16.2. Sixty-Forty Denton Wyle

Denton dreamed of people screaming in the night. When he awoke, the Sapphian village was quiet all around him. He was spooked enough that he got up and stepped out of the hut into the village common. It was quiet. Everything looked peaceful. The large wood bonfire in the center of the circle was low and hot like a bed of coals. He went back to bed.

In the morning he slept late and missed the work crews. The day was long and dull and he could not even find John in the afternoon to shoot the breeze or go for a swim. He looked, too. And asked around. No one had seen him.

That night, at the Saturday Night Special, John’s name was among those announced in the circle.

Denton was standing in the crowd when he heard it. He had, in fact, just been scanning the crowd for John, and not for the first time that evening. He froze, his hands folded politely in front of him.

Denton knew it was John’s name, John’s real name. He knew that Sapphians did not often, if ever, share the same name. And John’s absence now took on an ominous meaning. He had never seen the boy miss a gathering like this one. Something was majorly wrong.

And then Denton remembered that he did not really know the purpose of the list. He’d tried to find out, but maybe not hard enough, because suddenly the fact that he did not know seemed lazy and horribly, horribly unwise.

Denton scanned the crowd again, as if to change the message his ears had heard. His gaze stopped upon an apparently inconsolable cluster of females—John’s mother and sisters. He worked his way over there, trying to keep it together. They were hanging on one another in a kind of ball of limbs and tears. Denton tugged on one, disentangling her with more force than he had intended, but he was upset, damn it. He made her look at him. “Where’s John?”

She gaped at him with confused hurt, as if he were purposefully being mean. Then she started wailing again and turned back to her family.

Denton would have tried again, but it was hopeless. He put his hands on his hips, feeling very, very unhappy. He was breathing hard. His anger was building. He turned and strode through the crowd, looking for someone who could give him an answer. Just a simple freaking answer!

Then he saw one of the young males he and John worked with almost every day. He was standing still, watching Denton approach, looking right at him. Denton felt a twinge of relief and went to him, grabbed his arm. “Do you know what happened to John?”

But the male—Denton had called him Pete—just looked at him, looked at him, right the heck into his eyes. Stared, really. After months of the guy looking at his cheek, it was kind of disconcerting. And his eyes… they were not nearly as dim and clueless as Denton had always imagined. In fact, they were rather callous eyes. When had that happened?

“John? What h-happened to him?” Denton heard his own voice squeak and realized that he was very badly scared.

Pete slowly smiled. “Allook saheed. He will be missed.”

Denton worked his way toward the jungle, smiling and nodding at the few Sapphians who paused in their grief to give him his due as he passed. His heart was pulsing. The throb of it joined with the lump in his neck in a blood duet. His palms were wet. He told himself he had to calm down. It seemed very important that he calm down.

He reached the jungle. No one seemed to be watching him. He attempted to slip off into the trees, but it turned into something more like thrashing his way into the trees. It got him away from the circle, though, and that was the point.

He blundered around in the starlit jungle for a while, his limbs jerking, sweat coming out of his body in sheets. He was like a rabbit caught in a net and, like a rabbit, he struggled with every muscle and nerve and, eventually, inevitably, exhausted himself.

Panting, he stopped and listened. He couldn’t hear anything. He was alone. It was just him, by himself, going nuts in the nighttime jungle. No one had followed him. No one was coming to get him. He’d gotten a bit lost and it took him ten minutes to find a Sapphian path. It was deserted. He sank down on it, sitting on the packed earth. He had to get a grip.

After all, he didn’t know what Pete had meant. He could have meant “Allook saheed [meaning Denton], yes, we will miss John.” He hadn’t necessarily been referring to John’s allook saheedness. The fact that John was also called allook saheed didn’t necessarily have anything to do with his disappearance anyway. And Denton still did not know what the list meant. Even if something bad had happened to John—death, for example—maybe he had died of natural causes. Maybe there was some kind of superquick virus on this planet, one that he would, by virtue of his Earth genes, be completely immune to. Even if that list did mean people were gone forever or even dead, that didn’t mean his name would ever be on it—at least, not anytime soon.

Only it did. His stomach, which was currently a quivering, sickened mass of bunny guts, said so. He had been covering up, pasting over a lot of things that bothered him. There were a lot of things that didn’t seem quite right. Like the way that, in their solicitude, the Sapphians never quite left him alone. Or John, he recalled. Even swimming, they had always been surrounded. And there were other things. If he’d been in a movie theater, he would be screaming at the idiot on the screen by now: Get out of there, you stupid jerk! But he’d been pasting it over because in real life, unlike the movies, nothing dramatic ever actually happened. There never was a bogeyman under the bed, even if it would be kind of cool and dramatic if there were. And, mostly, he’d ignored stuff because he was a big freaking coward. Because he didn’t have anywhere else to go. Because he needed this all to be true so badly!

Yes, he needed it to be true. He was lost. He was so terribly, terribly far from home. And the semblance of belonging helped him to forget. He sniffed, feeling very sorry for himself.

And then he thought… it still might be okay. He really didn’t know for sure that it wasn’t. He could be letting his imagination get the best of him. He did that, like that time with Carter and the cat burglar thing. He knew he had a tendency to do that and—

A branch cracked.

Denton got to his feet, all panicked motion. Before he could run, a shape stepped from the trees. It was the girl with the white-gold hair, Eyanna. She watched him warily. She had probably heard him blundering through the trees earlier. Earth had probably heard him.

“Ta zhecta,” he said.

“Ta zhecta.” She hesitated, wary, then held something toward him. It was the photograph he had given to her. “Yours?” Her face was intent, questioning.

“No… I gave it to you. You keep it.”

She frowned at him in frustration. “Yours?” she asked again, more loudly now, holding the photograph up as if he wasn’t looking at it properly. “Is she your female?”

He hadn’t a clue what she was going on about and couldn’t care less. The photograph, its subject, the entire history and science of photography, for that matter, was the last thing on his freaking mind right now.

“Yes, she is my female,” he answered, more to shut Eyanna up than anything else. And then he remembered what John had said. What had he called Eyanna? A ghost woman? That was right! Her name had been said in the circle—and she was here, looking healthy and, if not happy, certainly alive.

“Eyanna, listen! My friend’s name was said in the circle tonight. What does that mean? What happens to these ones?”

Eyanna took a step back ungracefully. A small fearful sound escaped her mouth.