That got my attention. “You were careless. Raleigh Curtis wasn’t just keeping his eyes open. He was going to shoot Wright. He did shoot me.”
“Accident. He didn’t know you were one of us. If he’d seen you clearly, he wouldn’t have fired.”
“Why would he want to shoot Wright?”
“He didn’t know Wright was with you.”
“Iosif, why shoot anyone over this rubble? Only the people who did this should be punished.”
He stared at me. “Someone burned your mothers and your sisters as well as all of the human members of your family to death here. They shot the ones who tried to get out, shot them and threw most of them back into the fire. How you escaped, I have no idea, but we found the others, burned, broken … My people and I found them. We were coming for a visit, and we actually arrived before the firemen, which meant we were able to get control of them and see to it that they recalled this place as abandoned. When the fire was out, we cleaned up and covered up because we didn’t want the remains examined by the coroner. We searched the area for several nights, hunting for survivors and questioning the local humans, finding out what they knew and seeing to it that they only remembered things that wouldn’t expose or damage us. In fact, the neighbors didn’t know anything. So we didn’t catch the killers. We thought, though, that some of them might come back to enjoy remembering what they’d done. Criminals have done that in the past.”
“To enjoy the memory of killing … How many people?” I demanded.
“Seventy-eight. Everyone except you.”
I wet my lips, looked away from him, remembering the cave. “Maybe only seventy-seven,” I said. I wanted badly not to say it, but somehow, not saying it would have made me feel even worse.
Iosif touched me, put his hand on my chin and turned my head so that I faced him. He or someone else had done that before. It felt familiar and steadying. He had straight, collar-length white-blond hair framing his sharp, narrow face and large gray eyes with their huge dark-adapted pupils. He still didn’t look familiar. I didn’t know him. But his touch no longer alarmed me.
I said, “Someone found me as I was waking up in the cave. I don’t know how long I’d been there. Several days, at least. But finally, I was regaining consciousness, and someone found me. I didn’t know at the time that it was … a person, a man. I didn’t know anything except … I killed him.” I couldn’t bring myself to say the rest—that I’d not only killed the man, but eaten him. It shamed me so much that I moved my face away from his fingers, took a step back from him. “I still don’t know who he was, but I remember the sounds he made. I heard them clearly, although at the time I didn’t even recognize what he said as speech. Later, when I was safe with Wright, I was able to sort through the memories and understand what he said. I think he knew me. I think he’d been looking for me.”
“What did he say?” Wright asked. He had moved closer to me.
It was terrible that he was hearing this. I shut my eyes for a moment, then answered his question. “He said, ‘Oh my God, it’s her. Please let her be alive.’”
There was silence.
Iosif sighed, then nodded. “He wasn’t from here, Shori, he was from my community.”
I looked at him and saw his sorrow. He knew who the man was, and he mourned him. I shook my head. “I’m sorry.”
To my surprise, Wright pulled me against him. I leaned on him gratefully.
“I sent my people out to hunt,” Iosif said. “We thought you would have survived, if anyone did. Only one of my men didn’t come back from the search. We never found him. Where is your cave?”
I turned to look around, then described as best I could where the cave was. “I can take you there,” I said.
Iosif nodded. “If his remains are still there, I’ll have them collected and buried.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, my voice not much more than a whisper.
He stared at me, first with anger and grief, then, it seemed, only with sorrow. “You are, aren’t you? I’m glad of that. You’ve forgotten who and what you are, but you still have at least some of the morality you were taught.”
After a while, Wright asked, “Why did you think she had a better chance of surviving?”
“Her dark skin,” Iosif said. “The sun wouldn’t disable her at once. She’s a faster runner than most of us, in spite of her small size. And she would have come awake faster when everything started. She’s a light sleeper, compared to most of us, and she doesn’t absolutely have to sleep during the day.”