“Don’t worry about him,” I said. “Are Celia, Brook, and Joel all right?”
“They’re fine.”
I nodded, relieved, and told him where to find the men I’d killed and their guns and their gasoline. “Get other symbionts to help you collect them,” I said. “There should be a total of eighteen raiders, living and dead, including this one.”
“Okay,” he said. “Why is this one still alive?”
“I’ve got questions for him,” I said. “Are any of the rest of them alive?”
“Two. They’re shot, and they’ve been kicked around a little. The symbionts were pissed as hell at them.”
“Good. Make sure the dead, their cars, and the rest of their possessions are gathered and shut up out of sight in case the noise or the smoke attracts outside attention.” The Gordons had no neighbors who could be seen from the houses, but the noise might have reached some not-too-distant farm. And the smoke might be seen, although there was much less of it now. The fires were almost out. Two houses had been damaged, but none of them had been destroyed. That was amazing. “Where are the survivors?” I asked.
He pointed them out in the yard where they had been laid, then he said with concern, “Shori, your face is beginning to blister. You should get inside. If it gets any worse, you might have scars.”
I touched his throat just at the spot I had so often bitten. “I won’t scar anymore than you do when I bite you. Thank you for worrying about me, though.” I left him. My raider followed me as though I were leading him with a rope.
The two surviving raiders were battered and unconscious. They lay on the grass in front of Edward’s house. “Don’t hurt them any more,” I told the symbionts who were guarding them. “When they can talk, your Ina will want to question them. I will, too.”
“Our doctor will look at them when she gets around to them,” a man named Christian Brownlee said. He stared at my raider, then ignored him. My raider inched closer to me.
“Are all the symbionts alive?” I asked.
He nodded. “Five hurt. They’re in Hayden’s house.”
I knew the Gordons had a doctor and two nurses among the ninety or so adult humans in the community, and I went to Hayden’s house, expecting to find her at work there. She was.
The doctor was one of Hayden’s symbionts. She was an internist named Carmen Tanaka, and she was assisted not only by the two nurses, a man and a woman, but by three other symbionts. She was busy but not too busy to lecture me.
“You stay out of the sun,” she said. “You’re blistering.”
“I came to see whether I could be of use,” I told her. “I don’t know whether there is anything I can do to help heal symbionts not my own, but I want to help if I can.”
Carmen looked up from the leg wound that she was cleaning. The bullet had apparently gone straight through the man’s calf. “If any of them were in danger or likely to be in danger before their Ina awake, I’d ask for your help,” she said. “But as things are, you’d just cause them unnecessary pain and create problems between them and their Ina.”
I nodded. “Let me know if anything changes,” I said. “I’m going to do what I can for the raiders who survived. We’re going to want to talk to them later.”
“Is this one?” she looked at my companion.
“Yes.”
She looked at the bite wound on the man’s neck and nodded. “If you bite the others, you’ll help them avoid infection and they’ll heal faster and be more manageable.”
I nodded and went out to tend to the raiders. Once I finished with them, I took my raider back to the guest house, gave him a cold bottle of beer from the stock we’d found in the pantry, and sat down with him at the kitchen table.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
“Victor Colon.”
“All right, Victor. Tell me why you attacked this place.”
He frowned. “We had to.”
“Tell me why you had to.”
He frowned, looking confused. It was a kind of confusion that worried me since it seemed to me that it could mean only one thing.
Celia and Brook came into the kitchen, saw us, and stopped.
“Come in,” I said. “Did you come to get food?”
“We missed lunch,” Brook said. “We probably shouldn’t be hungry after all this, but we are.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “Eat something. Fix some for Victor here, too. And sit and talk with us.”