“Lilah,” said Nix. “This place—all these things—it’s incredible. You brought all of this here by yourself?”
Lilah poured water into a cooking pot and began adding bits of meat and vegetables. “By myself. Who else?”
“How many of these books have you read?”
“All. ” She smiled for the first time since they’d started walking. She leaned over and began stirring the mixture in the pot. “I … read, um, better than talk. Sorry. ”
“Sorry?” said Benny enthusiastically. “Lilah, you’re amazing! Isn’t she amazing, Nix?”
Benny, caught up in the moment, turned to Nix, but her expression was a few hundred degrees colder than his. Benny’s common sense took a giant step back for an emergency re-evaluation of everything that had happened in the last few seconds. Lilah, lit by the soft glow of the cook fire, was bending over and smiling. The inadequate rags of her shirt were doing even less of their job. Benny, who, to his credit, hadn’t even been aware of all this, was suddenly very aware—and aware of the fact that Nix was watching both of them. The common sense part of him slapped his forehead and prayed for an earthquake or a timely invasion by a horde of zoms. Benny tried to salvage the moment by stretching his last question into a longer one. “… to have read so many books. ”
As lame attempts go, this one was barely able to limp.
The grin he gave Nix was intended to be earnest, scholarly, and totally oblivious to the miles of cleavage Lilah was showing. Nix’s smile was chilly enough to kill houseplants.
And Chong fries Morgie for being thick, Benny thought, feeling the edges of his smile begin to crack.
To Lilah, Nix said, “George taught you to read?”
Lilah, who was unpracticed enough with people to misread the moment, nodded and sat back. “Yes. We had to read. All the time. ‘Knowledge is power,’” she recited in a voice that was clearly an attempt to imitate George’s.
They nodded. Benny took the opportunity to ask her some questions. “Lilah, have you been alone all this time? I mean … since Gameland?”
She nodded. “Alone. ”
“How did you survive?” asked Nix.
Lilah turned cold eyes on her. “What I see,” she said, “I kill. ”
“God,” said Nix.
Benny said, “What about the way-station monks? Do they help you at all?”
“Monks … We don’t talk. They have their, um, things. I have mine. ”
“Tom said he saw you twice. ”
“Tom,” she said, and shook her head.
“He looked like me. But he was older. Darker hair, darker skin. Tall. Carried a sword. ”
The Lost Girl brightened and smiled in a way that Benny thought it showed she not only knew who Tom was but maybe betrayed something more than simple recognition.
“Sword man,” Lilah said. “Very, um, pretty. ” She looked at Nix for approval. “Pretty?”
“Handsome,” Nix said. “Hot. ”
Lilah liked that word. “Hot. ” She turned to Benny. “But … dead?”
He nodded. “The Hammer shot him, and he fell into a bunch of zoms. ”
Her smiled vanished. “Then he’s a walker. ”
Benny couldn’t bear to think about that and changed the subject. “Lilah, Tom said that you could tell people where the new Gameland is. ”
“What people?”
“People in our town. In Mountainside. ”