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Her sue Itshere now"

"Tell me," I say "I’d like to be in on the joke" I keep my voice easy, conversational, but I’ve seen tooabout what’s happened to them is funny

"You all called us Anoood enough to marry you And now you need us to save you"

I smile back at her "True," I say I lower my voice I’m not entirely sure that Oker is asleep "So," I say to Leyna, "you’ve asked me plenty of questions Let me ask you one or two"

"Of course," she says, her eyes flickering She’s enjoying this

"Is there any chance at all you can find a cure?"

"Of course," she says again, perfectly confident "It’s only a matter of time You’ll be helpful to us I won’t lie But we’d have found the cure without you You’ll just help us speed up the process, which is valuable, of course The Pilot’s not going to take us to the Otherlands if too many people die before we can save them"

"What if your immunity provides no clues?" I ask "What if it turns out to be a enetics?"

"It’s not," she says "We know that The people in the village coo, some more recently The Pilot doesn’t want us to include the recent arrivals in the data, so we don’t, but we’re all immune It must be environmental"

"Still," I say, "an iure out how to bring people back Maybe you’ll only find out how to keep the the virus in the first place"

"If so," Leyna says, "that’s still an extremely valuable discovery"

"But only if you make it in tiotten the virus So we’re very useful to you, actually"

I hear a snort from the corner Oker stands up and walks over toward us

"Congratulations," Oker says to me "You’re not just a Society boy after all I’d been wondering"

"Thank you," I say

"You were a physic in the Society, weren’t you?" Oker asks

"I was," I say

He waves one knotted hand in n him to my lab when you’re done," he tells Leyna

She doesn’t like it, I can tell, but she nods "All right," she says It’s a sign of a good leader when they know the ame, and if Oker is it, she should make sure he has what he needs to try to win

It takes theet some rest," Leyna says "I’ll show you where you’ll sleep"

She walks withTheir h, like it matters more There aren’t many other sounds to cover it up, so you have to listen

"Did you grow up in this village?" I ask her "It’s beautiful"

"No," Leyna says "I used to live in Cao They used to let us work at the Army base soather in the last of the Anomalies and Aberrations"

She looks off in the distance "The Pilot was the one arned us that we should go," she says "The Society wanted us all dead Those who didn’t co were picked up by the Society and sent out to the Outer Provinces to die"

"So that’s why you trust the Pilot," I say "He warned you"

"Yes," she says "And he’d been part of the vanishings I don’t know if you’ve heard about them"

"I have," I say "People who escaped from the Society and ended up either here or in the Otherlands"

She nods

"And no one has ever returned from the Otherlands?"

"Not yet," she says She stops at a building with bars on the s A guard stands at the door and nods to her "I’m afraid this is the prison," she says "We don’t know you well enough to trust you on your oithout supervision, so there are tiht Soht have been less cooperative than you have They’re here full-ti, if I were in charge of this situation "And Cassia?" I ask "Where will she stay?"

"She’ll have to sleep here, too," Leyna says "But we’ll couard to taketo understand"

"I thought it was clear," she says "We don’t know you We can’t trust you alone"

"It’s not that," I say "It’s about the Otherlands, and why you want to go there You’re not even sure that they exist"

"They do," she says