The Skipper

by Peter Linderman

The war between the souls and humans who are scattered throughout the world rages. Peace shown even more difficult to achieve when a series of disappearances spreads like wildfire through the peaceful and just society that have instituted souls on planet Earth.

2. Arrived - Wanda

Author's Note: I don't speak (or write) English very well, so I had to use Google translate. Sorry.

CHAPTER 1: Arrived (Wanda)

"I think we're being chased," Kyle said from the back of the van. Melanie snorted in disbelief as the eldest O'Shea brother cowered like a puppy in the headlights of passing vehicles. "We've been passed by the same RV four times."

"Relax, there's nothing to fear, it's just your imagination." I tried to calm him down as I drove down I-17 toward home.

"Do you really think the searchers would chase us in a four-can like that?" Mel added sarcastically.

"Well, that's true," Kyle reasoned, frowning. "But they do look so much alike without the license plate and the manufacturer's mark!"

For souls, the sense of ownership was inconsequential, a mere title, a bureaucratic formality. License plates were superfluous in a world where everyone had equal access to transportation and no one watched over one another.

"If you want, I can drive for a while, Wanda, so you can rest," Melanie offered when she saw that I was still feeling overwhelmed by sitting behind the wheel.

"No, no. I can do it." I answered, trying to convince myself more than her.

I had been very careless.

During the months I had lived in Chicago and San Diego, I hadn't bothered to learn to drive on my own, but had been making use of Mel's rather dubious knowledge of the highway code. However, the skip into Petals' body had been problematic in that regard. Petals Open to the Moon had barely begun teaching driving lessons in Seattle when Jamie, Mel and Jared had abducted her. So I was left with the difficulty of having to drive from memory and fill in the gaps.

I was afraid of messing up something basic and attracting the attention of some highway patrol. I didn't have a license, of course, there was no need for one: No soul would dare to go out on the highway without first knowing how to drive properly.

But I was not like other souls.

Sometimes I wondered if the reason I always got into trouble on the planets I had visited was because of some defect in me…

The sound of Kyle shuffling through the boxes in the back of the van unsettled me. His nervousness was proving to be contagious, he had been agitated and unwilling ever since the mission began. He was very worried about leaving Sunny alone in the caves. He was still frantic even though this little mission had taken us barely three days.

This was not an urgent expedition to obtain medicine, tools or food. We were well supplied to last several months without leaving the caves.

Actually, that excursion was due to a song that had been stuck in my head for a few weeks. I had no idea where it had come from, but I heard it everywhere. In my footsteps as I wandered through the grottos of the caves, in the gurgling of the water in the bathrooms as I washed, in the rhythm of the men's hoe as I brought them a drink in the great garden. Even in the howling of the wind as it passed through the cracks in Mel and Jared's bedroom:

A well'a bless my soul
what'sa wrong with me?
I'm itchin' like a man on a fuzzy tree
my friends say I'm actin' wild as a bug
I'm in love
I'm all shook up
mm mm mm, mm, yay, yay, yay

Well, my hands are shaky and my knees are weak
I can't seem to stand on my own two feet
who do you think of when you have such luck?
I'm in love
I'm all shook up
mm mm mm, mm, yay, yay, yay

The obsession got to the point where I started humming a few words. Melanie had never liked to hum, so I had been living two lives, ever since I was a Bat, without being able to sing a melody and I was out of practice.

"The King is not dead!" Jeb suddenly blurted out one day when he heard me singing it while we were working in the central plaza. Mel, who was standing next to me at the time with the pickaxe, and I both turned around at his comment.

"Who?" we asked in unison.

"Elvis Presley! The King of Rock!"

As neither of us gave any indication that we recognized the name, Jeb's face fell in disbelief and despair. He muttered a word that I couldn't hear, but that was surely some kind of curse, and then asked more calmly:

"Where have you heard that song?"

Mel didn't know what to say. He had no idea. But I answered instantly, automatically, without thinking:

"At the Breaker Harmony Music Dispensary next to Mahatma Gandhi Park."

Mel frowned at me when I said that, and I realized she had never been there. I immediately remembered a small, modest storefront, between a youth clothing gallery and my favorite perfumery in Seattle. I had spent many autumn afternoons listening to the old-fashioned human songs that Harmony played in the background in the store. I felt nostalgic for a place I had never visited, but that I knew like the back of my tiny hand. I even remembered the face of the store clerk. An older man, about fifty or so, with Indian features and short jet-black hair, with an accent that I found ridiculously funny and rather peculiar musical tastes.

I felt strangely far from home.

But Jeb gave me no time to ponder these emotions that I thought were foreign to me. He peppered me with questions, as he had done before, about music dispensaries, public libraries, film museums, and any remnants of human civilization left in the new soul society.

He seemed surprised that we had not gotten rid of any element of his history so riddled with violence, hatred and war.

"I imagined that you would have lit a big bonfire and thrown into it everything that you didn't like about us," he said, unusually serious.

I shuddered when I heard him say that.

"It's not our style. We don't erase a culture because it is contrary to our principles, we just don't put it into practice."

I wanted to add that "destroying what is rejected was indeed the style of humans," but that seemed excessive and perhaps offensive to him.

And so we ended up on our trip to Utah. A short trip to acquire a portable radio with solar panel, rechargeable batteries, music CDs, novels, textbooks for Isaiah, Freedom and Jamie, some new clothes, some toys and a few other things that seemed superfluous and unnecessary to me.

I glanced in the rearview mirror, noticing that Kyle had stopped rummaging through the boxes. In his hands was a gray, recycled cardboard book bound with black plastic rings. The pages were yellowed from repeated use. I couldn't read the title, which was reflected upside down.

But before turning my gaze back to the highway, I stopped for a second to check my hair in the mirror with a flirtatious gesture.

That was another oddity of this new body.

Pet was vain, like many of the flowers.

I had been a flower once, too. In fact, I would have been just another unknown red rose in the crowd, if it hadn't been for the fact that this was my fourth planet visited on my pilgrimage and because I was a native of the Origin. But I never felt proud of my appearance on the Planet of Flowers, I tried to be humble about my past. Now, being human, I couldn't help but look at my trimmed nails painted with bubblegum pink polish and brush my long curls of golden hair whenever they got tangled in the wind outside the window.

It was disconcerting.

"What are you reading?" Mel asked, noticing that Kyle's complaints had stopped.

"Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare," he exclaimed, his deep voice turning into a low murmur, like a lion's growl. "I once had to do a class assignment on it, so I copied the one Jodi wrote… We both failed for cheating! And she was mad at me for weeks!"

A flash of sadness crossed his face.

"Is this an interesting book?" I asked, trying to ease his anguish. To make him forget for a while that he had lost Jodi forever.

"Neither of you would like it."

"Hey, we have very different tastes," Mel complained, noticing Kyle's abrupt, dry tone.

"That's why I'm saying it." he closed the cover of the book, staring at Mel.

"You, Melanie, wouldn't like it at all because it has a lot of love, drool and other sentimental stuff. All that meringue would make you gag. And you, Wanda" he rolled his eyes until they rested on me, "it would give you goosebumps, it has a lot of gratuitous violence and death… Although, because it's so worn out, many of your people have read it."

I was not at all surprised by his comment.

"I suppose See Weed are the most interesting in any human book."

"Really?" Mel asked, putting on her sunglasses. The afternoon was drawing to a close and the fiery orange rays of the sun were bothering him from her side. "I thought you might find it… kind of scandalous to use paper to write on. You know, since they're made of cellulose."

"But paper is much better than memorizing all the stories by hearsay, isn't it?" I replied, annoyed, remembering my very long stay on that planet of boundless oceans. "You end up getting tired of hearing them over and over again. It's very monotonous and boring… On the other hand, Bats are fascinated by everything related to human music" I exclaimed to change the tortuous subject of the Planet of the See Weed, "the scales of notes, how you use musical instruments instead of just the voice and scores. Above all, they are passionate about scores."

Kyle looked at me thoughtfully as if he were solving a very complicated sum.

"They find it shocking to repeat other people's songs," Melanie clarified the questions that she thought were reflected in her face. "Bats don't have faces, only ears and mouths. So their songs are their entire identity and each song is unique and non-transferable."

But Kyle kept watching us both, alternately, rolling his eyes from seat to seat as if it were a tennis match. He didn't seem to have heard us say a word. His mind was far away.

Melanie was irritated beyond help:

"What the hell is wrong with you?! Do we have monkeys on our faces?! Or what?!"

Kyle suddenly jumped and started laughing out loud as he returned to Earth.

"I was thinking about something Ian told me about you two," he said, catching his breath. "He said that even when you were together, it was very easy to tell you apart. Because you were so different. Like night and day. And I was drawing some conclusions…" His voice trailed off.

"What kind of conclusions?" I said in a falsely casual tone. But the sudden mention of Ian had made my heart skip a beat. I hadn't seen him in three weeks, and every fiber of my being yearned for him passionately.

"Eh… the first conclusion is that I definitely like you much more than Melanie" he said with a heavy tone of humor.

I giggled and smiled from ear to ear.

Mel punched him on the shoulder instead. But not a gentle, playful punch like he used to do with Jared, Jamie, or even me.

But one with real harm.

"Oh! You see, Wanda?" Kyle complained. "I don't know what Jared sees in you! You're a grumpy, humorless tomboy."

As expected, Mel gave him another well-deserved blow on the shoulder.

I didn't usually rejoice in the use of violence employed by my incorrigible humans. But I had been so amused by Kyle's first insultingly flattering comment that I was still smiling non-stop.

Melanie looked at me and, thinking I was having fun with her anger, she became even more sulky. She shook her head as if to say, 'Come on! You're against me too!' And a moment later she started laughing along with us, realizing the absurdity of the situation.

It was a fun time, sort of until we took the detour onto I-10, bypassing the city of Phoenix. Kyle returned to his morose mood once again.

"I was also thinking a little about what might have happened to Sunny and Jodi," Kyle said, almost to himself.

Melanie and I simultaneously sighed deeply. She groaned in exasperated impatience, and I groaned in resigned stoicism. But for some strange reason they both sounded exactly the same to my ears.

Oh! It's a bit one-track minded!

Mel nodded knowingly, as if she heard me thinking that silent complaint. Kyle continued chattering, oblivious to the fact that we were trying to ignore him.

"You see, when I met Sunny in Vegas I thought she was going to be a completely different person, like Jared told me. But she wasn't... well, she had those weird little soul eyes, obviously" he added, making a strange face with his mouth. "However, in every other way she resembled Jodi: The way she talked to me, the way she looked at me and smiled, were Jodi's, not that of a stranger who was in her body. She was also kinder and calmer than I remembered her, that was unusual for her, but Ian says that all souls are like that by nature."

I nodded, listening to him more attentively.

""At the beginning of the trip back I was suspicious of her trusting attitude, but when Sunny started telling me about our memories together, there were moments when I thought Jodi was back by my side," Kyle exclaimed, a little more moved than he would have wanted to tell us. He was silent for a long minute (which we would have given anything for before) while we both stood expectantly. "What I'm saying is that except for the fact that she insisted on me calling her by her new name and her silver eyes, I would have believed that she didn't have one of those parasites inside her body." Mel narrowed her eyelids in a threatening way when she heard him use that harsh word, but I was no longer affected by his direct way of speaking. "What's even more unusual is that when Sunny told me things about her past lives as a Bear, on the Mist's Planet, I expected her to behave differently. I don't know, that she could distinguish between the soul and the human one, like Ian did with you. But it wasn't like that."

"What do you mean?" I croaked, my voice a little hoarse because of a lump in my throat.

"Well… it was like Jodi was the one who lived through that time as a Bear and was telling me about it," he added, still looking at us both again. "That's what worries me most about Sunny. There's no other personality under her face, there's just Jodi, but with a different name. It's like… Jodi has possessed Sunny's mind instead of the other way around. I don't know. Has Sunny disappeared?"

That really shook me. Melanie and I looked at each other and knew we were thinking the same thing: The story we once heard from our healer in Chicago about an unfortunate soul who had suffered an identity crisis.

Racing Song, Kevin. For months I was terrified that I would fade away, a mere reflection of Melanie. The same Seeker had harassed me for weeks before my journey across the burning desert, using my fear to force me to reveal the secrets I believed I was keeping from her.

Seeing the shocked face that Mel gave me back, I thought that maybe I wasn't the only one who started to tremble at the possibility. If it seemed terrible to me to lose my identity, all my memories and my character that I believed made me unique among all souls, what would it feel like for her to end up becoming me? Or to use my name? The name I had earned after eight planets! Or to mourn Jared's absence every night like Sunny did?

"But what worries me the most", Kyle continued, oblivious to our personal tribulations. "Is that I almost sent her off in the bonnies. Can you imagine?! I almost sent what's left of Jodi to a damn planet full of little flowers!"

"What's left of Jodi…" I muttered under my breath, lost in thought.

I hadn't thought of that remote possibility.

What if her love for this big, rude guy was so strong that it wouldn't disappear just because she changed planets or species? What if we were condemning her to a life of loneliness she wouldn't want at all? What if Kyle was right?

My own feelings for Ian, Jamie, Jeb, and the others hadn't disappeared when I'd jumped into Pet's body. Nor, to my dismay, had my desire for Jared. For a long time I'd thought, I could almost say I'd wanted to believe, that what I felt for him was only a product of Mel's mind. But now he had me as proof that human love left an unbreakable mark on souls.

As incredible as it seemed to me, Kyle was right, once again. Maybe Jodi hadn't managed to wake up when we did the extraction because there was no one to wake up. There was only Sunny and the memories of her love for him. If I had been affected by the six months I spent dreaming, both asleep and awake, about Jared, how could the six years of Sunny thinking about her past with Kyle have affected her more profoundly?

Mel was tense, her hands clenched into fists and her gaze lost in the distance. Kyle continued with that pensive attitude that did not fit him at all. Meanwhile, I had the unusual impulse to press the accelerator pedal to get home early.

"Wanda?" Kyle called out to me.

"Yeah?"

"Can souls go mad?"

"What?!" I yelled.

That untimely question caught me off guard. It left me completely disoriented.

"You know, if you can lose your mind."

"You mean chatty Lacey and the Seeker?" Melanie joked, though she was a little stunned by the whole thing like I was.

"No, I'm just curious," he replied.

I had never seriously considered that question. Even when I first went to a Comforter, I hadn't feared for my sanity. The psyche of souls simply didn't work the same way as human minds. We didn't repress memories into the subconscious, like humans do with their traumas. What we experienced stayed with us for our entire existence. We could choose not to remember it for a while, to ignore it like I did with the images of those mutilated bodies of souls Doc had uselessly butchered in the hospital. But they would never, ever disappear from my memory.

I couldn't.

We could not withdraw from reality and live in fantasy worlds created by our imagination. We could use it whenever we wanted, to dream, invent, and create. But we were beings who by definition depended on the reliability of our borrowed senses. Although feelings could affect the way we perceived the world (as when I thought it was the work of the No Pain who made everything and everyone around me shine), we were still aware of that altered perception.

In many ways we were as different from humans as a solid steel ball is from an onion. Souls were unbroken, a block of thought incapable of being broken into fragments. Schizophrenia could not exist among our kind. Instead, humans hid their feelings and thoughts in layers, one beneath another. There was no way to know what was really hidden beneath each layer until it was revealed.

"Well, as far as I know, souls have never had cases of madness. We're just not like humans. But..." I added, thinking about it more "...we live everything through the bodies of our hosts, so I suppose that if one of them had some psychological problem it would affect us to some degree. Although I don't think it would make us 'lose our minds'. It would only be a problem while we occupied that body.

"Oh, how typical of souls!" Mel snorted in an exaggerated tone of indignation. "If something goes wrong, you always blame the body for everything!"

I shrugged in embarrassment. Although Melanie smiled openly to show me that it had only been a bad joke, as an ex-body that she had been.

"But can souls become violent or angry? You know, act more aggressively, like humans?" Kyle insisted, his voice shaken. "Ian assured me that you can't get irritated or angry, that you were very peaceful. But I don't know what to believe anymore."

My freckled silver cheeks flushed red as I remembered the last time I had been angry. I didn't know what to say. Mel laughed out loud at my embarrassment.

"You're remembering that time, right?"

I embarrassed, not daring to look at Kyle even in the rearview mirror. The shyness of this new body always overwhelmed me.

"What are you talking about, girls?"

"About the night Jamie was sick because of that infected wound on his leg," Mel explained, trying to remain firm, and Wanda almost killed you.

"Are you kidding?! Are you serious?!"

I sat back enough to see just the road and nothing else.

"I would have settled for slapping you a few times and breaking your nose. But she was so irritated with you that she wanted to strangle you until you turned blue."

"You were just saying horrible things about Jamie!" I blurted out, my voice suddenly rising. I covered my mouth, noticing the reproachful tone in my words.

"So good old Wanda can also be mean when she wants to be. Ha!" Kyle laughed." You'll see when Ian finds out! He'll flip!

"To tell the truth, souls are very balanced" Melanie tried to defend me. "They don't usually give in to such violent impulses, although they can have them too. Believe me, it's very difficult to get them out of their minds."

Kyle digested that for a moment as the darkness of night began to take over the desert. We still couldn't see the volcanic rock mill, crowned with prickly pears and governors called Picacho Peak in the distance, but we were slowly moving away from the brightness of the city of Phoenix.

"Then I must be the one who always gets on people's nerves," Kyle muttered to himself, but he couldn't quiet his raspy voice enough.

I quickly connected the dots in my mind.

"Did Sunny have a fight with you?!" Mel exclaimed, getting ahead of me by a hair and stealing the question from my lips.

"No, it's not that," he said quickly. "She didn't hit me or anything. It's just that when I told her about this mission, she got jealous."

"Jealous? What do you mean, 'jealous'? Jealous of whom?" I asked, unable to understand him.

Kyle raised both eyebrows, pressed his lips into a thin line, looked at both of us repeatedly, then gave a horse-like snort like said, It's obvious, isn't it?

"Jealous of us?!" Mel jumped with her eyes wide open.

"Well, when Jeb gave me permission to go with you, I thought Sunny would burst into tears like she always did when I mentioned going outside and that I would have to refuse to go," he began to explain quickly. "But this time she got angry, accused me of spending too much time with you, accused me of having an affair with Wanda before I came to the caves" I raised an eyebrow at her saying that "and called me everything but nice."

"You haven't explained to him that you almost killed us once! You idiot!" Mel snapped stormily.

"I didn't want to scare her. I don't really care about her, Jodi was always getting jealous when we lived together in Portland. I guess she'll get over it in a few days." He waved a hand in a casual gesture as if to dismiss the matter. "The funny thing is that Sunny is just like Jodi even when she gets angry."

"I don't find it funny," I complained.

"Well, it's partly your fault, Wanda."

"Hey!" Mel turned around in his seat and for a moment I feared he was going to break his nose once and for all.

"Calm down, calm down," Kyle said, his hands in the air in a sign of peace. "First, I have to say that Sunny has always known that I've liked brunettes, like Mel. But when she found out who you were, Wanda, she started to feel insecure again… You didn't tell us that you were some kind of Rock Superstar from the Mist's Planet. A celebrity. The great heroine Rides the Beast! That's something she thinks she can't compete with."

The temperature in my cheeks rose a few degrees. I had always thought that the glory gained by doing something supremely stupid in the middle of a remote snowfield was undeserved. Many thought that the society of souls was serene and calm, but "dull" was the word that best defined us. As soon as any of us performed a feat that could be described as slightly exciting, we were elevated to heroes.

"Also, I guess I shouldn't have told her how I saved your life during the incident with Jared and Doc" he added, leaning back in his seat.

"That you saved his life… What the hell is that bullshit?" Mel bellowed angrily.

"Didn't Jared tell you?"

"Tell us what?" we both said.

"Wow, I didn't expect that from him," she muttered under her breath. "You know, when Doc almost killed you." I winced a little at the blunt word. "I had fallen asleep while trying to wake Jodi and didn't notice when you came into the hospital. But I remember that in my sleep I started seeing flashes of light through my half-closed eyelids. Like the ones I'd seen when Doc had extracted Sunny, and I remember thinking, 'That's it, I screwed up! The cryotank opened because I wanted to carry it around with me all the time, and Sunny spilled out!'"

I smiled modestly and watched in the rearview mirror as Kyle rolled his eyes.

"So, I woke up scared and found his cryotank unharmed. But I caught Doc red-handed. He had just gotten you out of Melanie and was closing up his cut. In the meantime, he had you on the desk. He wasn't very lucid and still thought I was some kind of nightmare. So all I could think of was to ask him what he was doing with you, Wanda."

Mel and I listened to this with a hint of morbid interest. Neither of us had been conscious at the time.

"But Doc didn't answer me; he started mumbling something about how he promised you and something about how you wanted to bury yourself with Wes and Walter. That's when I did wake up, leaving Sunny and Jodi on the cot and facing him. Doc had already finished closing the scar and I saw that there was no cryotank ready for you. I started yelling at him even louder when I realized what was happening. But Doc was faster, he picked you up from the desk and held you in his arms. I didn't know if he was going to crush you right there, but I swear he didn't look like the usual Doc."

I held my breath against the weight of guilt. What a horror I had put poor Eustace through with my promise!

"Jared appeared out of nowhere then. He immediately understood what was going on and helped me out… Good thing he was there! Because I wouldn't have known what to do on my own. He pulled out his hunting knife and crept up behind Doc," Kyle continued, telling the story in a gruesome manner. The hairs on my neck stood up in horror at what Jared could have done for me. "But then you did something that froze us all: You jumped out of Doc's hands and dove straight to the ground. I was afraid you might have fallen to pieces, but you were curled up in a ball with all your antennae moving."

I stifled a giggle as I saw the concern in Kyle's blue eyes in the rearview mirror. We souls might seem as fragile and brittle as glass. But on our home planet, in the Origin, we survived outside our hosts by flying through thunderstorms and hurricane-force winds. Levitating like metallic snowflakes amid the intense magnetic convection currents. Our light, branched bodies were like bird feathers.

If there was one thing we were very good at, it was falling.

"That's when Doc was going to pick you up off the ground that Jared grabbed him from behind and put the knife to his neck," Kyle continued with the story of my rescue. "He quickly explained to me how to get one of the cryotanks going, while holding Doc down so he wouldn't do anything. Then I picked you up off the ground and put you in it before you could die."

"What a coincidence!" I mused sarcastically. The two O'Shea brothers had me in their hands to kill me and to save me.

Mel watched him with reluctance, as if she didn't believe his version of events or as if she wanted to give Jared more credit. But I had no reason to doubt Kyle's story.

He could be rude, irresponsible, self-centered, bossy, and a pain in the ass, but I had never considered him a hypocrite or a liar. He was as honest with himself as a soul, even if in other respects he was nothing like that. Kyle said what he thought, just like that, without beating around the bush or hiding anything. When he had hated me for believing me a danger to everyone, he had shown me his contempt openly.

That's why I appreciated their friendship more than anyone else now, even though Mel had a hard time understanding why we got along so well.

"You shouldn't have asked Doc to kill you. You don't know how bad he was for weeks," Kyle told me, his face twisting. "fter he got his hopes up again that no more patients would die, and here you come with that plan to bring him down."

"Okay, let her go, don't pester her" Mel said.

But Kyle was speaking frankly again. When we souls chose to finally die, we asked our healers not to insert us into another body. It was natural for our kind. Sad, yes, but more common than humans could imagine. No soul would question another's intimate, personal decision, or deprive them of their right to Final Death.

Doc, however, was not a healer or a soul, nor had I asked him to let me die in peace after completing a life cycle. What I had demanded in exchange for my secrets had not been an act of compassion, nor of mercy towards a dying man. It had been cold-blooded murder.

My murder.

Picacho Peak could already be seen on the horizon, rising majestically with the sky in the background becoming darker by the moment.

Finally, we're home! I sighed with suppressed relief. Not as much relief as I would have had if Ian had come to the caves to be with me again. His journey would still take at least another week.

Maybe I should have swallowed my reservations and gone with him. But I was afraid of seeing the bitter look in Burns Living Flowers' eyes again, the only other soul who had decided to join the human resistance, and it made me feel terrible about myself.

"Hey, Kyle. Sunny's right about one thing," Mel started to say in the darkness of the cabin. Apparently she was still mulling over the absurd subject of jealousy. "You haven't left our side lately. You follow us everywhere! You're like a fucking limpet!"

"I wasn't following you, I was following Wanda!" Kyle immediately rebuked him. "Ian made me promise to keep an eye on her while she was out of the caves, so she wouldn't get into trouble. You're the one who won't leave her side, not even to sleep!" he shouted over Mel.

"So tell Ian when he gets back that I'm more than enough to keep her safe from any danger, okay?" Mel raised her voice even more.

"Calm down, please" I asked them.

Their arguments could reach record levels on the decibel scale if they continued longer and longer. Melanie and Kyle were equally stubborn when they got down to it.

At least the promise he made to his brother explained Kyle's attitude about this mission. I had found it unexpected that he had opposed our departure so vehemently (he had argued with Jeb at the top of his lungs) and then decided to separate from Sunny, when he could not prevent our trip. He did it not out of choice, nor because he distrusted my intentions again, but because of his oath. But what kind of problems did Ian expect me to have? Sometimes he went too far being so overprotective of me!

When I turned off the highway and entered the desert through the countryside, we stopped the van in the dark, so we could switch seats and have Kyle drive for me. The last time, since jumping into Pet's body, which had tried to follow the dirt road leading to the caves, I had driven one of Jared's jeep wheels into a deep sinkhole.

I took advantage of those few moments to stretch my legs and look at the sky that was beginning to fill with stars. Those distant lights made me feel small, even more so than this already tiny body.

My home planet, the place where I had been born as a tiny soul wishing to explore the wide universe, was too far away to even be seen, no matter how powerful the telescope used. It was far beyond the horizon of the universe, far beyond the light coming from the Big Bang itself, where humans did not dare to imagine what wonders might exist. But that place had never been my home, even if it was for the rest of my brothers. I had made a long journey, more than anyone else, to find my true home among these humans.

As we reached the caves, I began to rethink my changed attitude toward "missions" from a different perspective. I used to feel guilty about shopping in stores. I thought it was dishonorable for me to contribute nothing to society. But now, for some reason I didn't know, I saw things in a more practical light.

What other choice did I have? Let my humans go back to raiding warehouses and stores at night? It was too risky and too violent. Kyle would probably find the prospect of beating up some prospector who caught them entertaining. And he would find the risk of death an incentive.

Humans! Only they could see the funny side of danger, fear and violence.

Maybe he was contributing something to society after all by keeping Kyle and the rest from their old ways.

But that wasn't the reason I didn't feel as uncomfortable as I had before. Nor had I taken Mel's advice and stopped thinking about it. The truth was that since I'd been inhabiting Pet's body, I felt more comfortable going shopping than I had before. But at the same time I still felt like an outsider among souls. Maybe it was because Pet hadn't started working when she was taken from her home. She hadn't yet experienced the emotional gratification that every soul felt when contributing to the common good.

She was a child in many ways.

Mel, however, had never been as carefree as Pet. Since she was fourteen, she had had to face the harsh and cruel reality. And even long before the first waves invaded the planet and she had to flee with Jamie, she was already tenacious in her own right.

Now that I could see Mel with my own eyes from the outside, I could admire the strength and character that I always wanted to possess, but that I definitely could not find in myself.

But then, what was I really like? I had never questioned my personality in my previous lives.

Was she more malleable , so to speak, than I had thought? This new human body was so different from Mel's that it puzzled me at every turn. For example, Mel had always been very self-sufficient, doing things for herself and not very willing to ask for or accept help. However, Pet's weak constitution and small stature had shaped her into a personality that was more resigned to her physical limitations. And, curiously, encouraged her to use other abilities.

When I needed to reach a high shelf in the warehouse, I was not shy about asking any stranger or the clerk on duty to help me. Always with a smile on my lips and a playful tone in my voice. As if it were a child's game.

Lying was also more spontaneous. My lies were still very easy for any human to detect, but they came out more fluently and cleverly than before. At the last clothing gallery in Utah, I had even asked an older man to try on a flannel shirt to see what size it was, because I told him I wanted to give it to my 'grandpa' for his birthday. When in fact it was for Jeb and I didn't even need to check at all.

I was amazed at how I charmed everyone around me, with that 'angel face', as Jamie called it. And I was also amazed at how pleased I was to get away with things on those occasions, thanks to my self-confidence and insight.

I didn't even bother trying to grab one of the heavy cardboard boxes from the back of the van when Kyle finally pulled up to the entrance of the caves and we began unloading the loot. Mel or Kyle would probably have snatched it out of my hands in a heartbeat if I was overwhelmed. So I settled for carrying one of the bulky, lightweight trash bags filled with new clothes. I smiled at the way I looked. I looked like a Christmas elf carrying Santa's toys on my back, swaying with every step I took.

Curiously, as we descended the Y-shaped corridor leading to the warehouse, we began to make out a blue light as we approached. Jeb with his Santa Claus beard was waiting for us at the main bend, where the ground leveled out completely.

The cold electric light from one of the sunlamps shone on his face. I knew at once that there was trouble. He wasn't whistling absentmindedly as he did when he caught someone off guard, nor was he smiling at our return. I dropped my gear on the ground.

I wasn't scared when I noticed that he didn't have his poker face on. I had learned to associate that pose with the worst possible news. Jeb only hid his intentions from me when he didn't dare tell me something. However, at that moment he was serious, worried and somewhat embarrassed. As if he had made a mistake and had to reluctantly admit it. My intuition had already guessed his true intentions a long time ago:

"Is there any boiled frog, Jeb?"

Kyle frowned at the strange culinary comment. Perhaps he was thinking about the dinner menu. But Mel got the message right away and laughed to herself, dropping her load as well.

Jeb had made the most of those short three days to finally acclimatize Sunny to the presence of humans. She rarely left her bedroom unless accompanied by Kyle. And although the rest of the cave dwellers no longer had any qualms about her presence, Sunny remained as shy and reserved as she had been the first day.

"This time the frog jumped out of the water," Jeb exclaimed in a pessimistic and defeated manner.

"What?!" Mel and I said at the same time.

"What are you two talking about?" Kyle asked, annoyed, noticing the sidelong glances we all gave him. He put down the heavy box he was carrying and crossed his arms, demanding an explanation.

"From Sunny," Mel clarified.

"What happened?" I asked Jeb.

"First of all, Kyle, she's okay now. Don't worry," Jeb said hurriedly to the big guy. He stood up as tall as he could be, his head looking like it was resting on the stone ceiling, like the capital of a column. "Everything was going well these past few days, she was getting used to it, little by little, just like you, Wanda. She seemed really comfortable with Trudy and Paige and the others." I nodded and made a rewind motion to speed things up. I figured all the girls had pitched in. Except Sharon and Maggie, obviously. "Well, everything was going great with her until early this morning when she took a wrong turn on her way to the grocery store to pick up some groceries."

Jeb pointed to the ground with his index finger.

"Oh, shit!" Mel said.

"You've lost Sunny!" Kyle bellowed, throwing his arms wide open and taking up almost the entire width of the tunnel. I jumped slightly as he looked creepy, like an enraged ogre.

"Sunny's fine," Jeb quickly repeated.

I tried not to look sour at Kyle for his comment, I really did. If I had just happened upon the exit when I was with Mel. Kyle wouldn't have used the verb 'lose',though of course he would have been just as angry… demanding my head on a spike. I pushed that horrible thought out of my mind immediately. Resentment was not good for any soul.

"She didn't go out into the desert," Jeb continued firmly. "s soon as she realized she had taken a wrong turn, she turned around and ran down the hallway screaming loudly. She kept repeating the same thing: 'I didn't want to see him!' We all heard it from the…"

"Yeah, I know," Kyle interrupted, obviously in a hurry, "she's got some good lungs when she yells. Get to the point, Jeb!"

"Uh… we rushed over right away to see what had happened to her, why she was screaming so desperately. But when we got here she was lying on the ground with scraped knees and bruised hands. Apparently she had tripped while running in the dark…"

"Oh my God!" My brain was working a ten mile a minute when it came to intuitions. "Jeb, don't tell me you took her to the hospital!"

Jeb didn't say anything, he touched the tip of his nose with a finger in a gesture he had only seen humans do. He had never fully understood its meaning until that moment.

"We tried, rather" he added.

"What have you done to Sunny?" Kyle roared, every nerve on edge. His face, usually as pale as Ian's, had taken on a deep ruddy hue. "What have you done to her body ?"

"Oh, for God's sake!" a voice implored from the hall behind Jeb's back. Maggie had come to her after hearing Kyle's retorts to her brother. "She's all right and alive in your room. She's still sobbing like a doomsday siren, though, the absolue fool. I've never seen anything like it in my life."

"Don't even dare about calling her a "thing" again."

Maggie had a temper that was hard to intimidate, as all the members of the Stryder family did, she had learned. But the implicit threat in Kyle's statement was so intimidating that she stood in the light of the electric lamp with her eyes wide open.

"What I wanted to say…" she began.

"Shut up, Magnolia," Jeb suggested, stepping between the two. "Look, Kyle. Candy had to heal her in center field because she got frantic when she saw Doc."

"Of course!" I let out a discreet whistle. It was normal for Sunny to be on edge and have a panic attack when they tried to take her to the hospital to treat her wounds. I wasn't scared of Doc anymore. But to her he must still have seemed like the man from nightmares. She would think the worst, that they were going to extract her and put her in a cryotank for finding the exit.

"Who's with her now?" Kyle calmed down upon hearing that she was intact.

"Ruth Ann and Trudy," Maggie exclaimed, ignoring Jeb's warning.

"Come on, come with me!" Kyle urged us, grabbing both Mel and me by the shoulders to get us moving.

"Us? Why?" Mel complained.

"Who's going to carry the van's stuff?" I argued, seeing his outburst.

"Let someone else pick it up! What does it matter! She may not want to see you because of me" Kyle explained while giving us little pushes with the strength of a bear from this planet, "but she will feel better about herself if she sees that you are back alive and well."

Jeb looked questioning as he sensed that he was missing something in the conversation, but he moved forward with us without asking any indiscreet questions to satisfy his curiosity.

"Stay out of Sunny's sight," Kyle snapped at Maggie without even looking at her as he walked past her.

"What? Why? What the hell have I done to her?" Maggie stammered in confusion.

"You scare her," he replied, walking briskly up the slope toward the large garden.

A small group of people were scattered around the onion fields, tomato plants, and corn patch. They were all whispering as they entered the cave that led to the kitchens. The delicious aroma of rehydrated mashed potatoes and the Canadian bacon I brought back from the last mission wafted from this part of the caves, making my mouth water. But Kyle didn't slow down for a second, even though he was probably a lot hungrier than Mel and I combined.

I could make out a few faces that came over to greet us: Travis, Heath, Carol, Lily, and of course, her brother George. Others, though, were just dark shapes in the shadows. One of those shapes must have been Lacey, given her diminutive stature, comparable only to mine, but she disappeared toward the kitchens. Since Kyle was in a hurry, Jeb stopped to ask some of the curious people to help him unload the van.

Maggie followed us at a safe distance as we entered the fifth hallway on the left of the octopus-shaped corridor. Some of Kyle and Sunny's neighbors hadn't come to the kitchens yet and were peering outside the bedroom doors: Lucina, Aaron, and Stanley. But I didn't see Jamie, the kids, or Candy, so I assumed they were eating.

I rarely went into the other hallway full of bedrooms, as the other hallways were used primarily as storage for food and farm tools. Jeb was the only one who had a bedroom all to himself in the first hallway, which was wide and spacious, at the back of the hallway so that his snoring could not be heard. He liked to jokingly call it the 'presidential suite' of his house.

Kyle and Sunny's bedroom, which had previously belonged to my good friend Walter, had an entrance flanked by purple curtains with gold tassels around the edges that looked more suited to the proscenium of a theater. They weren't nailed to the door frame but hung from a real curtain rod. So the sound of Kyle pulling them back fiercely startled Sunny, Ruth Ann, and Trudy alike. The harsh, clear white light from one of the new rechargeable lamps dazzled Mel and me, but Kyle didn't even blink.

"Kyle!" she exclaimed when she saw him.

Her face, distorted by a sea of shed tears, lit up like a real sun when she saw again that man who had become her pillar of salvation. Another dark figure approached through the corridor to crowd the entrance with the rest of the curious people, so I assumed it was John or perhaps Manny, but I didn't pay attention to him contemplating such a spectacle.

"My bear!" Kyle exclaimed in response, throwing himself into Sunny's eager arms to give her a protective hug of comfort.

"My bear?" a quiet voice murmured behind us, stupefied.

Maggie, next to us, unconsciously grimaced. Ruth Ann and Trudy made room for Kyle as best they could, sticking close to the wall like flies. The room had become very large after the remodeling, but Kyle took up more space than the two of them put together.

"I didn't want to see him! I swear, Kyle! I didn't want to see him!" Sunny whimpered, over and over again, inconsolably.

"Don't be afraid," Kyle whispered in her ear in his deep voice. "No one is going to hurt you. I'm already here."

I was always disturbingly moved by Kyle's compassion for Sunny. All the hatred and anger of that unparalleled brute dissolved in her mere presence.

Sunny's weak, broken sobs gradually quieted beneath the bulk of Kyle's arms. It almost felt like he was going to suffocate her with his tight grip.

"I don't want to go, Kyle," she repeated, rocking in his embrace like a baby.

Ruth Ann and Trudy scurried out of the cramped cubicle, feeling a little uncomfortable, but the rest of the onlookers didn't move from the doorway. Kyle looked at me over Sunny's head, asking for help with his blue eyes, so much like his brother's when they weren't glowing with rage. Mel groaned, rolling her eyes at me as I gave in to her emotional blackmail, and we entered the room to lend a hand.

"Don't worry, Sunny, no one is going to take you anywhere". I leaned down a little to pat her on the shoulder. Sunny pulled herself away from Kyle's arms with difficulty, as if she had become welded to him in his embrace.

"It's not like you should get so upset," Mel exclaimed, crouching down to be at the level of her black eyes, which shone like sparkles in the lamplight. "Wanda has gone outside the caves plenty of times and no one here has ever done anything to her," Mel lied.

"But she's different" Sunny whimpered.

"Why?" she asked more grimly. Mel crossed his arms and stood in an authoritative stance, looking down at her, his hazel eyes fixed like a preying eagle on its victim.

"Because… you trust her," Sunny replied, catching her breath. "She came to you across the desert, alone. She almost died. She protected you from the Seekers, and did a lot of other things for you. Kyle told me everything. She's much braver than I am."

Kyle looked up at the ceiling of the cavern, as if crying out to the heavens for some divine punishment due to a sin committed. Perhaps he had gone a bit too far in telling my story.

"I've never been braver than you, Sunny" I answered, although I noticed Mel's immediate rejection of my answer. "If I was about to die in the desert heat, it was because I was a stupid who didn't have a plan. Nor did I go looking for these humans to help them, that came much later. After they accepted me. I came to this place because I was a coward who ran away from myself."

"Don't say that, Wanda" Mel contradicted me.

"But it's true," I replied. "I didn't like my life in San Diego. I didn't see any point in being on this planet. It was like the whole planet was against me. And if it hadn't been for your stubbornness, Mel, I would have fled to another world and never discovered that I could find a family here."

"I don't see it that way," Mel whispered. My sister. The first person in the entire universe who had truly known what I was like.

"That's why I called myself Wanderer" I said, turning to see Mel's contorted face "I was always stumbling from one life to another, from one planet to another, fleeing from my end."

Sunny had stopped crying, but the tears hanging from her eyelids shone like tiny pearl necklaces in the glow of her silver gaze.

"You are brave, though, Sunny. I leaned forward on my ankles to get closer to her face. You've proven it more than enough this morning, can't you see?"

"Me?" Her voice was barely a gurgle.

"When you found your way out of the caves, what did you do?" Mel asked, knowing where I was going with this.

"I'm back," she exclaimed in a completely unquestionable tone of voice, as if she were saying that the Earth was round.

"But why did you do it?" I asked.

"Because I didn't want the Seekers to find me" Sunny began to hiccup, trying to take a deeper breath, "my parents will still be looking for me out there."

"But, Sunny, don't you see that you could have escaped?" I prompted her a little, I could feel Maggie's incisive gaze fixed on my back. I hoped that she wouldn't overcome her reservations and come close enough for Sunny to see her. "Didn't you think about what the other humans could have done to you when you returned?"

"I didn't think about it, I just reacted," she replied flustered, as if she were rethinking all her actions. "I didn't know what would happen."

"Bingo!" Mel exclaimed with a smile.

"Sunny, anyone can wander around a desert until they burn to death and be lucky enough to be rescued," I explained condescendingly. "But facing the unknown is only for the truly brave."

She smiled shyly, her lips still trembling with suppressed emotion. She must have been having a hard time accepting that such a renowned heroine like me had just paid her such an impressive compliment.

"Welcome to my house," Jeb exclaimed unexpectedly from the doorway. His appearance startled Sunny. "Finally."

"I… I don't…" Sunny began, her voice shaking. "I don't want the Seekers to find Kyle. I don't want him to be change for a soul. I know it's hard to believe, but I like him the way he is now. Even if he's a little… well, you know how he is."

I bit my lower lip to suppress a giggle, while Kyle stood impassively. I wasn't the only one present who tried, but I was the one who had the most success.

"I don't want any of the others to get hurt because of me either," Sunny continued, her face downcast, tears threatening to spill over again from her dark, bright eyes. "Humans aren't what I thought they would be. You're contradictory, complicated, unpredictable…"

"I know, I know," I said, patting him on the shoulder and nodding. "It's hard to understand them sometimes, it's not their fault. They're just that incomprehensible." I noticed a certain discomfort on the part of our nosy audience. "But it's worth the effort to get to know them thoroughly. Because they can be wonderful."

Sunny sniffed at the moisture on her nose, nodding decisively.

"Actually, I'm not that scared of you guys…" she continued, looking behind my back. I heard the sound of several feet shifting nervously at her words, the sand crunching beneath them. "I'm much more scared of never seeing Kyle again."

"Please don't think about it," Kyle begged, his voice reduced to a soft murmur from the tears he was swallowing back. He was also terrified of the idea. But his pride prevented him from showing it.

"Sunny," Jeb called from the doorway, waiting until she focused her gaze on him, "this is my house, and I don't want anyone living in fear under its roof. Do you understand that?"

"So… can I stay?" her voice sounded like a plea laden with surprise.

"If you can stand this bunch of lunatics..." Jeb left his welcome hanging in the air, smiling contentedly under his beard.

But Sunny, instead of being happy as everyone expected, burst into tears again. She buried herself under Kyle's shoulder and mumbled something indecipherable between her muffled sobs.

"Come on, come on, don't cry" Kyle asked her.

"I don't get it," we heard Sunny say. Mel raised an eyebrow at me and I shrugged. "Why? I don't get it. Why can't the Seekers stop chasing you? It doesn't make sense, it doesn't! Why do you have to keep hiding? Why can't we all live in peace?"

A couple of tears rolled down my cheeks, barely conscious of them. It was the cry of a soul that had only known peace. A kind of peace that had believed to be fair, but that would never make it happy on this planet. Like the cry of a child unable to understand the cruelty of the adult world. I didn't turn around to check, but I could hear in the air that that touching question echoed in the ears of all of them with the same disappointment. The Seekers would not rest until the wild humans were no longer a danger. There had been a time when I had thought that way myself. But not anymore. Now I was no longer Wanderer, the soul that had traveled the ends of the universe, but Wanda, the human who would follow this bunch of lunatics, as Jeb had called them, until the end of my days.

"I'm sorry, Kyle," Sunny exclaimed.

"You don't have to apologize for anything at all" he covered her under his shoulder again to comfort her. "You haven't done anything wrong."

"I'm sorry…" she sniffled as she spoke and looked into his eyes. "I'm sorry, I couldn't give you your Jodi's back."

"Don't say that, okay?" Kyle's spirit was about to crumble. "Don't think about her, please. It's not your fault. You're the one who's here with me, now" Kyle tried to stay firm as a rock, to continue being his pillar of salvation. But the big guy was distraught and shaking like a flan. "I'm never going to separate from you. Because, even if you're not her, you know that I love you."

He planted a big kiss on her lips in front of us all, without a moment's hesitation. He buried Sunny's tiny face streaked with countless tears under the jet-black mantle of his hair.

Even though it was the first time I saw them kissing in public, it was crystal clear to me that this was not the first time since she arrived at the caves. Sunny responded immediately, throwing her arms around his neck, so he could kiss her more intensely.

Jeb cleared his throat loudly. To stop us from staring at the couple.

"Okay, 'kay. Let's give them some privacy," Jeb said, turning around to chase away all the onlookers. When Mel and I left, he closed the two curtains behind him. "Hey, let's go! The show's over for today!" he added before walking away.

"You don't want Jamie to see you like that, do you?" Mel exclaimed when she saw my heartbroken face. She grabbed my chin and wiped the last of the moisture from my cheeks with the sleeve of her blouse as if I were a little girl. But those tears hadn't been of sadness, just of helplessness. The Earth no longer belonged to humans and there was nothing more I could do to change that fact.

"My bear," the voice he had heard earlier whispered between giggles. It was just Brandt, making fun of… Brandt?!

"You're back!" I spun around on my ankles, almost running into him as I came to a sudden stop. The expedition of Jared, Ian, Brandt, and Andy had left with four other men from Nate's group three long weeks ago.

My little heart was beating at full speed.

"No, it's just me," Brandt exclaimed, stunned. But before I could misunderstand him and give myself a fit at his devastating response, he began to explain himself quickly. "We split up when we left the caves. Andy and I went east to Albuquerque. Jared and Ian went west to Los Angeles." Mel made a look of relief, but I didn't understand why. Didn't he want to see them all again as much as I did? "Andy then went north with Max's group through the Rockies," Brandt continued, still in a rush. "While I've been traveling up and down the Gulf Coast with Russell's boys these past few weeks, looking into the possibilities of a self-service gas station network they're building on the highways." Jared went with Nate's group, or so he mentioned, south to Baja California and they crossed the ocean by boat to reach Guadalajara. It seems that's where they have their main armory.

"And Ian? Where did he go?" I asked, my nerves on edge. Why did you forget to mention him? I wanted to reproach Brandt as well, but I kept quiet.

"He left with Gail's group for Alaska, they found an old abandoned Cold War shelter where some survivors were hiding. Then he mentioned that he would stay in Portland for a couple of days on business…"

Eric Collins. I remembered the name of the friend Ian had lost in that city and was going to free. He had finally confessed Jeb's true intentions to me, days before he left, when I noticed he was very worried about the trip.

"Yes, yes, I already know the whole plan."

Mel turned her head quickly, looking at me. Apparently Jared hadn't said a word to her.

"But Ian should be on his way here by now, at least that's what he told me," Brandt added.

"He told you? But when did you talk to him?" Mel asked, confused. "And how?"

"Well, this is the most incredible thing. Nate and the rest of the groups use cell phones and public phone booths!" Brandt explained excitedly. "All these years we've been avoiding making phone calls and it turns out those worms… I mean, the Seekers, weren't spying on them," he corrected himself in time, so as not to insult me. But I didn't care at all, given the good news.

Ian was returning home.

Brandt left for the kitchens when we reached the hall, while Mel and I went to our rooms to change clothes. I was more skipping than walking. My excitement was uncontainable.

Mel pushed aside the light green patterned screen in her entryway to enter her room, but I was so weak that when I reached the two doors to my room (one painted red wood and the other heavy metal), I squeezed through the gap like a rodent instead of breaking in half trying to lift them.

I had only been in my dorm for three weeks, sleeping every night with Mel in the room I shared with Jared since I still had the bad habit of needing to fall asleep with the sound of someone else breathing next to me. I didn't like to abuse her hospitality, but she also missed Jared's absence and didn't object.

I saw my smiling reflection in the full-length mirror, with the meager light of the full moon filtering through the cracks. And I quickly changed into the much more comfortable clothes I usually wore in caves: short grey denim overalls, a blue short-sleeved T-shirt and yellow sandals. I checked my appearance once more after changing and smiled again.

That mirror was one of the few luxuries of civilization that Ian had granted me when I woke up in this new body with gray eyes, silver skin, and golden hair. Sometimes I didn't like seeing myself in it at all, because it brought back sad memories of a time and place that didn't belong to me. Memories of Pet's childhood. But on this occasion I was so eager to look as pretty as possible for his return that no feelings of nostalgia assailed me.

I let my nose guide me as I ran out of the dormitories, I could have almost crossed the central garden blindly for I was so hungry. Mel caught up with me soon after, as no matter how hard I galloped with my legs, I couldn't match his long strides. My feet weren't made for speed.

I expected the kitchens to be crowded, as they always were when night fell and we gathered to listen to stories while bread and dinner were being cooked. Only it wasn't just my past life stories being told by the firelight anymore. I recognized Manny's voice before I turned the last corner of the hallway. His Mexican accent was unmistakable among all the other voices. But when I looked around the dining room there were only seven other people listening to him.

"Where has everyone gone?" I thought out loud. Mel shook his head, not having any answer.

As soon as Jamie saw us enter, he jumped up from his seat and rushed out to give us a welcoming hug. Ruth Ann, Trudy and Carol greeted us from their tables, eating and listening. I didn't see Sharon, but Maggie was with Lacey at another table near Brandt.

"Come here, I saved you some food," Jamie offered, "as always."

Every time he hugged me upon returning from a mission, no matter how short, I felt that he was taller than when I left.

"Gosh! I'm always going to be a little girl!" I said to myself. My body had long since stopped growing and Jamie was already almost a head taller than me.

"Jamie, where is everyone else?" Mel looked around repeatedly as if expecting them to appear at any moment, to scare us by surprise.

"Uncle Jeb came by about a half hour ago and told us there was going to be some kind of meeting at the recreatives," he said, serving us two helpings of fried bacon and mashed potatoes.

"What kind of meeting?" Mel asked.

Was there going to be a courtroom? I was terrified that someone would question poor Sunny. But that wasn't going to be the case. Jeb had gone to see Sunny and Kyle shortly after they went to the kitchens and had already made his decision. No one would question it.

"Uncle Jeb called it a guateque," she said with a shrug, not having any idea what it meant, and I didn't know anything about it either. "A lot of people have been running off with their food bowls and everything. I've been waiting to tell you."

"It's a party," Trudy explained. "There will be music, and I assume Jeb will be getting some drinks and snacks from the storeroom, too."

"Sounds like fun," Jamie said, smiling. "Want to come dance with me after dinner, Wanda?"

"I don't know," I murmured discouraged.

Dance? Do I like to dance? My own personal crisis threatened to ruin my evening. The problem wasn't whether she knew how to dance; Pet's mother had given her ballet lessons when she was just a little girl, although she wasn't sure if Petals Open to the Moon was then.

The real problem was whether I would like to dance or whether it was just an inherent reflection of this body that loved music and had an overflowing vitality. I was not quite sure.

In none of my other lives had I known anything like human dancing. Perhaps the ceremonial courtship of Dragons, with their fluid movements in the plasma, was the closest thing to it. But I had never been inclined to seek a partner.

In fact, even in this life, Petals hadn't danced with anyone. She hadn't dated boys her age, nor had she even been considering it, although she had already noticed the changes of adolescence. No one had ever kissed those lips before until Ian did. It was very sad to think that Petals had missed out on the opportunity to know love. The best thing on the entire planet Earth and in all of humanity.

"Why don't you ask Mel?" I added, seeing a small hint of disappointment on Jamie's face. I didn't want to disappoint him.

"She only dances with Jared."

Yes, I remember that very well, I think ruefully. The indelible memory of Jared and Mel dancing to the sound of an old shortwave radio, with the afternoon sun illuminating the desert canyon where the three of them had taken refuge like a torch, was added to the list of reasons not to dance.

"You're so boring, Wanda!" Mel suddenly blurted out. "If it were up to you, we'd be working every day from morning to night."

She had said it very seriously although I could see in her eyes that it was just a joke.

"It's not true," I replied.

"But you never went out partying when we were in San Diego" she reminded me, to my chagrin. "And look, there were many students who invited you to university parties."

"I didn't think it was right to go out partying with my students, it wasn't professional," I replied, trying to remain firm. "Besides, you didn't make it easy for me, remember?"

Mel shrugged succinctly as if to say, 'My bad.'

"Okay, you go ahead. Even if I'm not going to dance, I'm going to hang out too."

She pointed her gaze in Jamie's direction, and I caught the longing on her face out of the corner of my eye. If Mel could handle the tear-jerking melodrama of Sunny and Kyle, I would be no less capable of going through it for him.

"Okay, I'll go, are you happy?"

"Fine," Jamie whispered before quickly turning his head and pretending to be listening to Manny's story.

I didn't finish the bowlful of mash Jamie had given me, but I did eat the tasty strips of bacon. I'd never been a big eater, but since I was barely five feet off the ground, I ate as little as a bird. I passed the rest of my food to Mel, unnoticed by Jamie, who was a devouring lime.

Lacey's laughter chilled me to the core as it echoed through the kitchens. It sounded like the agonized clucking of a bird being slaughtered. I tried to turn my attention back to Manny's words, to hear the end of his speech, but it was useless with the racket Maggie, Brandt, and Lacey were making. I could hear the words 'My bear' among the laughter. I felt sorry for Kyle's bad luck lately. First it had been Sunny's jealous rages, and now it was his turn to be the laughing stock of the moment.

Surely by the next day the anecdote would be on everyone's lips. As Jeb said, it was impossible to keep a secret in this place. Much less with the three gossips who had gathered around the table next to him.

"It's not a very smart idea to piss off Kyle by messing with Sunny," Mel whispered to me, giving them a scowl.

"It's like shaking a hornet's nest," I replied, using one of the phrases Mel's father always used. "But you have to admit, it's funny… My bear," I giggled.

Mel shifted her scowl in my direction and twisted her face as if shocked by my impudence. My sense of humor had also changed, becoming more frivolous and prosaic, not so fond of pessimistic sarcasm.

Sometimes I felt like there was a huge gap between us, growing ever wider. And this was one of those awkward moments.

"What's so funny?" Jamie asked.

"Nothing, nothing," Mel exclaimed quickly.

No one stayed in the kitchens after we finished eating and clearing away the dishes. Even Maggie came up behind me, hot on my heels a few feet away. I still hadn't gotten used to her change of attitude. Ever since she'd learned of Burns' existence, of another soul who was on the side of the humans, she'd looked at me very differently.

"I think Kyle spoils her a little too much," Maggie said, her voice loud enough for him to hear. "That little girl has such a short temper. At least Wanda was standing her ground and not so whiny."

Almost all of his comments were of this nature. She never spoke directly to me, but spoke as if I were not present in the room. She did not treat me kindly either, but tolerated my presence while pretending to be indifferent.

At first I thought it was her way of showing her friendship. But later I discovered that after a lifetime of being slandered by her neighbors, who considered her a nutcase, she knew that there were people for all tastes and colors. And she had come to the theory that in a similar way there must be souls that could be considered "eccentric" by the rest of her people.

I would have liked to deny these theories, but I could not find any argument to contradict them. Burns Living Flowers and I were not the typical example of an ordinary soul.

The sound of music reached us as we entered the large garden. It wasn't one of the songs Pet had heard before, but the fast-paced rhythm of the musical instruments sounded familiar to me as I recognized them: A frenetic electric guitar, thundering drums, and a dizzying bass. I could almost name the band that was playing, it was on the tip of my tongue.

—Red Hot Chilly Peppers —Mel exclaimed when she saw me so focused. I didn't understand until she explained further— That's the song By the way by the Red Hot Chilly Peppers . They were one of my favorite bands before…

Before the world fell apart. A pang of pain gripped my heart as I watched Mel's melancholy. What was Jeb up to by throwing a party? What was there to celebrate? That we were still alive?

I felt bad for having the selfish desire to see Ian again soon. For wanting to celebrate. There was no part of me that didn't long to spend sleepless nights in our room again. I missed his kisses, his touches, his hugs, and the way he made love to me so much. How I had missed him those long weeks sleeping together with Mel!

A strange tingling sensation began to develop in my feet, moving up through my ankles, all the way to my knees, and rising higher and higher. As I got closer to the source of the music, the tingling intensified.

When we got to the arcade we were all speechless. The music was booming through the low ceiling of the cavern, making strange echoes and intensifying sounds. The small radio with a CD player was surrounded by a handful of people who were rummaging through the cardboard boxes in which we had brought the discs. But what left us dumbfounded was that Jeb had lit up that dark and gloomy cavern as if it were a real disco.

Yellow, blue and white lamps lit up every corner of the room, giving a strange depth and tone to all the people who had gathered to dance. Jeb was elated when he greeted us upon seeing us arrive, he crossed his arms and stood in front of us, as self-satisfied as ever:

"What do you think? Isn't it great?"

"Brother, you've really done well this time," Maggie replied, laughing.

I crossed my arms as well, but under my denim overalls, like a sling. My feet began to rhythmically tap the floor to the music. Mel and Lacey headed over to the corner where the warm drinks were being handed out: sodas, beers, and other slightly stronger liquors. Jamie looked around in wonder and grinned at me from ear to ear when he noticed me. Then he launched himself onto the dance floor when Lily motioned for him to come over. While I was a mass of contradictory impulses.

Mel came back with a couple of Cokes for the two of us and was just as distracted as I was watching Jamie dance with Maggie, Carol and Lily.

After a few minutes the music stopped as Brandt, Violetta and Reid began to argue about the songs. They couldn't agree on which band to play next. Violetta and Reid had taken their role as DJ's very seriously and were not accepting of Brandt's unwelcome suggestions.

None of those names sounded familiar to me: U2 , Guns & Roses , Aerosmith , Green Day , Sting , Linking Park , etc… But I had taken them from the "antiques" section anyway, following the list they gave me.

Jeb came up behind them to the radio, winked at me, and put on whatever CD he wanted. When the three of them turned around, he waved his hands around cheekily. Then he started shaking his hips like he was giving her a high voltage shock when he heard the first few bars of a song and a voice that sounded very familiar to me.

The warden threw a party in the county jail
the prison band was there and they began to wail

Jamie stepped off the dance floor and grabbed me by the arm before I could react.

"Are you coming to dance?" he asked, though he didn't give me a chance to answer for a second. I let out a little squeal of excitement when he led me to the center of the room.

My legs began to swing in rhythm without me even realizing what I was doing. My movements were purposeful and graceful, copying the dance steps I observed and adding my own personal style as it became more pleasing to me. Jamie gave up after trying to imitate me, but he was completely unable to keep up.

I laughed out loud when I discovered that those feet were not made for running, or fleeing, but for dancing. I felt inexhaustible, I could spend the whole night dancing. And I was also relieved to realize that I was still me.

That experience was mine and mine alone, the first dance of my life with Jamie, not something borrowed from someone else's memories. A genuine feeling of joy in knowing that I had changed for myself. That my fear of not being who I thought I was anymore was holding me back from discovering my possibilities.

Yes, I like to dance! There were many other things to discover. I wanted time to go faster so Ian could arrive sooner and we could dance together. Once again.

TO BE TRANSLATED…