I was terrified that this general could. And that he was out there. Hunting us.

THIRTEEN

Two weeks after we landed on Roanoke, Magdy, Enzo, Gretchen and I went for a walk.

"Watch where you land," Magdy told us. "There are some big rocks down here."

"Great," Gretchen said. She shined her pocket light—acceptable technology, no computer equipment in it, just an old-fashioned LED—at the ground, looking for a place to land, and then hopped down from the edge of the container wall, aiming for her preferred spot. Enzo and I heard the oof as she landed, and then a bit of cursing.

"I told you to watch where you landed," Magdy said, shining his light on her.

"Shut it, Magdy," she said. "We shouldn't even be out here. You're going to get us all in trouble."

"Yeah, well," Magdy said. "Your words would have more moral authority if you weren't actually out here with me." He flicked his light up off of Gretchen and toward me and Enzo, still up on the container wall. "You two planning to join us?"

"Will you please stop with the light?" Enzo said. "The patrol is going to see it."

"The patrol is on the other side of the container wall," Magdy said. "Although if you don't hurry it up, that's not going to be the case for long. So move it." He flicked the light back and forth quickly in Enzo's face, making an annoying strobe effect. Enzo sighed and slid down off the container wall; I heard the muffled thump a second later. Which left me, feeling suddenly very exposed on the top of the containers that were the defensive perimeter around our little village—and also the frontier beyond which we were not allowed to go at night.

"Come on," Enzo whispered up to me. He, at least, remembered we weren't supposed to be out and modulated his voice accordingly. "Jump down. I'll catch you."

"Are you dumb?" I asked, also in a whispery voice. "You'll end up with my shoes in your eye sockets."

"It was a joke," Enzo said.

"Fine," I said. "Don't catch me."

"Jeez, Zoë," Magdy said, in a definite nonwhisper. "Will you jump already?"

I hopped off the container wall, down the three meters or so from the top, and tumbled a little when I landed. Enzo flicked his light on me, and offered me a hand up. I took it and squinted up at him as he pulled me up. Then I flicked my own light over to where Magdy was. "Jerk," I told him.

Magdy shrugged. "Come on," he said, and started along the perimeter of the wall toward our destination.

A few minutes later we were all flashing our lights into a hole.

"Wow," Gretchen said. "We've just broken curfew and risked being accidentally shot by the night guard for this. A hole in the ground. I'm picking our next field trip, Magdy."

Magdy snorted and knelt down into the hole. "If you actually paid attention to anything, you'd know that this hole has the council in a panic," Magdy said. "Something dug this out the other night while the patrol wasn't watching. Something was trying to get in to the colony from out here." He took his light and moved it up the nearest container until he spotted something. "Look. There are scratches on the container. Something tried to go over the top, and then when it couldn't it tried to go under."

"So what you're saying is that we're out here now with a bunch of predators," I said.

"It doesn't have to be a predator," Magdy said. "Maybe it's just something that likes to dig."

I flicked my light back up to the claw marks. "Yeah, that's a reasonable theory."

"We couldn't have seen this during the day?" Gretchen asked. "When we could see the things that can leap out and eat us?"

Magdy motioned his light over to me. "Her mom had her security people around it all day long. They weren't letting anybody else near it. Besides, whatever made this hole is long gone now."

"I'll remind you that you said that when something tears out your throat," Gretchen said.

"Relax," Magdy said. "I'm prepared. And anyway, this hole is just the opening act. My dad is friends with some of the security folks. One of them told him that just before they closed everything up for the night, they saw a herd of those fanties over in the woods. I say we go look."

"We should get back," Enzo said. "We shouldn't even be out here, Magdy. If they find us out there, we're all going to catch hell. We can see the fanties tomorrow. When the sun is up, and we can actually see them."

"Tomorrow they'll be awake and foraging," Magdy said. "And there's no way we're going to be able to do anything other than look at them through binoculars." Magdy pointed at me again. "Let me remind you that her parents have kept us cooped up for two weeks now, waiting to find out if anything might bruise us on this planet."

"Or kill us," I said. "Which would be a problem."

Magdy waved this away. "My point is that if we actually want to see these things—actually get close enough to them that we can get a good look at them—we have to do it now. They're asleep, no one knows we're gone, and we'll be back before anyone misses us."

"I still think we should go back," Enzo said.

"Enzo, I know this is taking away from valuable make-out time with your girlfriend," Magdy said, "but I thought you might want to explore something other than Zoë's tonsils for once."

Magdy was very lucky he wasn't in arm's reach when he made that comment. Either my arm or Enzo's.

"You're being an ass again, Magdy," Gretchen said.

"Fine," Magdy said. "You guys go back. I'll see you later. I'm going to see me some fanties." He started toward the woods, waving his pocket light in the grass (or grasslike ground cover) as he walked. I shined my light over to Gretchen. She rolled her eyes in exasperation and started walking after Magdy. After a minute Enzo and I followed.

Take an elephant. Make it just a little smaller. Lose the ears. Make its trunk shorter and tentaclly at the end. Stretch out its legs until it almost but not quite seems impossible that they could support the weight. Give it four eyes. And then do other assorted weird things to its body until it's not that it looks like an elephant, it's just that it looks more like an elephant than it looks like anything else you can think of.

That's a fantie.

In the two weeks we'd been trapped in the colony village, waiting for the "all clear" to actually begin colonization, the fanties had been spotted several times, either in the woods near the village or just barely in the clearing between the village and the woods. A fantie spotting would bring up a mad rush of children to the colony gate (a gap in the container wall, closed up at night) to look and gawk and wave to the creatures. It would also bring a somewhat more studiously casual wave of us teenagers, because we wanted to see them too, we just didn't want to seem too interested, since that would mess with our credibility with all our new friends.

Certainly Magdy never gave any indication of actually caring about the fanties at all. He'd allow himself to be dragged to the gate by Gretchen when a herd passed by, but then he spent most of his time talking to the other guys who were also happy to make it look like they had gotten dragged to the gate. Just goes to show, I suppose. Even the self-consciously cool had a streak of kid in them.

There was some argument as to whether the fanties we saw were a local group that lived in the area, or whether we'd seen a number of herds that were just migrating through. I had no idea which theory was right; we'd only been on planet for a couple of weeks. And from a distance, all the fanties looked pretty much the same.

And up close, as we quickly discovered, they smelled horrible.

"Does everything on this planet smell like crap?" Gretchen whispered to me as we glanced up at the fanties. They waved back and forth, ever so slightly, as they slept standing on their legs. As if to answer her question, one of the fanties closest to where we were hiding let rip a monumental fart. We gagged and giggled equally.

"Shhhh," Enzo said. He and Magdy were crouched behind another tall bush a couple of meters over from us, just short of the clearing where the fantie herd had decided to rest for the night. There were about a dozen of them, all sleeping and farting under the stars. Enzo didn't seem to be enjoying the visit very much; I think he was worried about us accidentally waking the fanties. This was not a minor concern; fantie legs looked spindly from a distance but up close it was clear they could trample any one of us without too much of a problem, and there were a dozen fanties here. If we woke them up and they panicked, we could end up being pounded into mincemeat.

I think he was also still a little sore about the "exploring tonsils" comment. Magdy, in his usual less-than-charming way, had been digging at Enzo ever since he and I officially started going out. The taunts rose and fell depending on what Magdy's relationship with Gretchen was at the moment. I was guessing at the moment Gretchen had cut him off. Sometimes I thought I needed a graph or maybe a flow chart to understand how the two of them got along.

Another one of the fanties let off an epic load of flatulence.

"If we stay here any longer, I'm going to suffocate," I whispered to Gretchen. She nodded and motioned me to follow her. We snuck over to where Enzo and Magdy were.

"Can we go now?" Gretchen whispered to Magdy. "I know you're probably enjoying the smell, but the rest of us are about to lose dinner. And we've been gone long enough that someone might start wondering where we went."

"In a minute," Magdy said. "I want to get closer to one."

"You're joking," Gretchen said.

"We've come this far," Magdy said.

"You really are an idiot sometimes, you know that?" Gretchen said. "You don't just go walking up to a herd of wild animals and say hello. They'll kill you."

"They're asleep," Magdy said.

"They won't be if you walk right into the middle of them," Gretchen said.

"I'm not that stupid," Magdy said, his whispered voice becoming louder the more irritated he became. He pointed to the one closest to us. "I just want to get closer to that one. It's not going to be a problem. Stop worrying."

Before Gretchen could retort Enzo put his hand up to quiet them both. "Look," he said, and pointed halfway down the clearing. "One of them is waking up."

"Oh, wonderful," Gretchen said.

The fantie in question shook its head and then lifted it, spreading the tentacles on its trunk wide. It waved them back and forth.

"What's it doing?" I asked Enzo. He shrugged. He was no more an expert on fanties than I was.

It waved its tentacles some more, in a wider arc, and then it came to me what it was doing. It was smelling something. Something that shouldn't be there.

The fantie bellowed, not from its trunk like an elephant, but from its mouth. All the other fanties were instantly awake and bellowing, and beginning to move.

I looked over to Gretchen. Oh, crap, I mouthed. She nodded, and looked back over at the fanties. I looked over at Magdy, who had made himself suddenly very small. I don't think he wanted to get any closer now.

The fantie closest to us wheeled about and scraped against the bush we were hiding behind. I heard the thud of its foot as the animal maneuvered itself into a new position. I decided it was time to move but my body overruled me, since it wasn't giving me control of my legs. I was frozen in place, squatting behind a bush, waiting for my trampling.

Which never came. A second later the fantie was gone, run off in the same direction as the rest of its herd: away from us.

Magdy popped up from his crouching position, and listened to the herd rumbling off in the distance. "All right," he said. "What just happened?"

"I thought they smelled us for sure," I said. "I thought they'd found us."

"I told you you were an idiot," Gretchen said to Magdy. "If you'd been out there when they woke up, we'd be scooping what was left of you into a bucket."

The two of them started sniping at each other; I turned to look at Enzo, who had turned to face the opposite direction from where the fanties had run. He had his eyes closed but it looked like he was concentrating on something.

"What is it?" I asked.

He opened his eyes, looked at me, and then pointed in the direction he was facing. "The breeze is coming from this direction," he said.

"Okay," I said. I wasn't following him.

"Have you ever gone hunting?" Enzo asked. I shook my head. "We were upwind of the fanties," he said. "The wind was blowing our scent away from them." He pointed to where the first fantie to wake up had been. "I don't think that fantie would have smelled us at all."

Click. "Okay," I said. "Now I get it."

Enzo turned to Magdy and Gretchen. "Guys," he said. "It's time to leave. Now."

Magdy flashed his pocket light at Enzo and seemed ready to say something sarcastic, then caught the expression on Enzo's face in the pocket light's circle. "What is it?"

"The fanties didn't run off because of us," Enzo said. "I think there's something else out there. Something that hunts the fanties. And I think it's coming this way."

It's a cliché of horror entertainments to have teenagers lost in the woods, imagining they're being chased by something horrible that's right behind them.

And now I know why. If you ever want to feel like you're on the verge of total, abject bowel-releasing terror, try making your way a klick or two out of a forest, at night, with the certain feeling you're being hunted. It makes you feel alive, it really does, but not in a way you want to feel alive.

Magdy was in the lead, of course, although whether he was leading because he knew the way back or just because he was running fast enough that the rest of us had to chase him was up for debate. Gretchen and I followed, and Enzo took up the rear. Once I slowed down to check on him and he waved me off. "Stay with Gretchen," he said. Then I realized that he was intentionally staying behind us so whatever might be following us would have to get through him first. I would have kissed him right then if I hadn't been a quivering mess of adrenaline, desperately running to get home.

"Through here," Magdy said to us. He pointed at an irregular natural path that I recognized as being the one we used to get into the forest in the first place. I was focusing on getting on that path and then something stepped in behind Gretchen and grabbed me. I screamed.

There was a bang, followed by a muffled thump, followed by a shout.

Ezno launched himself at what grabbed at me. A second later he was on the forest floor, Dickory's knife at his throat. It took me longer than it should have to recognize who it was holding the knife.

"Dickory!" I yelled. "Stop!"

Dickory paused.

"Let him go," I said. "He's no danger to me."

Dickory removed the knife and stepped away from Enzo. Enzo scrambled away from Dickory, and away from me.

"Hickory?" I called. "Is everything all right?"

From ahead, I heard Hickory's voice. "Your friend had a handgun. I have disarmed him."

"He's choking me!" Magdy said.

"If Hickory wanted to choke you, you wouldn't be able to talk," I yelled back. "Let him go, Hickory."

"I am keeping his handgun," Hickory said. There was a rustle in the darkness as Magdy picked himself up.

"Fine," I said. Now that we stopped moving, it was like someone pulled a stopper, and all the adrenaline in my body was falling out from the bottom of my feet. I crouched down to keep from falling over.

"No, not fine," Magdy said. I saw him emerge out of the gloom, stalking toward me. Dickory interposed itself between me and Magdy. Magdy's stalking came to a quick halt. "That's my dad's gun. If he finds it missing, I'm dead."

"What were you doing with the gun in the first place?" Gretchen asked. She had also come back to where I was standing, Hickory following behind her.

"I told you I was prepared," Magdy said, and then turned to me. "You need to tell your bodyguards that they need to be more careful." He pointed at Hickory. "I almost took off that one's head."

"Hickory?" I said.

"I was not in any serious danger," Hickory said, blandly. His attention seemed elsewhere.

"I want my gun back," Magdy said. I think he was trying for threatening; he failed when his voice cracked.

"Hickory will give you your dad's gun back when we get back to the village," I said. I felt a fatigue headache coming on.

"Now," Magdy said.

"For God's sake, Magdy," I snapped. I was suddenly very tired, and angry. "Will you please just shut up about your damn gun. You're lucky you didn't kill one of us with it. And you're lucky you didn't hit one of them"—I waved at Dickory and then Hickory—"because then you would be dead, and the rest of us would have to explain how it happened. So just shut up about the stupid gun. Shut up and let's go home."

Magdy stared at me, then stomped off into the gloom, toward the village. Enzo gave me a strange look and then followed his friend.

"Perfect," I said, and squeezed my temples with my hands. The monster headache I was on the verge of had arrived, and it was a magnificent specimen.

"We should return to the village," Hickory said to me.

"You think?" I said, and then stood up and stomped off, away from it and Dickory, back to the village. Gretchen, suddenly left with my two bodyguards for company, was not far behind me.

"I don't want one word of what happened tonight to get back to John and Jane," I said to Hickory, as it, Dickory and I stood in the common area of the village. At this time of night there were only a couple of other people who were loitering there, and they quickly disappeared when Hickory and Dickory showed up. Two weeks had not been enough time for people to get used to them. We had the common area to ourselves.

"As you say," Hickory said.

"Thank you," I said, and started walking away from them again, toward the tent I shared with my parents.

"You should not have been in the woods," Hickory said.

That stopped me. I turned around to face Hickory. "Excuse me?" I said.

"You should not have been in the woods," Hickory said. "Not without our protection."

"We had protection," I said, and some part of my brain didn't believe those words had actually come out of my mouth.

"Your protection was a handgun wielded by someone who did not know how to use it," Hickory said. "The bullet he fired went into the ground less than thirty centimeters from him. He almost shot himself in the foot. I disarmed him because he was a threat to himself, not to me."

"I'll be sure to tell him that," I said. "But it doesn't matter. I don't need your permission, Hickory, to do what I please. You and Dickory aren't my parents. And your treaty doesn't say you can tell me what to do."

"You are free to do as you will," Hickory said. "But you took an unnecessary risk to yourself, both by going into the forest and by not informing us of your intent."

"That didn't stop you from coming in after me," I said. It came out like an accusation, because I was in an accusatory mood.

"No," Hickory said.

"So you took it on yourself to follow me around when I didn't give you permission to do so," I said.

"Yes," Hickory said.

"Don't do that again," I said. "I know privacy is an alien concept to you, but sometimes I don't want you around. Can you understand that? You"—I pointed at Dickory—"nearly cut my boyfriend's throat tonight. I know you don't like him, but that's a little much."

"Dickory would not have harmed Enzo," Hickory said.

"Enzo doesn't know that," I said, and turned back to Dickory. "And what if he had gotten in a good hit on you? You might have hurt him just to keep him down. I don't need this kind of protection. And I don't want it."

Hickory and Dickory stood there silently, soaking up my anger. After a couple of seconds, I got bored with this. "Well?" I said.

"You were running out of the forest when you came by us," Hickory said.

"Yeah? So?" I said. "We thought we might be being chased by something. Something spooked the fanties we were watching and Enzo thought it might have been a predator or something. It was a false alarm. There was nothing behind us or else it would have caught up with us when you two leaped out of nowhere and scared the crap out of all of us."

"No," Hickory said.

"No? You didn't scare the crap out of us?" I said. "I beg to differ."

"No," Hickory said. "You were being followed."

"What are you talking about?" I said. "There was nothing behind us."

"They were in the trees," Hickory said. "They were pacing you from above. Moving ahead of you. We heard them before we heard you."

I felt weak. "Them?" I said.

"It is why we took you as soon as we heard you coming," Hickory said. "To protect you."

"What were they?" I asked.

"We don't know," Hickory said. "We did not have the time to make any good observation. And we believe your friend's gunshot scared them off."

"So it wasn't necessarily something hunting us," I said. "It could have been anything."

"Perhaps," Hickory said, in that studiously neutral way it had when it didn't want to disagree with me. "Whatever they were, they were moving along with you and your group."

"Guys, I'm tired," I said, because I didn't want to think about any of this anymore, and if I did think about it anymore—about the idea that some pack of creatures was following us in the trees—I might have a collapse right there in the common area. "Can we have this conversation tomorrow?"

"As you wish, Zoë," Hickory said.

"Thank you," I said, and started shuffling off toward my cot. "And remember what I said about not telling my parents."

"We will not tell your parents," Hickory said.

"And remember what I said about not following me," I said. They said nothing to this. I waved at them tiredly and went off to sleep.

I found Enzo outside his family's tent the next morning, reading a book.

"Wow, a real book," I said. "Who did you kill to get that?"

"I borrowed it from one of the Mennonite kids," he said. He showed the spine to me. "Huckleberry Finn. You heard of it?"

"You're asking a girl from a planet named Huckleberry if she's heard of Huckleberry Finn," I said. I hoped the incredulous tone of my voice would convey amusement.

Apparently not. "Sorry," he said. "I didn't make the connection." He flipped the book open to where he had been reading.

"Listen," I said. "I wanted to thank you. For what you did last night."

Enzo looked up over his book. "I didn't do anything last night."

"You stayed behind Gretchen and me," I said. "You put yourself between us and whatever was following us. I just wanted you to know I appreciated it."

Enzo shrugged. "Not that there was anything following us after all," he said. I thought about telling him about what Hickory told me, but kept it in. "And when something did come out at you, it was ahead of me. So I wasn't much help, actually."

"Yeah, about that," I said. "I wanted to apologize for that. For the thing with Dickory." I didn't really know how to put that. I figured saying Sorry for when my alien bodyguard very nearly took your head off with a knife wouldn't really go over well.

"Don't worry about it," Enzo said.

"I do worry about it," I said.

"Don't," Enzo said. "Your bodyguard did its job." For a second it seemed like Enzo would say something more, but then he cocked his head and looked at me like he was waiting for me to wrap up whatever it was I was doing, so he could get back to his very important book.

It suddenly occurred to me that Enzo hadn't written me any poetry since we landed on Roanoke.

"Well, okay then," I said, lamely. "I guess I'll see you a little later, then."

"Sounds good," Enzo said, and then gave me a friendly wave and put his nose into Huck Finn's business. I walked back to my tent and found Babar inside and went over to him and gave him a hug.

"Congratulate me, Babar," I said. "I think I just had my first fight with my boyfriend."

Babar licked my face. That made it a little better. But not much.

FOURTEEN

"No, you're still too low," I said to Gretchen. "It's making you flat. You need to be a note higher or something. Like this." I sang the part I wanted her to sing.

"I am singing that," Gretchen said.

"No, you're singing lower than that," I said.

"Then you're singing the wrong note," Gretchen said. "Because I'm singing the note you're singing. Go ahead, sing it."

I cleared my throat, and sang the note I wanted her to sing. She matched it perfectly. I stopped singing and listened to Gretchen. She was flat.

"Well, nuts," I said.

"I told you," Gretchen said.

"If I could pull up the song for you, you could hear the note and sing it," I said.

"If you could pull up the song, we wouldn't be trying to sing it at all," Gretchen said. "We'd just listen to it, like civilized human beings."

"Good point," I said.

"There's nothing good about it," Gretchen said. "I swear to you, Zoë. I knew coming to a colony world was going to be hard. I was ready for that. But if I knew they were going to take my PDA, I might have just stayed back on Erie. Go ahead, call me shallow."

"Shallow," I said.

"Now tell me I'm wrong," Gretchen said. "I dare you."

I didn't tell her she was wrong. I knew how she felt. Yes, it was shallow to admit that you missed your PDA. But when you'd spent your whole life able to call up everything you wanted to amuse you on a PDA—music, shows, books and friends—when you had to part with it, it made you miserable. Really miserable. Like "trapped on a desert island with nothing but coconuts to bang together" miserable. Because there was nothing to replace it with. Yes, the Colonial Mennonites had brought their own small library of printed books, but most of that consisted of Bibles and agricultural manuals and a few "classics," of which Huckleberry Finn was one of the more recent volumes. As for popular music and entertainments, well, they didn't much truck with that.

You could tell a few of the Colonial Mennonite teens thought it was funny to watch the rest of us go through entertainment withdrawal. Didn't seem very Christian of them, I have to say. On the other hand, they weren't the ones whose lives had been drastically altered by landing on Roanoke. If I were in their shoes and watching a whole bunch of other people whining and moaning about how horrible it was that their toys were taken away, I might feel a little smug, too.

We did what people do in situations where they go without: We adjusted. I hadn't read a book since we landed on Roanoke, but was on the waiting list for a bound copy of The Wizard of Oz. There were no recorded shows or entertainments but Shakespeare never fails; there was a reader's theater performance of Twelfth Night planned for a week from Sunday. It promised to be fairly gruesome—I'd heard some of the read-throughs—but Enzo was reading the part of Sebastian, and he was doing well enough, and truth be told it would be the first time I would have ever experienced a Shakespeare play—or any play other than a school pageant—live. And it's not like there would be anything else to do anyway.

And as for music, well, this is what happened: Within a couple days of landing a few of the colonists hauled out guitars and accordions and hand drums and other such instruments and started trying to play together. Which went horribly, because nobody knew anyone else's music. It was like what happened on the Magellan. So they started teaching each other their songs, and then people showed up to sing them, and then people showed up to listen. And thus it was, at the very tail end of space, when no one was looking, the colony of Roanoke reinvented the "hootenanny." Which is what Dad called it. I told him it was a stupid name for it, and he said he agreed, but said that the other word for it—"wingding"—was worse. I couldn't argue with that.

The Roanoke Hootenanners (as they were now calling themselves) took requests—but only if the person requesting sang the song. And if the musicians didn't know the song, you'd have to sing it at least a couple of times until they could figure out how to fake it. This led to an interesting development: singers started doing a cappella versions of their favorite songs, first by themselves and increasingly in groups, which might or might not be accompanied by the Hootenanners. It was becoming a point of pride for people to show up with their favorite songs already arranged, so everyone else in the audience didn't have to suffer through a set of dry runs before it was all listenable.

It was safe to say that some of these arrangements were more arranged than others, to put it politely, and some folks sang with the same vocal control as a cat in a shower. But now, a couple of months after the hootenannies had begun, people were beginning to get the hang of it. And people had begun coming to the hoots with new songs, arranged a cappella. One of the most popular songs at the recent hoots was "Let Me Drive the Tractor"—the tale of a colonist being taught to drive a manual tractor by a Mennonite, who, because they were the only ones who knew how to operate noncomputerized farm machinery, had been put in charge of planting crops and teaching the rest of us how to use their equipment. The song ends with the tractor going into a ditch. It was based on a true story. The Mennonites thought the song was pretty funny, even though it came at the cost of a wrecked tractor.

Songs about tractors were a long way from what any of us had been listening to before, but then, we were a long way from where any of us were before, in any sense, so maybe that fit. And to get all sociological about it, maybe what it meant was that twenty or fifty standard years down the line, whenever the Colonial Union decided to let us get in contact with the rest of the human race, Roanoke would have its own distinct musical form. Maybe they'll call it Roanokapella. Or Hootenoke. Or something.

But at this particular moment, all I was trying to do was to get the right note for Gretchen to sing so she and I could go to the next hoot with a halfway decent version of "Delhi Morning" for the Hootenanners to pick up on. And I was failing miserably. This is what it feels like when you realize that, despite a song being your favorite of maybe all time, you don't actually know every little nook and cranny of it. And since my copy of the song was on my PDA, which I could no longer use or even had anymore, there was no way to correct this problem.

Unless. "I have an idea," I said to Gretchen.

"Does it involve you learning to sing on key?" Gretchen asked.

"Even better," I said.

Ten minutes later we were on the other side of Croatoan, standing in front of the village's information center—the one place on the entire planet that you'd still find a functioning piece of electronics, because the inside was designed to completely block any radio or other signals of any sort. The technology to do this, sadly, was rare enough that we only had enough of it for a converted cargo container. The good news was, they were making more. The bad news was, they were only making enough for a medical bay. Sometimes life stinks. Gretchen and I walked into the receiving area, which was pitch black because of the signal-cloaking material; you had to close the outer door to the information center before you could open the inner door. So for about a second and a half it was like being swallowed by grim, black, featureless death. Not something I'd recommend.

And then we opened the inner door and found a geek inside. He looked at the both of us, a little surprised, and then got that no look.

"The answer is no," he said, confirming the look.

"Aw, Mr. Bennett," I said. "You don't even know what we're going to ask."

"Well, let's see," said Jerry Bennett. "Two teenage girls—daughters of the colony leaders, incidentally—just happen to walk into the only place in the colony where one could play with a PDA. Hmmm. Are they here to beg to play with a PDA? Or are they here because they enjoy the company of a chunky, middle-aged man? This is not a hard question, Miss Perry."

"We just want to listen to one song," I said. "We'll be out of your hair in just a minute."

Bennett sighed. "You know, at least a couple times a day someone just like you gets the bright idea to come in here and ask if I could just let them borrow a PDA to watch a movie, or listen to some music or read a book. And, oh, it'll just take a minute. I won't even notice they're there. And if I say yes, then other people will come in asking for the same time. Eventually I'll spend so much time helping people with their PDAs that I won't have time to do the work your parents, Miss Perry, have assigned me to do. So you tell me: What should I do?"

"Get a lock?" said Gretchen.

Bennett glanced over to Gretchen, sourly. "Very amusing," he said.

"What are you doing for my parents?" I asked.

"Your parents are having me slowly and painstakingly locate and print every single Colonial Union administration memo and file, so they can refer to them without having to come in here and bother me," Bennett said. "In one sense I appreciate that, but in a more immediate sense I've been doing it for the last three days and I'm likely to be doing it for another four. And since the printer I have to work with jams on a regular basis, it does actually require someone to pay attention to it. And that's me. So there you have it, Miss Perry: Four years of technical education and twenty years of professional work have allowed me to become a printer monkey at the very ass end of space. Truly, my life's goal has been achieved."

I shrugged. "So let us do it," I said.

"I beg your pardon," Bennett said.

"If all you're doing is making sure the printer doesn't jam, that's something we could do for you," I said. "We'll work for you for a couple of hours, and in exchange you let us use a couple of PDAs while we're here. And then you can do whatever else you need to do."

"Or just go have lunch," Gretchen said. "Surprise your wife."

Bennett was silent for a minute, considering. "Offering to actually help me," he said. "No one's tried that tactic before. Very sneaky."

"We try," I said.

"And it is lunchtime," Bennett said. "And it is just printing."

"It is," I agreed.

"I suppose if you mess things up horribly it won't be too bad for me," Bennett said. "Your parents won't punish me for your incompetence."

"Nepotism working for you," I said.

"Not that there will be a problem," Gretchen said.

"No," I agreed. "We're excellent printer monkeys."

"All right," Bennett said, and reached across his worktable to grab his PDA. "You can use my PDA. You know how to use this?"

I gave him a look.

"Sorry. Okay." He punched up a queue of files on the display. "These are files that need to go through today. The printer is there"—he motioned to the far end of the worktable—"and the paper is in that bin. Feed it into the printer, stack the finished documents next to the printer. If it jams, and it will, several times, just yank out the paper and let it autofeed a new one. It'll automatically reprint the last page it was working on. While you're doing that you can sync up to the Entertainment archive. I downloaded all those files into one place."

"You downloaded everyone's files?" I asked, and felt ever so slightly violated.

"Relax," Bennett said. "Only public files are accessible. As long as you encrypted your private files before you turned in your PDA, like you were told to, your secrets are safe. Now, once you access a music file the speakers will kick on. Don't turn them up too high or you won't be able to hear the printer jam."

"You have speakers already set up?" Gretchen asked.

"Yes, Miss Trujillo," Bennett said. "Believe it or not, even chunky middle-aged men like to listen to music."

"I know that," Gretchen said. "My dad loves his."

"And on that ego-deflating note, I'll be off," Bennett said. "I'll be back in a couple of hours. Please don't destroy the place. And if anyone comes in asking if they can borrow a PDA, tell them the answer is no, and no exceptions." He set off.

"I hope he was being ironic there," I said.

"Don't care," Gretchen said, and grabbed for the PDA. "Give me that."

"Hey," I said, holding it away from her. "First things first." I set up the printer, queued the files, and then accessed "Delhi Morning." The opening strains flowed out of the speakers and I soaked them in. I swear I almost cried.

"It's amazing how badly you remembered this song," Gretchen said, about halfway though.

"Shhhhh," I said. "Here's that part."

She saw the expression on my face and kept quiet until the song was done.

Two hours is not enough time with a PDA if you haven't had access to one in months. And that's all I'm going to say about that. But it was enough time that both Gretchen and I came out of the information center feeling just like we'd spent hours soaking in a nice hot bath—which, come to think of it, was something that we hadn't done for months either.

"We should keep this to ourselves," Gretchen said.

"Yes," I said. "Don't want people to bug Mr. Bennett."

"No, I just like having something over everyone else," Gretchen said.

"There aren't a lot of people who can carry off petty," I said. "Yet somehow you do."

Gretchen nodded. "Thank you, madam. And now I need to get back home. I promised Dad I'd weed the vegetable garden before it got dark."

"Have fun rooting in the dirt," I said.

"Thanks," Gretchen said. "If you were feeling nice, you could always offer to help me."

"I'm working on my evil," I said.

"Be that way," Gretchen said.

"But let's get together after dinner tonight to practice," I said. "Now that we know how to sing that part."

"Sounds good," Gretchen said. "Or will, hopefully." She waved and headed off toward home. I looked around and decided today would be a good day for a walk.

And it was. The sun was up, the day was bright, particularly after a couple of hours in the light-swallowing information center, and Roanoke was deep into spring—which was really pretty, even if it turned out that all the native blooms smelled like rotten meat dipped in sewer sauce (that description courtesy of Magdy, who could string together a phrase now and then). But after a couple of months, you stop noticing the smell, or at least accept there's nothing you can do about it. When the whole planet smells, you just have to deal with it.

But what really made it a good day for a walk was how much our world has changed in just a couple of months. John and Jane let us all out of Croatoan not too long after Enzo, Gretchen, Magdy and I had our midnight jog, and the colonists had begun to move into the countryside, building homes and farms, helping and learning from the Mennonites who were in charge of our first crops, which were already now growing in the fields. They were genetically engineered to be fast-growing; we'd be having our first harvest in the not too far future. It looked like we were going to survive after all. I walked past these new houses and fields, waving to folks as I went.

Eventually I walked past the last homestead and over a small rise. On the other side of it, nothing but grass and scrub and the forest in a line to the side. This rise was destined to be part of another farm, and more farms and pastures would cut up this little valley even further. It's funny how even just a couple thousand humans could start to change a landscape. But at the moment there was no other person in it but me; it was my private spot, for as long as it lasted. Mine and mine alone. Well, and on a couple of occasions, mine and Enzo's.

I laid back, looked up at the clouds in the sky, and smiled to myself. Maybe we were in hiding at the farthest reaches of the galaxy, but right now, at this moment, things were pretty good. You can be happy anywhere, if you have the right point of view. And the ability to ignore the smell of an entire planet.

"Zoë," said a voice behind me.

I jerked up and then saw Hickory and Dickory. They had just come over the rise.

"Don't do that," I said, and got up.

"We wish to speak to you," Hickory said.

"You could do that at home," I said.

"Here is better," Hickory said. "We have concerns."

"Concerns about what?" I said, and rose to look at them. Something wasn't quite right about either of them, and it took me a minute to figure out what it was. "Why aren't you wearing your consciousness modules?" I asked.

"We are concerned about the increasing risks you are taking with your safety," Hickory said, answering the first but not the second of my questions. "And with your safety in a general sense."

"You mean, being here?" I said. "Relax, Hickory. It's broad daylight, and the Hentosz farm is just over the hill. Nothing bad is going to happen to me."

"There are predators here," Hickory said.

"There are yotes," I said, naming the dog-sized carnivores that we'd found lurking around Croatoan. "I can handle a yote."

"They move in packs," Hickory said.

"Not during the day," I said.

"You do not only come here in the day," Hickory said. "Nor do you always come alone."

I reddened a bit at that, and thought about getting angry with Hickory. But it wasn't wearing its consciousness. Getting angry with it wouldn't do anything. "I thought I told the two of you not to follow me when I want to have some private time," I said, as evenly as I could.

"We do not follow you," Hickory said. "But neither are we stupid. We know where you go and with whom. Your lack of care is putting you at risk, and you do not always allow us to accompany you anymore. We cannot protect you as we would prefer to, and are expected to."

"We have been here for months, guys." I said. "There hasn't been a single attack on anyone by anything."

"You would have been attacked that night in the woods had Dickory and I not come to find you," Hickory said. "Those were not yotes in the trees that night. Yotes cannot climb or move through trees."

"And you'll notice I'm nowhere near the forest," I said, and waved in the direction of the tree line. "And whatever was in there doesn't seem to come out here, because we'd have seen them by now if they did. We've been over this before, Hickory."

"It is not only the predators here that concern us," Hickory said.

"I'm not following you," I said.

"This colony is being searched for," Hickory said.

"If you saw the video, you'll remember that this Conclave group blasted that colony from the sky," I said. "If the Conclave finds us, I don't think even you are going to be able to do much to protect me."

"It is not the Conclave we are concerned about," Hickory said.

"You're the only ones, then," I said.

"The Conclave is not the only one who will seek this colony," Hickory said. "Others will search for it, to win favor from the Conclave, or to thwart it, or to take the colony for its own. They will not blast this colony from the sky. They will take it in the standard fashion. Invasion and slaughter."

"What is with the two of you today?" I said. I was trying to lighten the mood.

I failed. "And then there is the matter of who you are," Hickory said.

"What does that mean?" I said.

"You should know well," Hickory said. "You are not merely the daughter of the colony leaders. You are also important to us. To the Obin. That fact is not unknown, Zoë. You have been used as a bargaining chip your entire life. We Obin used you to bargain with your father to build us consciousness. You are a treaty condition between the Obin and the Colonial Union. We have no doubt that any who would attack this colony would try to take you in order to bargain with the Obin. Even the Conclave could be tempted to do this. Or they would kill you to wound us. To kill a symbol of ourselves."

"That's crazy," I said.

"It has happened before," Hickory said.

"What?" I said.

"When you lived on Huckleberry, there were no fewer than six attempts to capture or kill you," Hickory said. "The last just a few days before you left Huckleberry."

"And you never told me this?" I asked.

"It was decided by both your government and ours that neither you nor your parents needed to know," Hickory said. "You were a child, and your parents wished to give you as unremarkable a life as possible. The Obin wished to be able to provide them that. None of these attempts came close to success. We stopped each long before you would have been in danger. And in each case the Obin government expressed its displeasure with the races who made such attempts on your well-being."

I shuddered at that. The Obin were not people to make enemies of.

"We would not have told you at all—and we have violated our standing orders not to do so—were we not in our current situation," Hickory said. "We are cut off from the systems we had in place to keep you safe. And you are becoming increasingly independent in your actions and resentful of our presence in your life."

Those last words hit me like a slap. "I'm not resentful," I said. "I just want my own time. I'm sorry if that hurts you."

"We are not hurt," Hickory said. "We have responsibilities. How we fulfill those responsibilities must adapt to circumstance. We are making an adaptation now."

"I don't know what you mean," I said.

"It is time for you to learn how to defend yourself," Hickory said. "You want to be more independent from us, and we do not have all the resources we once had to keep you safe. We have always intended to teach you to fight. Now, for both of those reasons, it is necessary to begin that training."

"What do you mean, teach me to fight?" I asked.

"We will teach you to defend yourself physically," Hickory said. "To disarm an opponent. To use weapons. To immobilize your enemy. To kill your enemy if necessary."

"You want to teach me how to kill other people," I said.

"It is necessary," Hickory said.

"I'm not sure John and Jane would approve of that," I said.

"Major Perry and Lieutenant Sagan both know how to kill," Hickory said. "Both, in their military service, have killed others when it was necessary for their survival."

"But it doesn't mean that they want me to know," I said. "And also, I don't know that I want to know. You say you need to adapt how you fulfill your responsibilities. Fine. Figure out how to adapt them. But I'm not going to learn how to kill something else so you can feel like you're doing a better job doing something I'm not even sure I want you to do anymore."

"You do not wish us to defend you," Hickory said. "Or learn to defend yourself."

"I don't know!" I said. I yelled it in exasperation. "Okay? I hate having my face pushed into all of this. That I'm some special thing that needs to be defended. Well, you know what? Everyone here needs to be defended, Hickory. We're all in danger. Any minute hundreds of ships could show up over our heads and kill us all. I'm sick of it. I try to forget about it a little every now and then. That's what I was doing out here before the two of you showed up to crap over it all. So thank you very much for that."

Hickory and Dickory said nothing to that. If they had been wearing their consciousness, they'd probably be all twitchy and overloaded at that last outburst. But they were just standing there, impassive.

I counted to five and tried to get myself back under control. "Look," I said, in what I hoped was a more reasonable tone of voice. "Give me a couple of days to think about this, all right? You've dropped a lot on me all at once. Let me work it through in my head."

They still said nothing.

"Fine," I said. "I'm heading back." I brushed past Hickory.

And found myself on the ground.

I rolled and looked up at Hickory, confused. "What the hell?" I said, and made to stand up.

Dickory, who had moved behind me, roughly pushed me back into the grass and dirt.

I scrambled backward from the two of them. "Stop it," I said.

They drew their combat knives, and came toward me.

I grunted out a scream and bolted upright, running at full speed toward the top of the hill, toward the Hentosz farm. But Obin can run faster than humans. Dickory flanked me, got in front of me, and drew back its knife. I backpedaled, falling backward as I did. Dickory lunged. I screamed and rolled again and sprinted back down the side of the hill I came up.

Hickory was waiting for me and moving to intercept me. I tried to fake going left but it was having none of it, and grabbed for me, getting a grip on my left forearm. I hit at it with my right fist. Hickory deflected it easily, and then in a quick reversal slapped me sharply on the temple, releasing me as it did so. I staggered back, stunned. Hickory looped a leg around one of mine and jerked upward, lifting me completely off the ground. I fell backward and landed on my head. A white blast of pain flooded my skull, and all I could do was lie there, dazed.

There was heavy pressure on my chest. Hickory was kneeling on me, immobilizing me. I clawed desperately at it, but it held its head away from me on its long neck and ignored everything else. I shouted for help as loudly as I could, knowing no one could hear me, and yelling anyway.

I looked over and saw Dickory, standing to the side. "Please," I said. Dickory said nothing. And could feel nothing. Now I knew why the two of them came to see me without their consciousness.

I grabbed at Hickory's leg, on my chest, and tried to push it off. It pushed it in harder, offered another disorienting slap with one hand, and with the other raised it and then plunged it toward my head in one terrible and fluid move. I screamed.

"You are unharmed," Hickory said, at some point. "You may get up."

I stayed on the ground, not moving, eyes turned toward Hickory's knife, buried in the ground so close to my head that I couldn't actually focus on it. Then I propped myself up on my elbows, turned away from the knife, and threw up.

Hickory waited until I was done. "We offer no apology for this," it said. "And will accept whatever consequences for it that you may choose. Know only this: You were not physically harmed. You are unlikely even to bruise. We made sure of this. For all of that you were at our mercy in seconds. Others who will come for you will not show you such consideration. They will not hold back. They will not stop. They will have no concern for you. They will not show you mercy. They will seek to kill you. And they will succeed. We knew you would not believe us if we only told you this. We had to show you."

I rose to my feet, barely able to stay upright, and staggered back from the two of them as best I could. "God damn you," I said. "God damn you both. You stay away from me from now on." I headed back to Croatoan. As soon as my legs could do it, I started running.

"Hey," Gretchen said, coming into the information center and sealing the inside door behind her. "Mr. Bennett said I could find you here."

"Yeah," I said. "I asked him if I could be his printer monkey a little more today."

"Couldn't keep away from the music?" Gretchen said, trying to make a little joke.

I shook my head and showed her what I was looking at.

"These are classified files, Zoë," she said. "CDF intelligence reports. You're going to get in trouble if anyone ever finds out. And Bennett definitely won't let you back in here."

"I don't care," I said, and my voice cracked enough that Gretchen looked at me in alarm. "I have to know how bad it is. I have to know who's out there and what they want from us. From me. Look." I took the PDA and pulled a file on General Gau, the leader of the Conclave, the one who ordered the destruction of the colony on the video file. "This general is going to kill us all if he finds us, and we know next to nothing about him. What makes someone do this? Killing innocent people? What happened in his life that gets him to a place where wiping out entire planets seems like a good idea? Don't you think we should know? And we don't. We've got statistics on his military service and that's it." I tossed the PDA back on the table, carelessly, alarming Gretchen. "I want to know why this general wants me to die. Why he wants us all to die. Don't you?" I put my hand on my forehead and slumped a little against the worktable.

"Okay," Gretchen said, after a minute. "I think you need to tell me what happened to you today. Because this is not how you were when I left you this afternoon."

I glanced over at Gretchen, stifled a laugh, and then broke down and started crying. Gretchen came over to give me a hug, and after a good long while, I told her everything. And I do mean everything.

She was quiet after I had unloaded. "Tell me what you're thinking," I said.

"If I tell you, you're going to hate me," she said.

"Don't be silly," I said. "I'm not going to hate you."

"I think they're right," she said. "Hickory and Dickory."

"I hate you," I said.

She pushed me lightly. "Stop that," she said. "I don't mean they were right to attack you. That was just over the line. But, and don't take this the wrong way, you're not an ordinary girl."

"That's not true," I said. "Do you see me acting any different than anyone else? Ever? Do I hold myself out as someone special? Have you ever once heard me talk about any of this to people?"

"They know anyway," Gretchen said.

"I know that," I said. "But it doesn't come from me. I work at being normal."

"Okay, you're a perfectly normal girl," Gretchen said.

"Thank you," I said.

"A perfectly normal girl who's had six attempted assassinations," Gretchen said.

"But that's not me," I said, poking myself in the chest. "It's about me. About someone else's idea of who I am. And that doesn't matter to me."

"It would matter to you if you were dead," Gretchen said, and then held her hand up before I could respond. "And it would matter to your parents. It would matter to me. I'm pretty sure it would matter to Enzo. And it seems like it would matter a whole lot to a couple billion aliens. Think about that. Someone even thinks about coming after you, they bomb a planet."

"I don't want to think about it," I said.

"I know," Gretchen said. "But I don't think you have a choice anymore. No matter what you do, you're still who you are, whether you want to be or not. You can't change it. You've got to work with it."

"Thanks for that uplifting message," I said.

"I'm trying to help," Gretchen said.

I sighed. "I know, Gretchen. I'm sorry. I don't mean to bite your head off. I'm just getting tired of having my life be about other people's choices for me."

"This makes you different than any of the rest of us how, exactly?" Gretchen asked.

"My point," I said. "I'm a perfectly normal girl. Thank you for finally noticing."

"Perfectly normal," Gretchen agreed. "Except for being Queen of the Obin."

"Hate you," I said.

Gretchen grinned.

"Miss Trujillo said that you wanted to see us," Hickory said. Dickory and Gretchen, who had gotten the two Obin for me, stood to its side. We were standing on the hill where my bodyguards had attacked me a few days earlier.

"Before I say anything else, you should know I am still incredibly angry at you," I said. "I don't know that I will ever forgive you for attacking me, even if I understand why you did it, and why you thought you had to. I want to make sure you know that. And I want to make sure you feel it." I pointed to Hickory's consciousness collar, secure around its neck.

"We feel it," Hickory said, its voice quivering. "We feel it enough that we debated whether we could turn our consciousness back on. The memory is almost too painful to bear."

I nodded. I wanted to say good, but I knew it was the wrong thing to say, and that I would regret saying it. Didn't mean I couldn't think it, though, for the moment, anyway.

"I'm not going to ask you to apologize," I said. "I know you won't. But I want your word you will never do something like that again," I said.

"You have our word," Hickory said.

"Thank you," I said. I didn't expect they would do something like that again. That sort of thing works once if it works at all. But that wasn't the point. What I wanted was to feel like I could trust the two of them again. I wasn't there yet.

"Will you train?" Hickory asked.

"Yes," I said. "But I have two conditions." Hickory waited. "The first is that Gretchen trains with me."

"We had not prepared to train anyone other than you," Hickory said.

"I don't care," I said. "Gretchen is my best friend. I'm not going to learn how to save myself and not share that with her. And besides, I don't know if you've noticed, but the two of you aren't exactly human shaped. I think it will help to practice with another human as well as with you. But this is nonnegotiable. If you won't train Gretchen, I won't train. This is my choice. This is my condition."

Hickory turned to Gretchen. "Will you train?"

"Only if Zoë does," she said. "She's my best friend, after all."

Hickory looked over to me. "She has your sense of humor," it said.

"I hadn't noticed," I said.

Hickory turned back to Gretchen. "It will be very difficult," it said.

"I know," Gretchen said. "Count me in anyway."

"What is the other condition?" Hickory asked me.

"I'm doing this for the two of you," I said. "This learning to fight. I don't want it for myself. I don't think I need it. But you think I need it, and you've never asked me to do something you didn't know was important. So I'll do it. But now you have to do something for me. Something I want."

"What is it that you want?" Hickory asked.

"I want you to learn how to sing," I said, and gestured to Gretchen. "You teach us to fight, we teach you to sing. For the hootenannies."

"Sing," Hickory said.

"Yes, sing," I said. "People are still frightened of the two of you. And no offense, but you're not brimming with personality. But if we can get the four of us to do a song or two at the hootenannies, it could go a long way to making people comfortable with you."

"We have never sung," Hickory said.

"Well, you never wrote stories before either," I said. "And you wrote one of those. It's just like that. Except with singing. And then people wouldn't wonder why Gretchen and I are off with the two of you. Come on, Hickory, it'll be fun."

Hickory looked doubtful, and a funny thought came to me: Maybe Hickory is shy. Which seemed almost ridiculous; someone about to teach another person sixteen different ways to kill getting stage fright singing.

"I would like to sing," Dickory said. We all turned to Dickory in amazement.

"It speaks!" Gretchen said.

Hickory clicked something to Dickory in their native tongue; Dickory clicked back. Hickory responded, and Dickory replied, it seemed a bit forcefully. And then, God help me, Hickory actually sighed.

"We will sing," Hickory said.

"Excellent," I said.

"We will begin training tomorrow," Hickory said.

"Okay," I said. "But let's start singing practice today. Now."

"Now?" Hickory said.

"Sure," I said. "We're all here. And Gretchen and I have just the song for you."

FIFTEEN

The next several months were very tiring.

Early mornings: physical conditioning.

"You are soft," Hickory said to me and Gretchen the first day.

"Despicable lies," I said.

"Very well," Hickory said, and pointed to the tree line of the forest, at least a klick away. "Please run to the forest as quickly as you can. Then run back. Do not stop until you return."

We ran. By the time I got back, it felt like my lungs were trying to force themselves up my trachea, the better to smack me around for abusing them. Both Gretchen and I collapsed into the grass gasping.

"You are soft," Hickory repeated. I didn't argue, and not just because at the moment I was totally incapable of speaking. "We are done for today. Tomorrow we will truly begin with your physical conditioning. We will start slowly." It and Dickory walked away, leaving Gretchen and me to imagine ways we were going to murder Hickory and Dickory, once we could actually force oxygen back into our bodies.

Mornings: school, like every other kid and teen not actively working in a field. Limited books and supplies meant sharing with others. I shared my textbooks with Gretchen, Enzo, and Magdy. This worked fine when we were all speaking to each other, less so when some of us were not.

"Will you two please focus?" Magdy said, waving his hands in front of the two of us. We were supposed to be doing calculus.

"Stop it," Gretchen said. She had her head down on our table. It had been a hard workout that morning. "God, I miss coffee," she said, looking up at me.

"It would be nice to get to this problem sometime today," Magdy said.

"Oh, what do you care," Gretchen said. "It's not like any of us are going to college anyway."

"We still have to do it," Enzo said.

"You do it, then," Gretchen said. She leaned over and pushed the book toward the two of them. "It's not me or Zoë who has to learn this stuff. We already know it. You two are always waiting for us to do the work, and then just nodding like you actually know what we're doing."

"That's not true," Magdy said.

"Really? Fine," Gretchen said. "Prove it. Impress me."

"I think someone's morning exertions are making her a little grumpy," Magdy said, mockingly.

"What's that supposed to mean?" I said.

"It means that since the two of you started whatever it is you're doing, you've been pretty useless here," Magdy said. "Despite what Gretchen the Grump is hinting at, it's the two of us who have been carrying the two of you lately, and you know it."

"You're carrying us in math?" Gretchen said. "I don't think so."

"Everything else, sweetness," Magdy said. "Unless you think Enzo pulling together that report on the early Colonial Union days last week doesn't count."

"That's not 'we,' that's Enzo," Gretchen said. "And thank you, Enzo. Happy, Magdy? Good. Now let's all shut up about this." Gretchen put her head back down on the table. Enzo and Magdy looked at each other.

"Here, give me the book," I said, reaching for it. "I'll do this problem." Enzo slid the book over to me, not quite meeting my gaze.

Afternoons: training.

"So, how is the training going?" Enzo asked me one early evening, catching me as I limped home from the day's workout.

"Do you mean, can I kill you yet?" I asked.

"Well, no," Enzo said. "Although now that you mention it I'm curious. Can you?"

"It depends," I said, "on what it is you're asking me to kill you with." There was an uncomfortable silence after that. "That was a joke," I said.

"Are you sure?" Enzo said.

"We didn't even get around to how to kill things today," I said, changing the subject. "We spent the day learning how to move quietly. You know. To avoid capture."

"Or to sneak up on something," Enzo said.

I sighed. "Yes, okay, Enzo. To sneak up on things. To kill them. Because I like to kill. Kill and kill again, that's me. Little Zoë Stab Stab." I sped up my walking speed.

Enzo caught up with me. "Sorry," he said. "That wasn't fair of me."

"Really," I said.

"It's just a topic of conversation, you know," Enzo said. "What you and Gretchen are doing."

I stopped walking. "What kind of conversation?" I asked.

"Well, think about it," Enzo said. "You and Gretchen are spending your afternoons preparing for the apocalypse. What do you think people are talking about?"

"It's not like that," I said.

"I know," Enzo said, reaching out and touching my arm, which reminded me we spent less time touching each other lately. "I've told people that, too. Doesn't keep people from talking, though. That and the fact that it's you and Gretchen."

"So?" I said.

"You're the daughter of the colony leaders, she's the daughter of the guy everyone knows is next in line on the colony council," Enzo said. "It looks like you're getting special treatment. If it was just you, people would get it. People know you've got that weird thing you have with the Obin—"

"It's not weird," I said.

Enzo looked at me blankly.

"Yeah, okay," I said.

"People know you've got that thing with the Obin, so they wouldn't think about it if it was just you," Enzo said. "But the two of you is making people nervous. People wonder if you guys know something we don't."

"That's ridiculous," I said. "Gretchen is my best friend. That's why I asked her. Should I have asked someone else?"

"You could have," Enzo said.

"Like who?" I said.

"Like me," Enzo said. "You know, your boyfriend."

"Yeah, because people wouldn't talk about that," I said.

"Maybe they would and maybe they wouldn't," Enzo said. "But at least I'd get to see you every once in a while."

I didn't have any good answer to that. So I just gave Enzo a kiss.

"Look, I'm not trying to make you feel bad or guilty or whatever," Enzo said, when I was done. "But I would like to see more of you."

"That statement can be interpreted in many different ways," I said.

"Let's start with the innocent ones," Enzo said. "But we can go from there if you want."

"And anyway, you see me every day," rewinding the conversation just a little. "And we always spend time together at the hootenannies."

"I don't count doing schoolwork together as time together," Enzo said. "And as much fun as it is to admire how you trained Hickory to imitate a sitar solo—"

"That's Dickory," I said. "Hickory does the drum sounds."

Enzo gently put a finger to my lips. "As much fun as it is," he repeated. "I'd rather have some time for just you and me." He kissed me, which was pretty effective punctuation.

"How about now?" I said, after the kiss.

"Can't," Enzo said. "On my way home to babysit Maria and Katherina so my parents can have dinner with friends."

"Waaah," I said. "Kiss me, tell me you want to spend time together, leave me hanging. Nice."

"But I have tomorrow afternoon free," Enzo said. "Maybe then. After you're done with your stabbing practice."

"We already did stabbing," I said. "Now we're on to strangulation."

Silence.

"Joke," I said.

"I only have your word for that," Enzo said.

"Cute." I kissed him again. "See you tomorrow."

The next day training went long. I skipped dinner to head to Enzo's parents' homestead. His mother said he'd waited around, and then headed over to Magdy's. We didn't talk to each other much the next day during school.

Evenings: study.

"We have reached an agreement with Jerry Bennett to allow you to use the information center in the evenings twice a week," Hickory said.

I suddenly felt sorry for Jerry Bennett, who I had heard was more than a little terrified of Hickory and Dickory, and probably would have agreed to anything they asked just so long as they left him alone. I made a mental note to invite Bennett to the next hootenanny. There's nothing to make an Obin look less threatening than to see one in front of a crowd, bobbing its neck back and forth and making like a tabla drum.

Hickory continued. "While you are there, you will study the Colonial Union files of other sentient species."

"Why do you want us to learn about them?" Gretchen asked.

"To know how to fight them," Hickory said. "And how to kill them."

"There are hundreds of species in the Conclave," I said. "Are we supposed to learn about each of them? That's going to take more than two nights a week."

"We will be focusing on species who are not members of the Conclave," Hickory said.

Gretchen and I looked at each other. "But they're not the ones planning to kill us," Gretchen said.

"There are many trying to kill you," Hickory said. "And some may be more motivated than others. For example, the Rraey. They recently lost a war with the Enesha, who took control of most of their colonies before they were themselves defeated by the Obin. The Rraey are no longer a direct threat to any established race or colony. But if they were to find you here, there is no doubt what they would do."

I shuddered. Gretchen noticed. "You okay?" she asked.

"I'm fine," I said, too quickly. "I've met the Rraey before." Gretchen looked at me strangely but didn't say anything after that.

"We have a list for you," Hickory said. "Jerry Bennett has already prepared the files you have access to for each species. Take special note of the physiology of each race. This will be important in our instruction."

"To learn how to fight them," I said.

"Yes," Hickory said. "And to learn how to kill them."

Three weeks into our studies I pulled up a race who were not on our list.

"Wow, they're scary-looking," Gretchen said, looking over my shoulder after she noticed I had been reading for a while.

"They're Consu," I said. "They're scary, period." I handed my PDA over to Gretchen. "They're the most advanced race we know about. They make us look like we're banging rocks together. And they're the ones who made the Obin what they are today."

"Genetically engineered them?" Gretchen asked. I nodded. "Well, maybe next time they can code for personality. What are you looking at them for?"

"I'm just curious," I said. "Hickory and Dickory have talked to me about them before. They're the closet thing the Obin have to a higher power."

"Their gods," Gretchen said.

I shrugged. "More like a kid with an ant farm," I said. "An ant farm and a magnifying glass."

"Sounds lovely," Gretchen said, and handed back the PDA. "Hope I never get to meet them. Unless they're on my side."

"They're not on a side," I said. "They're above."

"Above is a side," Gretchen said.

"Not our side," I said, and switched the PDA back to what I was supposed to be reading.

Late evening: everything else.

"Well, this is a surprise," I said to Enzo, who was sitting on my doorstep as I came back from another thrilling night at the information center. "I haven't seen you too much recently."

"You haven't seen much of anybody recently," Enzo said, standing up to greet me. "It's just you and Gretchen. And you've been avoiding me since we broke up the study group."

"I'm not avoiding you," I said.

"You haven't been going out of your way to look for me," Enzo said.

Well, he had me there.

"I don't blame you for it," I said, changing the subject a little. "It's not your fault Magdy threw that fit of his." After several weeks of increased sniping, things between Magdy and Gretchen finally reached toxic levels; the two of them had a shouting match in class and Magdy ended up saying some fairly not forgivable things and then stomping off, Enzo trailing behind. And that was the end of our little band.

"Yeah, it's all Magdy's fault," Enzo said. "Gretchen's poking at him until he snapped didn't have anything to do with it at all."

Already this conversation had gone twice to places I didn't want it to go, and the rational part of my brain was just telling me to let it go and change the subject. But then there was the not quite rational part, which was suddenly getting really annoyed. "So are you hanging out on my doorstep just to dump on my best friend, or is there some other reason you dropped by?"

Enzo opened his mouth to say something, and then just shook his head. "Forget it," he said, and started to walk off.

I blocked his path. "No," I said. "You came here for a reason. Tell me what it is."

"Why don't I see you anymore?" Enzo said.

"Is that what you came here to ask me?" I said.

"No," Enzo said. "It's not what I came here to say. But it's what I'm asking you now. It's been two weeks since Magdy and Gretchen did their thing, Zoë. It was between the two of them, but I've hardly seen you since then. If you're not actually avoiding me, you're faking it really well."

"If it was between Gretchen and Magdy, why did you leave when he did?" I said.

"He's my friend," Enzo said. "Someone had to calm him down. You know how he gets. You know I'm his heat sink. What kind of question is that?"

"I'm just saying it's not just between Magdy and Gretchen," I said. "It's between all of us. You and me and Gretchen and Magdy. When was the last time you did anything without Magdy?"

"I don't remember him being there when we spend time together," Enzo said.

"You know what I mean," I said. "You're always following him, keeping him from getting hit by someone or breaking his neck or doing something stupid."

"I'm not his puppy," Enzo said, and for that minute he actually got a little angry. Which was new.

I ignored it. "You're his friend," I said. "His best friend. And Gretchen is mine. And right now our best friends can't stand the sight of each other. And that leaks into us, Enzo. Let me ask you, right now, how do you feel about Gretchen? You don't like her very much, do you?"

"We've had better days," Enzo said.

"Right. Because she and your best friend are at it. I feel the same way about Magdy. I guarantee you he feels the same way about me. And Gretchen isn't feeling very friendly to you. I want to spend time with you, Enzo, but most of the time, both of us are a package deal. We come with our best friends attached. And I don't want the drama right now."

"Because it's easier just not to bother," Enzo said.

"Because I'm tired, Enzo," I said, spitting out the words. "Okay? I'm tired. Every morning I wake up and I have to run or do strength exercises or something that tires me out right after I've gotten out of bed. I'm tired before the rest of you are even awake. Then school. Then an entire afternoon of getting physically beat up in order to learn how to defend myself, on the chance some aliens want to come down here and kill us all. Then I spend my evenings reading up on every single race out there, not because it's interesting, but just in case I need to murder one of them, I'll know where its soft spots are. I hardly have time to think about anything else, Enzo. I am tired.

"Do you think all of this is fun for me? Do you think it's fun for me not to see you? To spend all my time learning to hurt and kill things? Do you think it's fun for me that every single day I get my nose rubbed in the fact there's a whole universe out there just waiting to murder us? When was the last time you thought about it? When was the last time Magdy thought about it? I think about it every day, Enzo. My time is spent doing nothing but. So don't tell me that it's just easier for me not to bother with the drama. You have no idea. I'm sorry. But you don't."

Enzo stared at me for a minute, and then reached over to wipe my cheeks. "You could tell me, you know," he said.

I laughed a small laugh. "I don't have time," I said. That got a smile from Enzo. "And anyway, I don't want you to worry."

"It's a little late for that," Enzo said.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"It's all right," he said.

"I miss it, you know," I said, wiping my own face. "Spending time with you. Even when it meant spending time with Magdy. I miss having the time to really talk to you. I miss watching you fail at dodgeball. I miss you sending me poems. I miss all of it. I'm sorry that we've gotten mad at each other lately, and that we didn't do something to fix it. I'm sorry and I miss you, Enzo."

"Thank you," Enzo said.

"You're welcome," I said.

We stood there for a minute, looking at each other.

"You came here to break up with me, didn't you," I said, finally.

"Yeah," said Enzo. "Yeah, I did. Sorry."

"Don't be," I said. "I haven't been a very good girlfriend."

"Yes you have," Enzo said. "When you've had the time."

Another shaky laugh from me. "Well, that's the problem, isn't it," I said.

"Yes," Enzo said, and I know he was sorry he felt he had to say it.

And just like that my first relationship was over, and I went to bed, and I didn't sleep.

And then I got up when the sun came up and walked out to our exercise area, and started everything again. Exercise. School. Training. Study.

A very tiring time.

And this is how my days went, most days, for months, until we had been at Roanoke for almost an entire year.

And then things started happening. Fast.

SIXTEEN

"We're looking for Joe Loong," Jane said, to the assembled search team, at the edge of the forest by Joe's house. Dad, who was standing with her and Savitri, was letting her run the show. "He's been missing for the last two days. Therese Arlien, his companion, tells me that he was excited about the return of the fanties to the area and told her he was thinking of trying to get close to one of the herds. We're working under the assumption that's what he did, and then either got lost, or perhaps got injured by one of the animals."

Jane motioned at the line of trees. "We're going to search the area in teams of four, spreading out in a line from here. Everyone in a group stays in voice contact with the group members on either side; every one at the left or right of a group also stays in voice contact with your opposite number from the next group over. Call to each other every couple of minutes. We'll do this slow and careful; I don't want any of us adding to the number of the lost, understand? If you lose voice contact with the other members of your group, stop and stay where you are, and let your group members reestablish contact. If the person next to you doesn't respond when you call, stop and alert those you are in contact with. Again, let's not lose anyone else, especially when we're trying to find Joe. Now, you all know who we are looking for?"

There were general nods; most of the hundred and fifty or so folks who'd showed up to look for Loong were friends of his. I personally had only the vaguest of ideas of what he looked like, but I was going on the idea that if someone came running toward us, waving his hands and saying, "Thank God you found me," it was likely to be him. And joining the search party was getting me a day out of school. You can't argue with that.

"All right, then," Mom said. "Let's organize into teams." People started grouping together in fours; I turned to Gretchen and figured she and I would be a team with Hickory and Dickory.

"Zoë," Mom said. "You're with me. Bring Hickory and Dickory."

"Can Gretchen come with us?" I asked.

"No," Jane said. "Too large. Sorry, Gretchen."

"It's all right," Gretchen said to Mom, and then turned back to me. "Try to survive without me," she said.

"Stop," I said. "It's not like we're dating." She grinned and wandered off to join another group.

After several minutes three dozen groups of four were spread out over more than half a klick of tree line. Jane gave the signal and we started in.

Then came the boring: three hours of stomping through the woods, slowly, searching for signs that Joe Loong had wandered in this direction, calling out to each other every few minutes. I found nothing, Mom to my left found nothing, Hickory to my right found nothing, and Dickory to its right found nothing either. Not to be hopelessly shallow about it, but I thought it would be at least a little more interesting than it was.

"Are we going to take a break anytime soon?" I asked Jane, walking up to her when she wandered into visual range.

"You're tired?" she said. "I would think that after all the training you do, a walk in the woods would be an easy thing."

I paused at this comment; I didn't make any secret of my training with Hickory and Dickory—it would be hard to hide, given how much time I gave to it—but it's not something that the two of us talked about much. "It's not a stamina issue," I said. "It's a boredom issue. I've been scanning the forest floor for three hours. I'm getting a little punchy."

Jane nodded. "We'll take a rest soon. If we don't find something in this area in the next hour, I'll regather people on the other side of Joe's homestead and try over there," she said.

"You don't mind me doing what I do with Hickory and Dickory, do you?" I asked. "It's not like I talk about it to you much. Either with you or Dad."

"It worried us the first couple of weeks, when you came in covered with bruises and then went to sleep without actually saying hello to us," Jane said. She kept walking and scanning as she talked. "And I was sorry it broke up your friendship with Enzo. But you're old enough now to make your own choices about what you want to do with your time, and we both decided that we weren't going to breathe down your neck about it."

I was about to say, Well, it wasn't entirely my own choice to do this, but Jane kept talking. "Beside that, we think it's smart," she said. "I don't know when we'll be found, but I think we will be. I can take care of myself; John can take care of himself. We were soldiers. We're happy to see that you're learning to take care of yourself, too. When it comes down to it, it might be the thing that makes a difference."

I stopped walking. "Well, that was a depressing thing to say," I said.

Jane stopped and came back to me. "I didn't mean it that way," she said.

"You just said I might be alone at the end of all this," I said. "That each of us will have to take care of ourselves. That's not exactly a happy thought, you know."

"I didn't mean it that way," Jane said. She reached over and touched the jade elephant pendant she had given me years ago. "John and I will never leave you, Zoë. Never abandon you. You need to know that. It's a promise we made to you. What I am saying is that we will need each other. Knowing how to take care of ourselves means we are better able to help each other. It means that you will be able to help us. Think about that, Zoë. Everything might come down to what you are able to do. For us. And for the colony. That's what I'm saying."

"I doubt it's going to come to that," I said.

"Well, I doubt it too," Jane said. "Or at least I hope it doesn't come to that."

"Thanks," I said, wryly.

"You know what I mean," Mom said.

"I do," I said. "I think it's funny how bluntly you put it."

To the left of us there was a faint scream. Jane swiveled in its direction and then turned back to face me; her expression left very little doubt that whatever mom-daughter bonding moment we'd been having was at a very abrupt end. "Stay here," she said. "Send word down the line to halt. Hickory, come with me." The two of them sped off in the direction of the scream quietly at what seemed like an almost impossible high speed; I was suddenly reminded that, yes, in fact, my mom was a veteran warrior. There's a thought for you. It was just now I finally had the tools to really appreciate it.

Several minutes later Hickory returned to us, clicked something to Dickory in their native tongue as he passed, and looked at me.

"Lieutenant Sagan says that you are to return to the colony with Dickory," Hickory said.

"Why?" I asked. "Have they found Joe?"

"They have," Hickory said.

"Is he all right?" I asked.

"He is dead," Hickory said. "And Lieutenant Sagan believes there is reason to worry that the search parties may be in danger if they stay out here much longer."

"Why?" I asked. "Because of the fanties? Was he trampled or something?"

Hickory looked at me levelly. "Zoë, you do not need me to remind you of your last trip into the forest and what followed you then."

I went very cold. "No," I said.

"Whatever they are, they appear to follow the fantie herds as they migrate," Hickory said. "They have followed those herds back here. And it appears that they found Joseph Loong in the woods."

"Oh my God," I said. "I have to tell Jane."

"I assure you, she has figured it out," Hickory said. "And I am to find Major Perry now, so he will know presently. This is being taken care of. The lieutenant asks for you to return to Croatoan. As do I. Dickory will accompany you. Go now. And I advise silence until your parents speak of this publicly." Hickory strode off into the distance. I watched it go, and then headed home, fast, Dickory matching my strides, both of us moving quietly, as we had practiced so many times.

The fact that Joe Loong was dead spread fast in the colony. Rumors of how he died spread even faster. Gretchen and I sat in front of Croatoan's community center and watched a revolving cast of rumormongers offer up their takes.

Jun Lee and Evan Black were the first to talk; they had been part of the group that had found Loong's body. They were enjoying their moment in the spotlight as they told everyone who would listen about how they found Loong, and how he had been attacked, and how whatever had attacked him had eaten part of him. Some people speculated that a pack of yotes, the local carnivores, had cornered Joe Loong and brought him down, but Jun and Evan laughed at that. We'd all seen the yotes; they were the size of small dogs and ran from the colonists whenever they saw them (and for good reason, since the colonists had taken to shooting at them for bothering the livestock). No yote, or even a pack of yotes, they said, could have done to Joe what they'd seen had been done to him.

Shortly after these gory tidbits had gotten around, the entire colony council met in Croatoan's medical bay, where Loong's body had been taken. The fact that the government was being pulled into it made people suspect it might actually have been murder (the fact that the "government" in this case was just twelve people who spent most of their time hoeing rows like everyone else didn't matter). Loong had been seeing a woman who'd recently dumped her husband, so now the husband was a prime suspect; maybe he'd followed Loong into the woods, killed him, and then yotes had at him.

This theory made Jun and Evan unhappy—their version with a mysterious predator was much more sexy—but everyone else seemed to like it better. The inconvenient fact that the presumed murderer in this case had already been in Jane's custody on a different charge and couldn't possibly have done the deed seemed to escape most people's notice.

Gretchen and I knew the murder rumor had nothing to it, and that Jun and Evan's theory was closer to reality than not, but we kept our mouths shut. Adding what we knew wouldn't make anyone feel less paranoid at the moment.

"I know what it is," Magdy said, to a bunch of male friends.

I nudged Gretchen with an elbow and motioned with my head at Magdy. She rolled her eyes and very loudly called him over before he could say anything else.

"Yes?" he said.

"Are you stupid?" Gretchen asked.

"See, this is what I miss about you, Gretchen," Magdy said. "Your charm."

"Just like what I miss about you is your brains," Gretchen said. "What were you about to say to your little group of friends, I wonder?"

"I was going to tell them about what happened when we followed the fanties," Magdy said.

"Because you think it would be smart at the moment to give people another reason to panic," Gretchen said.

"No one's panicking," Magdy said.

"Not yet," I said. "But if you start telling that story, you're not going to help things, Magdy."

"I think people should know what we're up against," Magdy said.

"We don't know what we're up against," I said. "We never actually saw anything. You're just going to be adding to the rumors. Let my parents and Gretchen's dad and the rest of the council do their jobs right now and figure out what's actually going on and what to tell people without you making their job harder."

"I'll take that under advisement, Zoë," Magdy said, and turned to go back to his pals.

"Fine," Gretchen said. "Take this under advisement, too: You tell your pals there about what followed us out there in the woods, and I'll tell them the part where you ended up eating dirt because Hickory dropped you to the ground after you panicked and took a shot at him."

"A really lousy shot," I said. "One where you almost blew off your own toe."

"Good point," Gretchen said. "We'll have fun telling that part."

Magdy narrowed his eyes at both of us and stomped off toward his pals without another word.

"Think it'll work?" I asked.

"Of course it'll work," Gretchen said. "Magdy's ego is the size of a planet. The amount of time and effort he puts into doing things to make himself look good is astounding. He's not going to let us mess with that."

As if on cue, Magdy glanced over at Gretchen. She waved and smiled. Magdy surreptitiously flipped her off and started talking to his friends. "See," Gretchen said. "He's not that hard to understand."

"You liked him once," I reminded her.

"I still like him," Gretchen said. "He's very cute, you know. And funny. He just needs to pull his head out of a certain part of his anatomy. Maybe in another year he'll be tolerable."

"Or two," I said.

"I'm optimistic," Gretchen said. "Anyway, that's one rumor squashed for now."

"It's not really a rumor," I said. "We really were followed that night. Hickory said so."

"I know," Gretchen said. "And it's going to come out sooner or later. I'd just rather not have it involve us. My dad still doesn't know I did all that sneaking out, and he's the sort of guy that believes in retroactive punishment."

"So you're not really worried about avoiding panic," I said. "You're just covering your own tail."

"Guilty," Gretchen said. "But avoiding panic is how I'm rationalizing it."

But as it happens, we didn't avoid panic for long.

Paulo Gutierrez was a member of the colonial council, and it was there he found out that Joe Loong had not only been killed, but that he'd been murdered—and not by a human being. There really was something else out there. Something smart enough to make spears and knives. Something smart enough to turn poor Joe Loong into food.

The council members had been ordered by my parents not to talk about this fact yet, in order to avoid a panic. Paulo Gutierrez ignored them. Or, actually, defied them.

"They told me it was covered by something called the State Secrets Act, and that I couldn't tell you about it," Gutierrez told a group that surrounded him and a few other men, all carrying rifles. "I say to hell with that. There's something that's out there right now, killing us. They have weapons. They say they follow the fantie herds, but I think they could have just been in the woods all this time, sizing us up, so they would know how to hunt us. They hunted Joe Loong. Hunted him and killed him. Me and the boys here are planning to return the favor." And then Gutierrez and his hunting party tromped off in the direction of the woods.

Gutierrez's declaration and news of his hunting party raced through the colony. I heard about it as kids came running up to the community center with all the latest; by that time Gutierrez and his crew had already been in the woods for a while. I went to tell my parents, but John and Jane were already off to bring back the hunting party. The two of them were former military; I didn't think they would have any trouble bringing them back.

But I was wrong. John and Jane found the hunting party, but before they could drag them back, the creatures in the woods ambushed them all. Gutierrez and all his men were killed in the attack. Jane was stabbed in the gut. John chased after the fleeing creatures and caught up with them at the tree line, where they attacked another colonist at his homestead. That colonist was Hiram Yoder, one of the Mennonites who helped save the colony by training the rest of us how to plant and farm without the help of computerized machinery. He was a pacifist and didn't try to fight the creatures. They killed him anyway.

In the space of a couple of hours, six colonists were dead, and we learned that we weren't alone on Roanoke—and what was here with us was getting used to hunting us.

But I was more worried about my mom.

"You can't see her yet," Dad said to me. "Dr. Tsao is working on her right now."

"Is she going to be okay?" I asked.

"She'll be okay," Dad said. "She said it was not as bad as it looked."

"How bad did it look?" I asked him.

"It looked bad," Dad said, and then realized that honesty wasn't really what I was looking for at the moment. "But, look, she ran after those things after she'd been wounded. If she had been really injured, she wouldn't have been able to do that, right? Your mom knows her own body. I think she'll be fine. And anyway, she's being worked on right now. I wouldn't be at all surprised if she's walking around like nothing happened by this time tomorrow."

"You don't have to lie to me," I said, although per the previous comment he was actually telling me what I wanted to hear.

"I'm not lying," Dad said. "Dr. Tsao is excellent at what she does. And your mom is a very fast healer these days."

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"I've had better days," he said, and something flat and tired in his voice made me decide not to press the matter any further. I gave him a hug and told him I was going to visit Gretchen and would be over there for a while, in order to stay out of his hair.

Night was falling as I stepped out of our bungalow. I looked out toward Croatoan's gate and saw colonists streaming in from their homesteads; no one, it seemed, wanted to spend the night outside the walls of the colony village. I didn't blame them one bit.

I turned to head to Gretchen's and was mildly surprised to see her striding up under full steam. "We have a problem," she said to me.

"What is it?" I said.

"Our idiot friend Magdy has taken a group of his friends into the forest," Gretchen said.

"Oh, God," I said. "Tell me Enzo isn't with him."

"Of course Enzo's with him," Gretchen said. "Enzo's always with him. Trying to talk sense to him even as he's following him right off a cliff."

SEVENTEEN

The four of us moved as silently as we could into the forest, from the place where Gretchen had seen Magdy, Enzo and their two friends go into the tree line. We listened for their sounds; none of them had been trained to move quietly. It wasn't a good thing for them, especially if the creatures decided to hunt them. It was better for us, because we wanted to track them. We listened for our friends on the ground, we watched and listened for movement in the trees. We already knew whatever they were could track us. We hoped we might be able to track them, too.

In the distance, we heard rustling, as if of quick, hurried movement. We headed that direction, Gretchen and I taking point, Hickory and Dickory fast behind.

Gretchen and I had been training for months, learning how to move, how to defend ourselves, how to fight and how to kill, if it was necessary. Tonight, any part of what we learned might have to be used. We might have to fight. We might even have to kill.

I was so scared that if I stopped running, I think I would have collapsed into a ball and never gotten up.

I didn't stop running. I kept going. Trying to find Enzo and Magdy before something else did. Trying to find them, and to save them.

"After Gutierrez left, Magdy didn't see any point in keeping our story quiet anymore, so he started blabbing to his friends," Gretchen had told me. "He was giving people the idea that he'd actually faced these things and had managed to keep them off while the rest of us were getting away."

"Idiot," I said.

"When you parents came back without the hunting party, a group of his friends came to him about organizing a search," Gretchen said. "Which was actually just an excuse for a bunch of them to stalk through the forest with guns. My dad caught wind of this and tried to step on its head. He reminded them that five adults just went into the forest and didn't come out. I thought that was the end of it, but now I hear that Magdy just waited until my dad went to go visit yours before gathering up some like-minded idiots to head off into the woods."

"Didn't anyone notice them heading off?" I asked.

"They told people they were going to do a little target practice on Magdy's parents' homestead," Gretchen said. "No one's going to complain about them doing that right about now. Once they got there they just took off. The rest of Magdy's family is here in town like everyone else. No one knows they're missing."

"How'd you find out about this?" I asked. "It's not like Magdy would tell you this right now."

"His little group left someone behind," Gretchen said. "Isaiah Miller was going to go with him, but his dad wouldn't let him have the rifle for 'target practice.' I heard him complaining about that and then basically intimidated the rest of it out of him."

"Has he told anybody else?" I asked.

"I don't think so," Gretchen said. "Now that he's had time to think about it I don't think he wants to get in trouble. But we should tell someone."

"We'll cause a panic if we do," I said. "Six people have already died. If we tell people four more people—four kids—have gone off into the woods, people will go insane. Then we'll have more people heading off with guns and more people dying, either by these things or by accidentally shooting each other because they're so wired up."

"What do you want to do, then?" Gretchen asked.

"We've been training for this, Gretchen," I said.

Gretchen's eyes got very wide. "Oh, no," she said. "Zoë, I love you, but that's loopy. There's no way you're getting me out there to be a target for these things again, and there's no way I'm going to let you go out there."

"It wouldn't just be us," I said. "Hickory and Dickory—"

"Hickory and Dickory are going to tell you you're nuts, too," Gretchen said. "They just spent months teaching you how to defend yourself, and you think they're going to be at all happy with you putting yourself out there for something to use as spear practice. I don't think so."

"Let's ask them," I said.

"Miss Gretchen is correct," Hickory said to me, once I called for it and Dickory. "This is a very bad idea. Major Perry and Lieutenant Sagan are the ones who should deal with this matter."

"My dad's got the whole rest of the colony to worry about at the moment," I said. "And Mom's in the medical bay, getting fixed from when she dealt with this the last time."

"You don't think that tells you something?" Gretchen said. I turned on her, a little angry, and she held up a hand. "Sorry, Zoë. That came out wrong. But think about it. Your mom was a Special Forces soldier. She fought things for a living. And if she came out of this with a wound bad enough for her to spend her night in the medical bay, it means that whatever is out there is serious business."

"Who else can do this?" I asked. "Mom and Dad went after that hunting party on their own for a reason—they had been trained to fight and deal with experiences like that. Anyone else would have gotten themselves killed. They can't go after Magdy and Enzo right now. If anyone else goes after them, they're going to be in just as much danger as those two and their other friends. We're the only ones who can do this."

"Don't get angry at me for saying this," Gretchen said. "But it sounds like you're excited to do this. Like you want to go out there and fight something."

"I want to find Enzo and Magdy," I said. "That's all I want to do."

"We should inform your father," Hickory said.

"If we inform my father he'll tell us no," I said. "And the longer we talk about this the longer it's going to take to find our friends."

Hickory and Dickory put their heads together and clacked quietly for a minute. "This is not a good idea," Hickory said, finally. "But we will help you."

"Gretchen?" I asked.

"I'm trying to decide if Magdy is worth it," she said.

"Gretchen," I said.

"It's a joke," she said. "The sort you make when you're about to wet your pants."

"If we are to do this," Hickory said. "We must do it on the assumption that we will engage in combat. You have been trained with firearms and hand weapons. You must be prepared to use them if necessary."

"I understand," I said. Gretchen nodded.

"Then let us get ready," Hickory said. "And let us do so quietly."

Any confidence that I had any idea what I was doing left me the moment we entered the forest, when the running through the trees brought me back to the last time I raced through them at night, some unknown thing or things pacing us invisibly. The difference between now and then was that I had been trained and prepared to fight. I thought it would make a difference in how I felt.

It didn't. I was scared. And not just a little.

The rustling, rushing sound we had heard was getting closer to us and heading right for us, on the ground and moving fast. The four of us halted and hid and prepared ourselves to deal with whatever was coming at us.

Two human forms burst out of the brush and ran in a straight line past where Gretchen and I were hiding. Hickory and Dickory grabbed them as they passed by them; the boys screamed in terror as Hickory and Dickory took them down. Their rifles went skidding across the ground.

Gretchen and I rushed over to them and tried to calm them down. Being human helped.

Neither was Enzo or Magdy.

"Hey," I said, as soothingly as I could, to the one closest to me. "Hey. Relax. You're safe. Relax." Gretchen was doing the same to the other one. Eventually I recognized who they were: Albert Yoo and Michel Gruber. Both Albert and Michel were people I had long filed away under the "kind of a twit" category, so I didn't spend any more time with them than I had to. They had returned the favor.

"Albert," I said, to the one closest to me. "Where are Enzo and Magdy?"

"Get your thing off of me!" Albert said. Dickory was still restraining him.

"Dickory," I said. It let Albert go. "Where are Enzo and Magdy?" I repeated.

"I don't know," Albert said. "We got separated. Those things in the trees started chanting at us and Michel and I got spooked and took off."

"Chanting?" I asked.

"Or singing or clicking or whatever," Albert said. "We were walking along, looking for these things when all these noises started coming out of the trees. Like they were trying to show us that they had snuck up on us without us even knowing."

This worried me. "Hickory?" I asked.

"There is nothing significant in the trees," it said. I relaxed a little.

"They surrounded us," Albert said. "And then Magdy took a shot at them. And then things really got loud. Michel and I got out of there. We just ran. We didn't see where Magdy and Enzo went."

"How long ago was this?" I asked.

"I don't know," Albert said. "Ten minutes, fifteen. Something like that."

"Show us where you came from," I said. Albert pointed. I nodded. "Get up," I said. "Dickory will take you and Michel back to the tree line. You can get back from there."

"I'm not going anywhere with that thing," Michel said, his first contribution to the evening.

"Okay, then you have two choices," I said. "Stay here and hope we come back for you before these things do, or hope that you make it to the tree line before they catch up with you. Or you can let Dickory help you and maybe survive. Your choice." I said it a little more forcefully than I had to, but I was annoyed that this idiot didn't want help staying alive.

"Okay," he said.

"Good," I said. I picked up their rifles and handed them to Dickory, and took his. "Take them to the tree line near Magdy's homestead. Don't give them back their rifles until you get there. Come back and find us as soon as you can." Dickory nodded, intimidated Albert and Michel into movement, and headed off.

"I never liked them," Gretchen said as they left.

"I can see why," I said, and gave Dickory's rifle to Hickory. "Come on. Let's keep going."

We heard them before we saw them. Actually, Hickory, whose hearing goes above human range, heard them—trilling and chirping and chanting. "They are singing," Hickory said quietly, and led Gretchen and me to them. Dickory arrived, silently, just before we found them. Hickory handed over its rifle.

In the small clearing were six figures.

Enzo and Magdy were the first I recognized. They knelt on the ground, heads down, waiting for whatever was going to happen to them. The light was not good enough for me to see any expression on either of their faces, but I didn't have to see their faces to know that they were scared. Whatever had happened to the two of them had gone badly, and now they were just waiting for it to end. However it would end.

I took in Enzo's kneeling form and remembered in a rush why I loved him. He was there because he was trying to be a good friend for Magdy. Trying to keep him out of trouble, or at the very least to share his trouble if he could. He was a decent human being, which is rare enough but is something of a miracle in a teenage boy. I came out here for him because I still loved him. It had been weeks since we'd said anything more than a simple "hello" at school—when you break up in a small community you have to make some space—but it didn't matter. I was still connected to him. Some part of him stayed in my heart, and I imagined would for as long as I lived.

Yes, it was a really inconvenient place and time to realize all of this, but these things happen when they happen. And it didn't make any noise, so it was all right.

I looked over at Magdy, and this is the thought I had: When all of this is through, I am seriously going to kick his ass.

The four other figures . . .

Werewolves.

It was the only way to describe them. They looked feral, and strong, and carnivorous and nightmarish, and with all of that was movement and sound that made it clear that there were brains in there to go along with everything else. They shared the four eyes of all the Roanoke animals we had seen so far, but other than that they could have been lifted right out of folklore. These were werewolves.

Three of the werewolves were busy taunting and poking Magdy and Enzo, clearly toying with them and threatening them. One of them held a rifle that it had taken off of Magdy, and was jabbing him with it. I wondered if was still loaded, and what would happen to Magdy or the werewolf if it went off. Another held a spear and occasionally poked Enzo with it. The three of them were chirping and clicking at each other; I don't doubt they were discussing what to do with Magdy and Enzo, and how to do it.

The fourth werewolf stood apart from the other three and acted differently. When one of the other werewolves went to poke Enzo or Magdy, it would step in and try to keep them from doing it, standing between the humans and the rest of the werewolves. Occasionally it would step in and try to talk to one of the other werewolves, gesturing back to Enzo and Magdy for emphasis. It was trying to convince the other werewolves of something. To let the humans go? Maybe. Whatever it was, the other werewolves weren't having any of it. The fourth werewolf kept at it anyway.

It suddenly reminded me of Enzo, the first time I saw him, trying to keep Magdy from getting into an idiotic fight for no reason at all. It didn't work that time; Gretchen and I had to step in and do something. It wasn't working now, either.

I glanced over and saw that Hickory and Dickory had both taken up positions where they could get clean shots at the werewolves. Gretchen had moved off from me and was setting up her own shot.

Between the four of us we could take all of the werewolves before they even knew what had happened to them. It would be quick and clean and easy, and we'd get Enzo and Magdy out of there and back home before anyone knew anything had happened.

It was the smart thing to do. I quietly moved and readied my weapon, and took a minute or two to stop shaking and steady up.

I knew we'd take them in sequence, Hickory on the far left taking the first of the three group werewolves, Dickory taking the second, Gretchen the third, and I the last one, standing away from the rest. I knew the rest of them were waiting for me to make the shot.

One of the werewolves moved to poke Enzo again. My werewolf hurried, too late, to stop the assault.

And I knew. I didn't want to. I just didn't. Didn't want to kill it. Because it was trying to save my friends, not kill them. It didn't deserve to die just because that was the easiest way to get back Enzo and Magdy.

But I didn't know what else to do.

The three werewolves started chittering again, first in what seemed like a random way, but then together, and to a beat. The one with a spear began thumping it into the ground in time, and the three of them started working off the beat, playing against each other's voices for what was clearly a victory chant of some sort or another. The fourth werewolf started gesturing more frantically. I had a terrible fear of what was going to happen at the end of the chant.

They kept singing, getting closer to the end of that chant.

So I did what I had to do.

I sang back.

I opened my mouth and the first line of "Delhi Morning" came out of it. Not well, and not on key. Actually, it was really bad—all those months of practicing it and playing it at hootenannies were not paying off. It didn't matter. It was doing what I needed it to do. The werewolves immediately fell silent. I kept singing.

I glanced over to Gretchen, who was not so far away that I couldn't read the Are you completely insane? look that she had on her face. I gave her a look that said, Help me out please. Her face tightened up into something unreadable and she sighted down her rifle to keep one of the werewolves squarely in target—and started to sing the counterpoint of the song, dipping above and below my part, like we had practiced so many times. With her help I found the right key to sing and homed in.

And now the werewolves knew there was more than one of us.

To the left of Gretchen, Dickory chimed in, mimicking the sitar of the song as he did so well. It was funny to watch, but when you closed your eyes it was hard to tell the difference between it and the real thing. I drank in the twang of his voice and kept singing. And to the left of Dickory, Hickory finally came in, using its long neck to sound off like a drum, finding the beat and keeping it from then on.

And now the werewolves knew there were as many of us as them. And that we could have killed them anytime. But we didn't.

My stupid plan was working. Now all I had to do was figure what I had planned to do next. Because I really didn't know what I was doing here. All I knew was that I didn't want to shoot my werewolf. The one, in fact, who had now stepped off entirely away from the rest of his pack and was walking toward where he thought my voice was coming from.

I decided to meet him halfway. I set down my rifle and stepped into the clearing, still singing.

The werewolf with the spear began to raise it, and suddenly my mouth was very dry. I think my werewolf noticed something on my face, because it turned and chattered madly at the spear carrier. The spear went down; my werewolf didn't know it, but he'd just saved his friend a bullet in the head from Gretchen.

My werewolf turned back to me and started walking toward me again. I kept singing until the song was through. By that time, my werewolf was standing right next to me.

Our song was finished. I stood there, waiting to see what my werewolf would do next.

What he did next was point to my neck, to the jade elephant pendant Jane had given me.

I touched it. "Elephant," I said. "Like your fanties."

He stared at it again and then stared at me again. Finally it chirped out something.

"Hello," I said back. What else was I going to say?

We had a couple more minutes of sizing each other up. Then one of the three other werewolves chirped something. He chirped something back, and then tilted his head at me, as if to say, It would really help me if you actually did something here.

So I pointed to Enzo and Magdy. "Those two belong to me," I said, making what I hoped were appropriate hand signals, so my werewolf would get the idea. "I want to take them back with me." I motioned back in the direction of the colony. "Then we'll leave you alone."

The werewolf watched all my hand signals; I'm not sure how many of them he actually got. But when I was done, he pointed to Enzo and Magdy, then to me, and then in the direction of the colony, as if to say, Let me make sure I've got this right.

I nodded, said "yes," and then repeated all the hand signals again. We were actually having a conversation.

Or maybe we weren't, because what followed was an explosion of chittering from my werewolf, along with some wild gesticulating. I tried to follow it but I had no idea what was going on. I looked at him helplessly, trying to get what he was saying.

Finally he figured out I had no clue what he was doing. So he pointed at Magdy, and then pointed at the rifle one of the other werewolves was holding. And then he pointed at his side, and then motioned at me as if to take a closer look. Against my better judgment, I did, and noticed something I missed before: My werewolf was injured. An ugly furrow was carved into his side, surrounded by raw welts on either side.

That idiot Magdy had shot my werewolf.

Barely, sure. Magdy was lucky that his aim continued to be bad, otherwise he'd probably already be dead. But even grazing it was bad enough.

I backed up from the werewolf and let him know I'd seen enough. He pointed at Enzo, pointed at me, and pointed back to the colony. Then he pointed at Magdy and pointed at his werewolf friends. This was clear enough: He was saying Enzo was free to go with me, but his friends wanted to keep Magdy. I didn't doubt that would end badly for Magdy.

I shook my head and made it clear I needed the both of them. My werewolf made it equally clear they wanted Magdy. Our negotiations had just hit a really big snag.

I looked my werewolf up and down. He was stocky, barely taller than me, and covered only in a sort of short skirt cinched up with a belt. A simple stone knife hung from the belt. I'd seen pictures of knives like it from history books detailing the Cro-Magnon days back on Earth. The funny thing about the Cro-Magnons was that despite the fact that they were barely above banging rocks together, their brains were actually larger than our brains are now. They were cavemen, but they weren't stupid. They had the ability to think about serious stuff.

"I sure hope you have a Cro-Magnon brain," I said to my werewolf. "Otherwise I'm about to get in trouble."

He tilted his head again, trying to figure out what I was trying to say to him.

I motioned again, trying to make it clear I wanted to talk to Magdy. My werewolf didn't seem happy about this, and chattered something to his friends. They chattered back, and got pretty agitated. But in the end, my werewolf reached out to me. I let him take my wrist and he dragged me over to Magdy. His three friends fanned themselves out behind me, ready if I should try anything stupid. I knew outside the clearing Hickory and Dickory, at least, would be moving to get better sight lines. There were still lots of ways this could go very very wrong.

Magdy was still kneeling, not looking at me or anything else but a spot on the ground.

"Magdy," I said.

"Kill these stupid things and get us out of here already," he said, quietly and fast, still not looking at me. "I know you know how. I know you have enough people out there to do it."

"Magdy," I said again. "Listen to me carefully and don't interrupt me. These things want to kill you. They're willing to let Enzo go, but they want to keep you because you shot one of them. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?"

"Just kill them," Magdy said.

"No," I said. "You went after these guys, Magdy. You were hunting them. You shot at them. I'm going to try to keep you from getting killed. But I'm not going to kill them because you put yourself in their way. Not unless I have to. Do you understand me?"

"They're going to kill us," Magdy said. "You and me and Enzo."

"I don't think so," I said. "But if you don't shut up and actually listen to what I'm trying to say to you, you're going to make that more likely."

"Just shoot—" Magdy began.

"For God's sake, Magdy," Enzo said suddenly, from Magdy's side. "One person on the entire planet is risking her own neck for you and all you can do is argue with her. You really are an ungrateful piece of crap. Now would you please shut up and listen to her. I'd like to get out of this alive."

I don't know who was more surprised by that outburst, me or Magdy.

"Fine," Magdy said, after a minute.

"These things want to kill you because you shot one of them," I said. "I'm going to try to convince them to let you go. But you're going to have to trust me and follow my lead and not argue and not fight back. For the last time: Do you understand me?"

"Yes," Magdy said.

"Okay," I said. "They think I'm your leader. So I need to give them the idea I'm angry with you for what you did. I'm going to have to punish you in front of them. And just so you know, this is going to hurt. A lot."

"Just—" Magdy began.

"Magdy," I said.

"Yeah, all right, whatever," Magdy said. "Let's just do this."

"Okay," I said. "Sorry about this." Then I kicked him in the ribs. Hard.

He collapsed with a whoosh and fell flat to the ground. Whatever he was expecting, he wasn't expecting that.

After he had gasped on the ground for a minute I grabbed him by the hair. He clutched at my hand and tried to get away.

"Don't fight me," I said, and gave him a quick punch in the ribs to make the point. He got it and stopped. I pulled his head back and yelled at him for shooting the werewolf, pointing at his rifle and then the wounded werewolf and back and forth several times to make the point. The werewolves seemed to make the connection and chittered among themselves about it.

"Apologize," I told Magdy, still holding his head.

Magdy reached out to the wounded werewolf. "I'm sorry," he said. "If I had known that shooting would mean Zoë got to beat the crap out of me, I would never have done it."

"Thanks," I said, and then let go of his hair and smacked him hard across the face. Magdy went down again. I looked over to the werewolf to see if this was sufficient. He didn't look like he was quite there yet.

I loomed over Magdy. "How are you doing?" I asked.

"I think I'm going to throw up," he said.

"Good," I said. "I think that would work. Need any help?"

"I got it," he said, and retched all over the ground. This got impressed chirps from the werewolves.

"Okay," I said. "Last part, Magdy. You really have to trust me on this one."

"Please stop hurting me now," Magdy said.

"Almost done," I said. "Stand up, please."

"I don't think I can," he said.

"Sure you can," I said, and wrenched his arm to give him motivation. Magdy inhaled and stood up. I marched him over to my werewolf, who eyed the both of us, curiously. I pointed at Magdy, and then to the werewolf's wound. Then I pointed to the werewolf, and made a slashing motion on Magdy's side, and then pointed at the werewolf's knife.

The werewolf gave me yet another head tilt, as if to say, I want to be sure we understand each other, here.

"Fair's fair," I said.

"You're going to let him stab me?" Magdy said, his voice rising dramatically at the end of that sentence.

"You shot him," I said.

"He could kill me," Magdy said.

"You could have killed him," I said.

"I hate you," Magdy said. "I really really really hate you now."

"Shut up," I said, and then nodded to the werewolf. "Trust me," I said to Magdy.

The werewolf drew his knife, and then looked back at his companions, who were all chattering loudly and beginning to chant what they were chanting earlier. I was all right with that. The difference now was that it was my werewolf who would do whatever violence would be done.

My werewolf stood there for a minute, soaking in the chant of his fellow werewolves. Then without warning he sliced at Magdy so quickly that I only got him moving back, not forward. Magdy hissed in pain. I let him go and he fell to the ground, clutching his side. I moved in front of him and grabbed his hands. "Let me see," I said. Magdy moved his hands and winced preemptively, expecting a gush of blood.

There was only the thinnest red line on his side. The werewolf had cut Magdy just enough to let him know he could have cut him a lot worse.

"I knew it," I said.

"You knew what?" Magdy said.

"That I was dealing with a Cro-Magnon," I said.

"I really don't understand you," Magdy said.

"Stay down," I said. "Don't get up until I tell you."

"I'm not moving," he said. "Really."

I stood up and faced the werewolf, who had put his knife back on his belt. He pointed to Magdy, and then pointed to me, and then pointed back toward the colony.

"Thank you," I said, and gave the werewolf a little nod of my head, which I hoped would convey the idea. When I looked up again, I saw him staring at my jade elephant again. I wondered if he'd ever seen jewelry before, or if it was simply because an elephant looks like a fantie. These werewolves followed the fantie herds; they would be a main source of food for them. They were their lives.

I took off my necklace and handed it to my werewolf. He took it and gently touched the pendant, making it twirl and glitter in the dim light of the night. He cooed at it appreciatively. Then he handed it back to me.

"No," I said. I held up a hand, and then pointed to the pendant, and to him. "It's for you. I'm giving it to you." The werewolf stood there for a moment, and then uttered a trill, which caused his friends to crowd around him. He held up the pendant for them to admire.

"Here," I said, after a minute, and motioned to him to hand me the necklace. He did, and I—very slowly, so I wouldn't surprise him—put it around his neck and fastened it. The pendant touched his chest. He touched it again.

"There," I said. "That was given to me by someone very important, so I would remember the people who loved me. I'm giving it to you, so you'll remember that I'm thanking you for giving me back people I love. Thank you."

The werewolf gave me another of his head tilts.

"I know you don't have any idea what I'm saying," I said. "Thank you anyway."

The werewolf reached to his side, pulled his knife. Then he laid it flat on his hand and offered it to me.

I took it. "Wow," I said, and admired it. I was careful not to touch the actual blade; I'd already seen how sharp it was. I tried to return it but he held up his hand or claw or whatever you want to call it, in a mirror of what I did for him. He was giving it to me.

"Thank you," I said again. He chirped, and with that he returned to his friends. The one holding Magdy's rifle dropped it, and then without looking back they walked to the nearest trees, scaled them at an unbelievable speed and were gone almost instantly.

"Holy crap," I said, after a minute. "I can't believe that actually worked."

"You can't believe it," Gretchen said. She came out of hiding and stalked right up to me. "What the hell is wrong with you? We come out all this way and you sing at them. Sing. Like you're at a hootenanny. We are not doing this again. Ever."

"Thank you for following my lead," I said. "And for trusting me. I love you."

"I love you too," Gretchen said. "It still doesn't mean this is ever going to happen again."

"Fair enough," I said.

"It was almost worth it to see you beat the crap out of Magdy, though," Gretchen said.

"God, I feel horrible about that," I said.

"Really?" Gretchen said. "It wasn't just a little bit of fun?"

"Oh, all right," I said. "Maybe a little."

"I'm right here," Magdy said, from the ground.

"And you need to thank Zoë you are," Gretchen said, and bent down to kiss him. "You stupid, exasperating person. I am so happy you are still alive. And if you ever do anything like this again, I will kill you myself. And you know I can."

"I know," he said, and pointed to me. "And if you can't, she will. I get it."

"Good," Gretchen said. She stood up and then held out her hand to Magdy. "Now get up. We've got a long way to go to get home, and I think we just blew all our dumb luck for the year."

"What are you going to tell your parents?" Enzo asked me, as we walked home.

"Tonight? Not a thing," I said. "Both of them have enough to worry about tonight. They don't need me coming in and saying that while they were out I faced down four werewolves who were about to kill two more colonists, and defeated them using only the power of song. I think I might wait a day or two to drop that one. That's a hint, by the way."

"Hint taken," Enzo said. "Although you are going to tell them something."

"Yes," I said. "We have to. If these werewolves are following the fantie herds then we're going to have problems like this every year, and every time they come back. I think we need to let people know they're not actually murdering savages, but we're all still better off if we just leave them alone."

"How did you know?" Enzo asked me, a minute later.

"Know what?" I said.

"That those werewolf thingies weren't just murdering savages," Enzo said. "You held Magdy and let that werewolf take a shot at him. You thought he wouldn't stab Magdy to death. I heard you, you know. After it did it, you said 'I knew it.' So how did you know?"

"I didn't," I said. "But I hoped. He had just spent God knows how long keeping his friends from killing the two of you. I don't think he was just doing it because he was a nice guy."

"Nice werewolf," Enzo said.

"Nice whatever he is," I said. "Thing is, the werewolves have killed some of us. I know John and Jane killed some of them trying to get our people back. Both of us—the colonists and the werewolves—showed we were perfectly able to kill each other. I think we needed to show that we were capable of not killing each other, too. We let them know that when we sang at them instead of shooting them. I think my werewolf got that. So when I offered him a chance to get back at Magdy, I guessed he wouldn't really hurt him. Because I think he wanted us to know he was smart enough to know what would happen if he did."

"You still took a big risk," Enzo said.

"Yeah, I did," I said. "But the only other alternative was to kill him and his friends, or have them kill all of us. Or all of us kill each other. I guess I hoped I could do something better. Besides, I didn't think it was too big a risk. What he was doing when he was keeping the others away from you two reminded me of someone I knew."

"Who?" Enzo asked.

"You," I said.

"Yes, well," Enzo said. "I think tonight marks the official last time I tag along with Magdy to keep him out of trouble. After this he's on his own."

"I have nothing bad to say about this idea," I said.

"I didn't think you would," Enzo said. "I know Magdy gets on your last nerve sometimes."

"He does," I said. "He really, really does. But what can I do? He's my friend."

"He belongs to you," Enzo said. "And so do I."

I looked over at him. "You heard that part, too," I said.

"Trust me, Zoë," Enzo said. "Once you showed up, I never stopped listening to you. I'll be able to recite everything you said for the rest of my life. Which I now have, thanks to you."

"And Gretchen and Hickory and Dickory," I said.

"And I will thank them all, too," Enzo said. "But right now I want to focus on you. Thank you, Zoë Boutin-Perry. Thank you for saving my life."

"You're welcome," I said. "And stop it. You're making me blush."

"I don't believe it," Enzo said. "And now it's too dark to see."

"Feel my cheeks," I said.

He did. "You don't feel especially blushy," he said.

"You're not doing it right," I said.

"I'm out of practice," he said.

"Well, fix that," I said.

"All right," Enzo said, and kissed me.

"That was supposed to make you blush, not cry," he said, after we stopped.

"Sorry," I said, and tried to get myself back together. "I've just really missed it. That. Us."

"It's my fault," Enzo started.

I put a hand up to his lips. "I don't care about any of that," I said. "I really don't, Enzo. None of that matters to me. I just don't want to miss you anymore."

"Zoë," Enzo said. He took my hands. "You saved me. You have me. You own me. I belong to you. You said it yourself."

"I did," I admitted.

"So that's settled," Enzo said.

"Okay," I said, and smiled.

We kissed some more, in the night, outside Enzo's front gate.

EIGHTEEN

The conversation Hickory was having with Dad about the Conclave and the Colonial Union was really interesting, right up until the point where Hickory said it and Dickory were planning to kill my parents. Then, well. I sort of lost it.

To be fair, it had been a really long day.

I had said good night to Enzo, dragged my butt home, and could barely think straight enough to hide the stone knife in my dresser and fend off Babar's lick attack on my face before I collapsed onto my cot and passed out without even bothering to get all the way undressed. At some point after I lay down, Jane came home from the medical bay, kissed me on the forehead and slipped off my boots, but I barely remember that other than murmuring something to her about how happy I was she was better. At least, that's what I was saying inside my head; I don't know if my mouth formed the actual words. I think it did. I was very tired at the time.

Not too much after that, though, Dad came in and gently nudged me awake. "Come on, hon," he said. "I need you to do something for me."

"I'll do it in the morning," I mumbled. "I swear."

"No, sweetheart," he said. "I need you to do it now." The tone of his voice, gentle but insistent, told me he really did need me to get up. I did, but with enough grumbling to maintain my honor. We went to the living room of our bungalow; Dad steered me to the couch, which I sat on and tried to maintain a semiconscious state that would allow me to go back to sleep when we were done with whatever it was we were doing. Dad sat down at his desk; Mom stood next to him. I smiled sleepily at her but she seemed not to notice. Between me and my parents were Hickory and Dickory.

Dad spoke to Hickory. "Can you two lie?" he asked it.

"We have not yet lied to you," Hickory said. Which even in my sleepy state I recognized as not being an actual answer to the question that was asked. Dad and Hickory bantered back and forth a little about what being able to lie brings to a conversation (in my opinion, mostly the ability to not have to argue about stupid things it's just better to lie about, but no one asked me), and then Dad asked me to tell Hickory and Dickory to answer all his questions without any lies or evasions.

This finally woke me all the way up. "Why?" I asked. "What's going on?"

"Please do it," Dad said.

"All right," I said, and then turned to Hickory. "Hickory, please answer my dad without lying to him or evading his questions. All right?"

"As you wish, Zoë," Hickory said.

"Dickory too," I said.

"We will both answer truthfully," Hickory said.

"Thank you," Dad said, and then turned back to me. "You can go back to bed now, sweetie."

This annoyed me. I was a human being, not a truth serum. "I want to know what's going on," I said.

"It's not something you need to worry about," Dad said.

"You order me to have these two tell you the truth, and you want me to believe it's not something I need to worry about?" I asked. The sleep toxins were taking their time leaving my system, because even as I was saying this I realized it came out showing a little more attitude to my parents than was entirely warranted at the moment.

As if to confirm this, Jane straightened herself up a bit. "Zoë," she said.

I recalibrated. "Besides, if I leave there's no guarantee they won't lie to you," I said, trying to sound a bit more reasonable. "They're emotionally equipped to lie to you, because they don't care about disappointing you. But they don't want to disappoint me." I didn't know if this was actually true or not. But I was guessing it was.

Dad turned to Hickory. "Is this true?"

"We would lie to you if we felt it was necessary," Hickory said. "We would not lie to Zoë."

There was a really interesting question here of whether Hickory was saying this because it was actually true, or whether it was saying it in order to back me up on what I said, and if the latter, what the actual truth value of the statement was. If I were more awake, I think I would have thought about it more at the time. But as it was, I just nodded and said, "There you go," to my dad.

"Breathe a word of this to anyone and you're spending the next year in the horse stall," Dad said.

"My lips are sealed," I said, and almost made a lip-locking motion, but thought better of it at the last second.

And a good thing, too, because suddenly Jane came up and loomed over me, bearing her I am as serious as death expression. "No," she said. "I need you to understand that what you're hearing here you absolutely cannot share with anyone else. Not Gretchen. Not any of your other friends. Not anyone. It's not a game and it's not a fun secret. This is dead serious business, Zoë. If you're not ready to accept that, you need to leave this room right now. I'll take my chances with Hickory and Dickory lying to us, but not you. So do you understand that when we tell you not to share this with anyone, that you cannot share it with anyone else? Yes or no."

Several thoughts entered my mind at that moment.

The first is that it was times like this when I had the smallest inkling of how terrifying Jane must have been as a soldier. She was the best mom a girl could ever have, make no mistake about it, but when she got like this, she was as hard and cold and direct as any person could be. She was, to use a word, intimidating. And this was just with words. I tried to imagine her stalking across a battlefield with the same expression on her face she had now, and standard-issue Defense Forces rifle. I think I actually felt at least three of my internal organs contract at the thought.

The second is I wondered what she would think of my ability to keep a secret if she had known what I had just done with my evening.

The third was maybe she did, and that was what this was about.

I felt several other of my internal organs contract at that thought.

Jane was still looking at me, cold like stone, waiting for my answer.

"Yes," I said. "I understand, Jane. Not a word."

"Thank you, Zoë," Jane said. Then she bent down and kissed the top of my head. Just like that, she was my mom again. Which in its way made her even more terrifying, if you ask me.

That settled, Dad started asking Hickory about the Conclave and what it and Dickory knew about that group. Since we had made the jump to Roanoke, we had been waiting for the Conclave to find us, and when they found us, to destroy us, like they had destroyed the Whaid colony in the video the Colonial Union had given us. Dad wanted to know if what Hickory knew about the Conclave was different than what we knew.

Hickory said yes, basically. They knew quite a bit about the Conclave, based on the Obin government's own files on them—and that their own files, contrary to what we had been told by the Colonial Union, showed that when it came to colonies, the Conclave much preferred to evacuate the colonies they confronted, rather than destroying them.

Dad asked Hickory why, if they had different information, they had not shared it earlier. Hickory said because they had been ordered not to by their government; neither Hickory nor Dickory would have lied about having the information if Dad had asked them, but he had never asked them about it before. I think this struck Dad as a bit weaselly on the part of Hickory and Dickory, but he let it go.

Dad asked Hickory if it'd seen the video the Colonial Union had given us, of the Conclave destroying the Whaid colony. Hickory said that it and Dickory had their own version. Dad asked if their version was different; Hickory said it was—it was longer and showed General Gau, who had ordered the destruction of the Whaid colony, trying to convince the Whaidi colony leader to let the Conclave evacuate the colonists, only to have the Whaid refuse to leave before the destruction of their colony. Hickory said that other times, on other colony worlds, colonists did ask to be evacuated, and the Conclave carried them off the planet, and sent them back to their homeworlds or allowed them to join the Conclave as citizens.

Jane asked for numbers. Hickory said they knew of seventeen colony removals by the Conclave. Ten of those had the Conclave returning colonists to their former homes. Four of those had the colonists joining the Conclave. Only three involved the destruction of the colonies, after the colonists refused to move. The Conclave was dead serious about not allowing anyone else to start new colonies, but—unlike what we were told by the Colonial Union—didn't insist on killing everyone on those new colonies to make the point.

This was fascinating stuff—and disturbing. Because if what Hickory was saying was true—and it was, because Hickory would not lie to me, or to my parents against my will—then it meant that either the Colonial Union had been wildly wrong about the Conclave, and its leader General Gau, or that the CU had lied to us when it told us what would happen if the Conclave found us. The first of these was certainly possible, I suppose; the Colonial Union was in a state of active hostility with almost every other alien race that we knew about, which I would guess would make intelligence gathering harder than it might be if we had more friends. But it was really more likely that the second of these was the truth: Our government lied to us.

But if the Colonial Union lied to us, why did it do it? What did it get from lying to us, punting us to who knows where in the universe, and making us live in fear of being discovered—and putting all of us in danger?

What was our own government up to?

And what would the Conclave really do to us if it found us?

This was such an interesting thing to think about that I almost missed the part where Hickory explained the reason why it and Dickory actually had detailed files about the Conclave's other colony removals: in order to convince Mom and Dad, should the Conclave come knocking, to surrender our colony rather than to let it be destroyed. And why would they want to convince Mom and Dad of this?

"Because of Zoë?" Dad asked Hickory.

"Yes," Hickory said.

"Wow," I said. This was news.

"Quiet, sweetheart," Dad said, and then gave his attention back to Hickory. "What would happen if Jane and I chose not to surrender the colony?" he asked.

"We would prefer not to say," Hickory said.

"Don't evade," Dad said. "Answer the question."

I caught Hickory giving me a quick look before it answered. "We would kill you and Lieutenant Sagan," Hickory said. "You and any other colony leader who would authorize the destruction of the colony."

Dad said something to this and Hickory said something back, but I missed most of it because my brain was trying to process what I had just heard, and it was absolutely and completely utterly failing. I knew I was important to the Obin. I had always known it abstractly, and then Hickory and Dickory had pounded the point into me months ago, when they had attacked me and showed me what it felt to be hunted, and showed me why I had to learn to defend myself. But in no formulation of my importance was even the conception that I was so important to the Obin that if it came to it, they would kill my parents to save me.

I didn't even know how to think about something like that. Didn't know how to feel about it. The idea kept trying to hook into my brain, and it just wasn't working. It was like having an out of body experience. I floated up over the conversation, and listened to Jane interject herself into the discussion, asking Hickory if even after admitting this as their plan, if it and Dickory would still kill her and John. Kill my mom and dad.

"If you choose to surrender the colony, yes," Hickory said.

I actually felt a snap as I reeled myself back into my head, and I'm happy to say that I quite suddenly knew exactly how to feel about all of this: absolutely enraged.

"Don't you dare," I said, and I flung out the words. "Under no circumstances will you do that." I was surprised to find myself standing when I said it; I didn't remember getting up. I was shaking so hard with anger I wasn't sure how I was still standing.

Hickory and Dickory both flinched at my anger, and trembled. "This one thing we must refuse you," Hickory said. "You are too important. To us. To all Obin."

To all Obin.

If I could have spat, I would.

Here it was again. All of my life, bounded by the Obin. Bounded not in who I was, but what I was. By what I meant to them. There was nothing about my own life that mattered in this, except what entertainment I could give them as billions of Obin played the records of my life like it was a funny show. If any other girl had been Charles Boutin's daughter, they would have happily watched her life instead. If any other girl's adopted parents had gotten in the way of the Obin's plan for her, they would have slaughtered them, too. Who I was meant nothing. The only thing that mattered was that I just happened to have been one man's daughter. A man who the Obin had thought could give them something. A man whose daughter's life they had bargained with to get that thing. A man who ended up dying because of the work he'd done for them. And now they wanted more sacrifices.

So I let Hickory and Dickory know how I felt. "I've already lost one parent because of the Obin," I said, and loaded everything I could into that last word. All my anger and disgust and horror and rage, at the idea they should so casually decide to take from me two people who had only ever shown me love and affection and honor, and flick them aside like they were nothing more than an inconvenience.

I hated Hickory and Dickory that minute. Hated them in that way that comes only when someone you love takes that love and betrays it, completely and totally. Hated them because they would betray me because they believe they loved me.

I hated them.

"Everybody calm down," John said. "No one is killing anyone. All right? This is a nonissue. Zoë, Hickory and Dickory aren't going to kill us because we're not going to let the colony be destroyed. Simple as that. And there is no way I would let anything happen to you, Zoë. Hickory and Dickory and I all agree that you are too important for that."

I opened my mouth to say something to that and just started sobbing instead. I felt like I'd gone numb from the legs; suddenly Jane was there, holding me and leading me back to the couch. I sobbed on her like I did so many years ago outside that toy store, trying to sort out everything I was thinking.

I heard Dad make Hickory and Dickory swear to protect me, always, under all circumstances. They swore. I felt like I didn't want their help or protection ever again. I knew it would pass. Even now I knew it was because of the moment that I felt this way. It didn't change the fact that I still felt it. I was going to have to live with it from now on.

Dad talked with Hickory more about the Conclave and asked to see the Obin's files on the other colony removals. Hickory said they would need to go to the information center to do it. Even though it was now so late it was almost morning, Dad wanted to do it right then. He gave me a kiss and headed out the door with the Obin; Jane held back a second.

"Are you going to be okay?" she asked me.

"I'm having a really intense day, Mom," I said. "I think I want it to be over."

"I'm sorry you had to hear what Hickory said," Jane said. "I don't think there would have been any good way to handle it."

I sniffled out a small grin. "You seem to have taken it well," I said. "If someone was telling me they had plans to kill me, I don't think I would have taken it anywhere as calmly."

"Let's just say I wasn't entirely surprised to hear Hickory say that," Jane said. I looked up at her, surprised. "You're a treaty condition, remember," she said. "And you are the Obin's main experience of what it's like to live."

"They all live," I said.

"No," Jane said. "They exist. Even with their consciousness implants they hardly know what to do with themselves, Zoë. It's all too new to them. Their race has no experience with it. They don't just watch you because you entertain them. They watch you because you're teaching them how to be. You're teaching them how to live."

"I've never thought about it that way," I said.

"I know you haven't," Jane said. "You don't have to. Living comes naturally to you. More naturally than to some of the rest of us."

"It's been a year since any of them have seen me," I said. "Any of them but Hickory and Dickory. If I've been teaching them how to live, I wonder what they've been doing for the last year."

"They've been missing you," Mom said, and kissed the top of my head again. "And now you know why they'll do anything to have you back. And to keep you safe."

I didn't have a good answer to that. Mom gave me one last quick hug and headed to the door to join Dad and the Obin. "I don't know how long this is going to take us," she said. "Try going to bed again."

"I'm too worked up to get back to sleep," I said.

"If you get some sleep you'll probably be less worked up when you wake up," Jane said.

"Trust me, Mom," I said. "It's going to take something pretty big to get me over being worked up about all of this."

NINETEEN

And wouldn't you know. Something big was arranged.

The Colonial Union showed up.

The shuttle landed and a little green man popped out. And I thought, This seems familiar. It was even the same little green man: General Rybicki.

But there were differences. The first time I saw General Rybicki, he was in my front yard, and it was just him and me. This time his shuttle landed in the grassy area right in front of Croatoan's gate, and a large chunk of the colony had turned out to see him land. He was our first visitor since we came to Roanoke, and his appearance seemed to give the idea that maybe we would finally be out of exile.

General Rybicki stood in front of the shuttle and looked at the people in front of him. He waved.

They cheered wildly. This went on for several minutes. It's like people had never seen someone wave before.

Finally the general spoke. "Colonists of Roanoke," he said. "I bring you good news. Your days of hiding are over." This was interrupted by another gout of cheering. When it calmed down, the general continued. "As I speak to you, my ship above is installing your communications satellite. Soon you will be able to send messages to friends and loved ones back on your home planets. And from here on out, all the electronic and communication equipment you had been ordered to stop using will be returned to you." This got a huge whoop from the teenage sectors of the crowd.

"We know that we have asked much from you," Rybicki said. "I am here to tell you that your sacrifice has not been wasted. We believe that very soon now the enemy that has threatened you will be contained—and not just contained, but defeated. We couldn't have done this without you. So for all of the Colonial Union, I thank you."

More cheering and nonsense. The general seemed to be enjoying his moment in the sun.

"Now I must speak with your colony leaders to discuss how to reintegrate you into the Colonial Union. Some of this may take some time, so I ask you to be a little patient. But until then, let me just say this: Welcome back to civilization!"

Now the crowd really went nuts. I rolled my eyes and looked down at Babar, who went with me to the landing. "This is what happens when you spend a year out in the wilderness," I said. "Any dumb thing looks like entertainment." Babar looked up at me and lolled his tongue out; I could tell he agreed with me. "Come on, then," I said. And we walked through the crowd to the general, who I was supposed to escort back to my dad.

General Rybicki saw Babar before he saw me. "Hey!" he said, and bent down for his slobbering, which Babar duly and enthusiastically applied. He was a good dog but not a hugely accurate judge of character. "I remember you," he said to Babar, petting him. He looked up and saw me. "I remember you, too."

"Hello, General," I said, politely. The crowd was still milling around us but quickly dispersing as folks raced to all corners of the colony to pass on what they were told.

"You look taller," he said.

"It's been a year," I said. "And I am a growing girl. This despite being kept in the dark all this time."

The general seemed not to catch this. "Your mother said that you would be escorting me to see them. I'm a little surprised that they didn't come out themselves," he said.

"They've had a busy couple of days," I said. "As have we all."

"So colony life is more exciting than you thought it would be," the general said.

"Something like that," I said, and then motioned. "I know my dad is very interested in talking to you, General. Let's not keep him waiting."

I held my PDA in my hand. There was something not quite right about it.

Gretchen noticed it too. "It feels weird," she said. "It's been so long since we carried one around. It's like I've forgotten how to do it."

"You seemed to remember pretty well when we were using the ones in the information center," I said, reminding her of how we'd spent a fair amount of the last year.

"It's different," she said. "I didn't say I'd forgotten how to use one. I'm saying I've forgotten what it was like to carry one around. Two different things."

"You could always give it back," I said.

"I didn't say that," Gretchen said, quickly. Then she smiled. "Still, you have to wonder. In the last year people here actually did manage to get along without them just fine. All the hootenannies and the plays and the other stuff." She looked at her PDA. "Makes you wonder if they're all going to go away now."

"I think they're part of who we are now," I said. "As Roanokers, I mean."

"Maybe," Gretchen said. "It's a nice thought. We'll have to see if it's actually true."

"We could practice a new song," I said. "Hickory says Dickory's been wanting to try something new for a while now."

"That's funny," Gretchen said. "One of your bodyguards has become a musical fiend."

"He's a Roanoker too," I said.

"I guess he is," Gretchen said. "That's funny, too."

My PDA blinked; something happened with Gretchen's as well. She peered at hers. "It's a message from Magdy," she said. "This is going to be bad." She touched the PDA to open it. "Yup," she said, and showed me the picture. Magdy sent a short video of him mooning us.

"Some people are getting back into the swing of things sooner than others," I said.

"Unfortunately," Gretchen said. She tapped onto her PDA. "There," she said. "I made a note to kick his ass the next time I see him." She motioned at my PDA. "He send it to you, too?"

"Yes," I said. "I think I'll refrain from opening it."

"Coward," Gretchen said. "Well, then, what is going to be your first official act on your PDA?"

"I'm going to send a message to a certain two someones," I said. "And tell them that I want to see them alone."

"We apologize for being late," Hickory said to me, as it and Dickory stepped into my bedroom. "Major Perry and General Rybicki gave us priority status on a data packet so that we could communicate with our government. It took some time to prepare the data."

"What did you send?" I asked.

"Everything," Hickory said.

"Everything," I said. "Every single thing you two and I did in the last year."

"Yes," Hickory said. "A digest of events now, and a more comprehensive report as soon as we can. Our people will be desperate to know what has happened with you since they last heard from us. They need to know you are well and unharmed."

"This includes what happened last night," I said. "All of it. Including the part where you oh so lightly mentioned your plans to murder my parents."

"Yes," Hickory said. "We are sorry to have upset you, Zoë. We would not have wished to do that. But you offered us no alternative when you told us to speak the truth to your parents."

"And what about to me?" I asked.

"We have always told you the truth," Hickory said.

"Yes, but not all of it, have you?" I said. "You told Dad that you had information about the Conclave that you didn't tell him about. But you didn't tell it to me, either. You kept secrets from me, Hickory. You and Dickory both."

"You never asked," Hickory said.

"Oh, don't give me that crap," I said. "We're not playing word games here, Hickory. You kept us in the dark. You kept me in the dark. And the more I've thought about it, the more I realize how you acted on what you knew without telling me. All those alien races you had me and Gretchen study in the information center. All the races you trained us how to fight. Hardly any of them were in the Conclave. Because you knew that if the Conclave found us first, they'd try everything not to fight us."

"Yes," Hickory said.

"Don't you think I should have known that?" I asked. "Don't you think it would have mattered to me? To all of us? To the entire colony?"

"We are sorry, Zoë," Hickory said. "We had orders from our government not to reveal information to your parents that they did not already know, until such time as it became absolutely necessary. That would have only been if the Conclave were to appear in your sky. Until then, we were required to exercise care. If we had spoken to you about it, you would have naturally informed your parents. And so we decided that we would not bring these things up with you, unless you asked us directly about them."

"And why would I do that?" I asked.

"Indeed," Hickory said. "We regret the necessity. But we saw no other alternative."

"Listen to me, both of you," I said, and then stopped. "You're recording this now, aren't you."

"Yes," Hickory said. "We always record, unless you tell us otherwise. Would you like us to stop recording?"

"No," I said. "I actually want all of you to hear this. First, I forbid you to harm my parents in any way. Ever."

"Major Perry has already informed us that he would surrender the colony rather than destroy it," Hickory said. "Since this is true there is no reason to harm either him or Lieutenant Sagan."

"It doesn't matter," I said. "Who knows if there's going to be another time you decide it's going to be necessary to try to get rid of John and Jane?"

"It seems unlikely," Hickory said.

"I don't care if it's more likely that I was going to sprout wings," I said. "I didn't think it was ever possible that you might think to kill my parents, Hickory. I was wrong about that. I'm not going to be wrong about it again. So swear it. Swear you will never harm my parents."

Hickory spoke briefly to Dickory in their own language. "We swear it," Hickory said.

"Swear it for all Obin," I said.

"We cannot," Hickory said. "That is not something we can promise. It is not within our power. But neither Dickory nor I will seek to harm your parents. And we will defend them against all those who would try to harm them. Even other Obin. This we swear to you, Zoë."

It was the last part of this that made me believe Hickory. I hadn't asked him to defend John and Jane, just not harm them. Hickory added it in. They both did.

"Thank you," I said. I felt as if I were suddenly coming unwound; until that second I didn't realize how worked up I was just sitting there, talking about this. "Thank you both. I really needed to hear that."

"You are welcome, Zoë," Hickory said. "Is there something else you want to ask us?"

"You have files on the Conclave," I said.

"Yes," Hickory said. "We have already given them to Lieutenant Sagan for analysis."

That made perfect sense; Jane had been an intelligence officer when she was in the Special Forces. "I want to see them, too," I said. "Everything you have."

"We will provide them to you," Hickory said. "But there is a lot of information, and not all of it is easy to understand. Lieutenant Sagan is far more qualified to work with this information."

"I'm not saying give it to me and not her," I said. "I just want to see it too."

"If you wish," Hickory said.

"And anything else that you might get from your government on the Conclave," I said. "And I mean all of it, Hickory. None of this 'you didn't ask directly' junk from now on. We're done with that. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," Hickory said. "You understand that the information we receive might in itself be incomplete. We are not told everything."

"I know," I said. "But you still seem to know more than we do. And I want to understand what we're up against. Or were, anyway."

"Why do you say 'were'?" Hickory asked.

"General Rybicki told the crowd today that the Conclave was about to be defeated," I said. "Why? Do you know any different?"

"We do not know any different," Hickory said. "But we do not think that just because General Rybicki says something in public to a large crowd, it means he is telling the truth. Nor does it mean that Roanoke itself is entirely out of danger."

"But that doesn't make any sense," I said. I held up my PDA to Hickory. "We were told we can use these again. That we can use all of our electronics again. We had stopped using them because they would give us away. If we're allowed to use them again, we don't have to worry about being given away."

"That is one interpretation of the data," Hickory said.

"There's another?" I asked.

"The general did not say that the Conclave had been defeated, but that he believed they would be defeated," Hickory said. "That is correct?"

"Yes," I said.

"Then it is possible that the general means for Roanoke to play a part in the defeat of the Conclave," Hickory said. "In which case, it is not that you are being allowed to use your electronics because it is safe. You are being allowed to use them because you are now bait."

"You think the Colonial Union is leading the Conclave here," I said, after a minute.

"We offer no opinion one way or another," Hickory said. "We note only that it is possible. And it fits what data we have."

"Have you told my dad about this?" I asked.

"We have not—" Hickory began, but I was already out the door.

"Close the door behind you," Dad said.

I did.

"Who have you talked to about this?" he asked.

"Hickory and Dickory, obviously," I said. "No one else."

"No one?" Dad asked. "Not even Gretchen?"

"No," I said. Gretchen had gone off to harass Magdy for sending her that video. I was beginning to wish I had gone with her instead of making Hickory and Dickory come to my room.

"Good," Dad said. "Then you need to keep quiet about it, Zoë. You and the alien twins."

"You don't think what Hickory is saying is going to happen, do you?" I asked.

Dad looked directly at me, and once again I was reminded how much older he was than he appeared. "It is going to happen," he said. "The Colonial Union has laid a trap for the Conclave. We disappeared a year ago. The Conclave has been looking for us all that time, and the CU has spent all that time preparing the trap. Now it's ready, so we're being dragged back into view. When General Rybicki's ship goes back, they're going to let it leak where we are. The news will get back to the Conclave. The Conclave will send its fleet here. And the Colonial Union will destroy it. That's the plan, anyway."

"Is it going to work?" I asked.

"I don't know," Dad said.

"What happens if it doesn't?" I asked.

Dad laughed a very small and bitter laugh. "If it doesn't, then I don't think the Conclave is going to be in any mood for negotiations," he said.

"Oh, God," I said. "We have to tell people, Dad."

"I know we do," he said. "I tried keeping things from the colonists before, and it didn't work very well." He was talking about the werewolves there, and I reminded myself that when all this was done I needed to come clean to him about my own adventures with them. "But I also don't need another panic on our hands. People have been whipsawed enough in the last couple of days. I need to figure out a way to tell people what the CU has planned without putting them in fear for their lives."

"Despite the fact they should be," I said.

"That is the catch," Dad said, and gave another bitter chuckle. Then he looked at me. "It's not right, Zoë. This whole colony is built on a lie. Roanoke was never intended to be a real colony, a viable colony. It exists because our government needed a way to thumb its nose at the Conclave, to defy its colonization ban, and to buy time to build a trap. Now that it's had that time, the only reason our colony exists is to be a goat at a stake. The Colonial Union doesn't care about us for who we are, Zoë. It only cares about us for what we are. What we represent to them. What they can use us for. Who we are doesn't actually enter into it."

"I know the feeling," I said.

"I'm sorry," Dad said. "I'm getting both abstract and depressed."

"It's not abstract, Dad," I said. "You're talking to the girl whose life is a treaty point. I know what it means to be valued for what I am rather than who I am."

Dad gave me a hug. "Not here, Zoë," he said. "We love you for you. Although if you want to tell your Obin friends to get off their asses and help us, I wouldn't mind."

"Well, I did get Hickory and Dickory to swear not to kill you," I said. "So that's progress, at least."

"Yes, baby steps in the right direction," Dad said. "It'll be nice not to have to worry about being knifed by members of my household."

"There's always Mom," I said.

"Trust me, if I ever annoyed her that much, she wouldn't use something as painless as a knife," Dad said. He kissed me on the cheek. "Thanks for coming to tell me what Hickory said, Zoë," he said. "And thanks for keeping it to yourself for now."

"You're welcome," I said, and then headed for the door. I stopped before I turned the handle. "Dad? How long do you think it will take before the Conclave is here?"

"Not long, Zoë," he said. "Not long at all."

In fact, it took just about two weeks.

In that time, we prepared. Dad found a way to tell everyone the truth without having them panic: He told them that there was still a good chance the Conclave would find us and that the Colonial Union was planning on making a stand here; that there was still danger but that we had been in danger before, and that being smart and prepared was our best defense. Colonists called up plans to build bomb shelters and other protections, and used the excavation and construction machinery we'd kept packed up before. People kept to their work and stayed optimistic and prepared themselves as best they could, readying themselves for a life on the edge of a war.

I spent my time reading the stuff Hickory and Dickory gave me, watching the videos of the colony removals, and poring through the data to see what I could learn. Hickory and Dickory were right, there was just too much of it, and lots of it in formats I couldn't understand. I don't know how Jane managed to keep it all straight in her head. But what was there was enough to know a few different things.

First, the Conclave was huge: Over four hundred races belonged to it, each of them pledging to work together to colonize new worlds rather than compete for them. This was a wild idea; up until now all the hundreds of races in our part of space fought with each other to grab worlds and colonize them, and then once they created a new colony they all fought tooth and nail to keep their own and wipe out everyone else's. But in the Conclave setup, creatures from all sorts of races would live on the same planet. You wouldn't have to compete. In theory, a great idea—it beats having to try to kill everyone else in the area—but whether it would actually work was still up in the air.

Which brought up the second point: It was still incredibly new. General Gau, the head of the Conclave, had worked for more than twenty years to put it together, and for most of those years it kept looking like it was going to fall apart. It didn't help that the Colonial Union—us humans—and a few others expended a lot of energy to break it up even before it got together. But somehow Gau made it happen, and in the last couple of years had actually taken it from planning to practicality.

That wasn't a good thing for everyone who wasn't part of the Conclave, especially when the Conclave started making decrees, like that no one who wasn't part of the Conclave could colonize any new worlds. Any argument with the Conclave was an argument with every member of the Conclave. It wasn't a one-on-one thing; it was a four-hundred-on-one thing. And General Gau made sure people knew it. When the Conclave started bringing fleets to remove those new colonies that other races planted in defiance, there was one ship in that fleet for every race in the Conclave. I tried to imagine four hundred battle cruisers suddenly popping up over Roanoke, and then remembered that if the Colonial Union's plan worked, I'd see them soon enough. I stopped trying to imagine it.

It was fair to wonder if the Colonial Union was insane for trying to pick a fight with the Conclave, but as big as it was, its newness worked against it. Every one of those four hundred allies had been enemies not too long ago. Each of them came in to the Conclave with its own plans and agenda, and not all of them, it seemed, were entirely convinced this Conclave thing was going to work; when it all came down, some of them planned to scoop up the choice pieces. It was still early enough for it all to fall apart, if someone applied just the right amount of pressure. It looked like the Colonial Union was planning to do that, up above Roanoke.

Only one thing was keeping it all together, and that was the third thing I learned: That this General Gau was in his way a remarkable person. He wasn't like one of those tin-pot dictators who got lucky, seized a country and gave themselves the title of Grand High Poobah or whatever. He had been an actual general for a people called the Vrenn, and had won some important battles for them when he decided that it was wasteful to fight over resources that more than one race could easily and productively share; when he started campaigning with this idea, he was thrown into jail. No one likes a troublemaker.

The ruler who tossed him in jail eventually died (Gau had nothing to do with it; it was natural causes) and Gau was offered the job, but he turned it down and instead tried to get other races to sign on to the idea of the Conclave. He had the disadvantage that he didn't get the Vrenn to go along with the idea at first; all he had to his name was an idea and a small battle cruiser called the Gentle Star, which he had gotten the Vrenn to give him after they decommissioned it. From what I could read, it seemed like the Vrenn thought they were buying him off with it, as in "here, take this, thanks for your service, go away, no need to send a postcard, bye."

But he didn't go away, and despite the fact that his idea was insane and impractical and nuts and could never possibly work because every race in our universe hated every other race too much, it worked. Because this General Gau made it work, by using his own skills and personality to get people of all different races to work together. The more I read about him, the more it seemed like the guy was really admirable.

And yet he was also the person who had ordered the killing of civilian colonists.

Yes, he'd offered to move them and even offered to give them space in the Conclave. But when it came right down to it, if they wouldn't move and they wouldn't join, he wiped them out. Just like he would wipe us all out, if despite everything Dad told Hickory and Dickory we didn't surrender the colony—or if, should the attack the Colonial Union had planned on the Conclave fleet go wrong, the general decided that the CU needed to be taught a lesson for daring to defy the Conclave and wiped us out just on general principles.

I wasn't so sure just how admirable General Gau would be, if at the end of the day he wouldn't stop from killing me and every single person I cared about.

It was a puzzle. He was a puzzle. I spent those two weeks trying to sort it out. Gretchen got grumpy with me that I'd been locked away without telling her what I was up to; Hickory and Dickory had to remind me to get out and work on my training. Even Jane wondered if I might not need to get outside more. The only person not to give me much grief was Enzo; since we got back together he was actually very accommodating about my schedule. I appreciated that. I made sure he knew. He seemed to appreciate that.

And then just like that we all ran out of time. The Gentle Star, General Gau's ship, appeared above our colony one afternoon, disabled our communications satellite so Gau could have some time to chat, and then sent a message to Roanoke asking to meet with the colony leaders. John replied that he would meet with him. That evening, as the sun set, they met on the ridge outside the colony, about a klick away.

"Hand me the binoculars, please," I said to Hickory, as we climbed out to the roof of the bungalow. It obliged me. "Thanks," I said. Dickory was below us, on the ground; old habits die hard.

Even with the binoculars General Gau and Dad were little more than dots. I looked anyway. I wasn't the only one; on other roofs, in Croatoan and in the homesteads, other people sat on roofs with binoculars and telescopes, looking at Dad and the general, or scanning the sky, looking in the dusk for the Gentle Star. As night finally fell, I spotted the ship myself; a tiny dot between two stars, shining unblinkingly where the other stars twinkled.

"How long until the other ships arrive, do you think?" I asked Hickory. The Gentle Star always arrived first, alone, and then at Gau's command, the hundreds of other ships would appear, a not-at-all-subtle bit of showmanship to get a reluctant colony leader to agree to get his or her people to leave their homes. I had watched it on previous colony removal videos. It would happen here, too.

"Not long now," Hickory said. "By now Major Perry will have refused to surrender the colony."

I took down my binoculars and glanced over to Hickory in the gloom. "You don't seem concerned about this," I said. "That's a different tune than you were singing before."

"Things have changed," Hickory said.

"I wish I had your confidence," I said.

"Look," Hickory said. "It has begun."

I glanced up. New stars had begun to appear in the sky. First one or two, then small groups, and then entire constellations. So many had begun to appear it was impossible to track every single appearance. I knew there were four hundred. It seemed like thousands.

"Dear God," I said, and I was afraid. Truly afraid. "Look at them all."

"Do not fear this attack, Zoë," Hickory said. "We believe this plan will work."

"You know the plan?" I asked. I didn't take my eyes off the sky.

"We learned of it this afternoon," Hickory said. "Major Perry told us, as a courtesy to our government."

"You didn't tell me," I said.

"We thought you knew," Hickory said. "You said you had spoken to Major Perry about it."

"We talked about the Colonial Union attacking the Conclave fleet," I said. "But we didn't talk about how."

"My apologies, Zoë," Hickory said. "I would have told you."

"Tell me now," I said, and then something happened in the sky.

The new stars started going nova.

First one or two, then small groups, and then entire constellations. So many expanded and brightened that they had begun to blend into each other, forming an arm of a small and violent galaxy. It was beautiful. And it was the worst thing I had ever seen.

"Antimatter bombs," Hickory said. "The Colonial Union learned the identity of the ships in the Conclave fleet. It assigned members of your Special Forces to locate them and plant the bombs just before the jump here. Another Special Forces member here activated them."

"Bombs on how many ships?" I asked.

"All of them," Hickory said. "All but the Gentle Star."

I tried to turn to look at Hickory but I couldn't move my eyes from the sky. "That's impossible," I said.

"No," Hickory said. "Not impossible. Extraordinarily difficult. But not impossible."

From other roofs and from the streets of Croatoan, cheers and shouts lifted into the air. I finally turned away, and wiped the tears off my face.

Hickory noticed. "You cry for the Conclave fleet," it said.

"Yes," I said. "For the people on those ships."

"Those ships were here to destroy the colony," Hickory said.

"I know," I said.

"You are sorry they were destroyed," Hickory said.

"I am sorry that we couldn't think of anything better," I said. "I'm sorry that it had to be us or them."

"The Colonial Union believes this will be a great victory," Hickory said. "It believes that destroying the Conclave's fleet in one engagement will cause the Conclave to collapse, ending its threat. This is what it has told my government."

"Oh," I said.

"It is to be hoped they are correct," Hickory said.

I was finally able to look away and face Hickory. The afterimages of the explosions placed blotches all around it. "Do you believe they are correct?" I asked. "Would your government believe it?"

"Zoë," Hickory said. "You will recall that just before you left for Roanoke, my government invited you to visit our worlds."

"I remember," I said.

"We invited you because our people longed to see you, and to see you among us," Hickory said. "We also invited you because we believed that your government was going to use Roanoke as a ruse to open a battle against the Conclave. And while we did not know whether this ruse would be successful, we believed strongly that you would have been safer with us. There is no doubt that your life has been in danger here, Zoë, both in ways we had foreseen and in ways that we could not. We invited you, Zoë, because we feared for you. Do you understand what I am saying to you?"

"I do," I said.

"You asked me if I believe the Colonial Union is correct, that this is a great victory, and if my government would believe the same," Hickory said. "My response is to say that once again my government extends an invitation to you, Zoë, to come visit our worlds, and to travel safe among them."

I nodded, and looked back to the sky, where stars were still going nova. "And when would you want this trip to begin?" I asked.

"Now," Hickory said. "Or as close to now as possible."

I didn't say anything to that. I looked up to the sky, and then closed my eyes and for the first time, started to pray. I prayed for the crews of the ships above me. I prayed for the colonists below me. I prayed for John and Jane. For Gretchen and her father. For Magdy and for Enzo and their families. For Hickory and Dickory. I prayed for General Gau. I prayed for everyone.

I prayed.

"Zoë," Hickory said.

I opened my eyes.

"Thank you for the invitation," I said. "I regret I must decline."

Hickory was silent.

"Thank you, Hickory," I said. "Really, thank you. But I am right where I belong."