The Host (The Host 1)

Chapter 24: Tolerated

It was true that I did not smell good.

I'd lost count of how many days I'd spent here-was it more than a week now? more than two?-and all of them sweating into the same clothes I'd worn on my disastrous desert trek. So much salt had dried into my cotton shirt that it was creased into rigid accordion wrinkles. It used to be pale yellow; now it was a splotchy, diseased-looking print in the same dark purple color as the cave floor. My short hair was crunchy and gritty; I could feel it standing out in wild tangles around my head, with a stiff crest on top, like a cockatoo's. I hadn't seen my face recently, but I imagined it in two shades of purple: cave-dirt purple and healing-bruise purple.

So I could understand Jeb's point-yes, I needed a bath. And a change of clothes as well, to make the bath worth the effort. Jeb offered me some of Jamie's clothes to wear while mine dried, but I didn't want to ruin Jamie's few things by stretching them. Thankfully, he didn't try to offer me anything of Jared's. I ended up with an old but clean flannel shirt of Jeb's that had the sleeves ripped off, and a pair of faded, holey cutoff sweatpants that had gone unclaimed for months. These were draped over my arm-and a bumpy mound of vile-smelling, loosely molded chunks that Jeb claimed was homemade cactus soap was in my hand-as I followed Jeb to the room with the two rivers.

Again we were not alone, and again I was miserably disappointed that this was the case. Three men and one woman-the salt-and-pepper braid-were filling buckets with water from the smaller stream. A loud splashing and laughing echoed from the bathing room.

"We'll just wait our turn," Jeb told me.

He leaned against the wall. I stood stiffly beside him, uncomfortably conscious of the four pairs of eyes on me, though I kept my own on the dark hot spring rushing by underneath the porous floor.

After a short wait, three women exited the bathing room, their wet hair dripping down the backs of their shirts-the athletic caramel-skinned woman, a young blonde I didn't remember seeing before, and Melanie's cousin Sharon. Their laughter stopped abruptly as soon as they caught sight of us.

"Afternoon, ladies," Jeb said, touching his forehead as if it were the brim of a hat.

"Jeb," the caramel woman acknowledged dryly.

Sharon and the other girl ignored us.

"Okay, Wanda," he said when they'd passed. "It's all yours. "

I gave him a glum look, then made my way carefully into the black room.

I tried to remember how the floor went-I was sure I had a few feet before the edge of the water. I took off my shoes first, so that I could feel for the water with my toes.

It was just so dark. I remembered the inky appearance of the pool-ripe with suggestions of what might lurk beneath its opaque surface-and shuddered. But the longer I waited, the longer I would have to be here, so I put the clean clothes next to my shoes, kept the smelly soap, and shuffled forward carefully until I found the lip of the pool.

The water was cool compared to the steamy air of the outer cavern. It felt nice. That didn't keep me from being terrified, but I could still appreciate the sensation. It had been a long time since anything had been cool. Still fully dressed in my dirty clothes, I waded in waist deep. I could feel the stream's current swirl around my ankles, hugging the rock. I was glad the water was not stagnant-it would be upsetting to sully it, filthy as I was, if that were the case.

I crouched down into the ink until I was immersed to my shoulders. I ran the coarse soap over my clothes, thinking this would be the easiest way to make sure they were clean. Where the soap touched my skin, it burned mildly.

I took off the soapy clothes and scrubbed them under the water. Then I rinsed them again and again until there was no way any of my sweat or tears could have survived, wrung them out, and laid them on the floor beside where I thought my shoes were.

The soap burned more strongly against my bare skin, but the sting was bearable because it meant I could be clean again. When I was done lathering, my skin prickled everywhere and my scalp felt scalded. It seemed as if the places where the bruises had formed were more sensitive than the rest of me-they must still have been there. I was happy to put the acidic soap on the rock floor and rinse my body again and again, the way I had my clothes.

It was with a strange mingling of relief and regret that I sloshed my way out of the pool. The water was very pleasant, as was the feeling of clean, if prickling, skin. But I'd had quite enough of the blindness and the things I could imagine into the darkness. I felt around until I found the dry clothes, then I pulled them quickly on and shoved my water-wrinkled feet into my shoes. I carried my wet clothes in one hand and the soap gingerly between two fingers of the other.

Jeb laughed when I emerged; his eyes were on the soap in my cautious grasp.

"Smarts a bit, don't it? We're trying to fix that. " He held out his hand, protected by the tail of his shirt, and I placed the soap in it.

I didn't answer his question because we weren't alone; there was a line waiting silently behind him-five people, all of them from the field turning.

Ian was first in line.

"You look better," he told me, but I couldn't tell from his tone if he was surprised or annoyed that I did.

He raised one arm, extending his long, pale fingers toward my neck. I flinched away, and he dropped his hand quickly.

"Sorry about that," he muttered.

Did he mean for scaring me now or for marking up my neck in the first place? I couldn't imagine that he was apologizing for trying to kill me. Surely he still wanted me dead. But I wasn't going to ask. I started walking, and Jeb fell into step behind me.

"So, today wasn't that bad," Jeb said as we walked through the dark corridor.

"Not that bad," I murmured. After all, I hadn't been murdered. That was always a plus.

"Tomorrow will be even better," he promised. "I always enjoy planting-seeing the miracle of the little dead-looking seeds having so much life in them. Makes me feel like a withered old guy might have some potential left in him. Even if it's only to be fertilizer. " Jeb laughed at his joke.

When we got to the big garden cavern, Jeb took my elbow and steered me east rather than west.

"Don't try to tell me you're not hungry after all that digging," he said. "It's not my job to provide room service. You're just going to have to eat where everyone else eats. "

I grimaced at the floor but let him lead me to the kitchen.

It was a good thing the food was exactly the same thing as always, because if, miraculously, a filet mignon or a bag of Cheetos had materialized, I wouldn't have been able to taste a thing. It took all my concentration just to make myself swallow-I hated to make even that small sound in the dead silence that followed my appearance. The kitchen wasn't crowded, just ten people lounging against the counters, eating their tough rolls and drinking their watery soup. But I killed all conversation again. I wondered how long things could last like this.

The answer was exactly four days.

It also took me that long to understand what Jeb was up to, what the motivation was behind his switch from the courteous host to the curmudgeonly taskmaster.

The day after turning the soil I spent seeding and irrigating the same field. It was a different group of people than the day before; I imagined there was some kind of rotation of the chores here. Maggie was in this group, and the caramel-skinned woman, but I didn't learn her name. Mostly everyone worked in silence. The silence felt unnatural-a protest against my presence.

Ian worked with us, when it was clearly not his turn, and this bothered me.

I had to eat in the kitchen again. Jamie was there, and he kept the room from total silence. I knew he was too sensitive not to notice the awkward hush, but he deliberately ignored it, seeming to pretend that he and Jeb and I were the only people in the room. He chattered about his day in Sharon's class, bragging a little about some trouble he'd gotten into for speaking out of turn, and complaining

about the chores she'd given him as punishment. Jeb chastised him halfheartedly. They both did a very good job of acting normal. I had no acting ability. When Jamie asked me about my day, the best I could do was stare intently at my food and mumble one-word answers. This seemed to make him sad, but he didn't push me.

At night it was a different story-he wouldn't let me stop talking until I begged to be allowed to sleep. Jamie had reclaimed his room, taking Jared's side of the bed and insisting that I take his. This was very much as Melanie remembered things, and she approved of the arrangement.

Jeb did, too. "Saves me the trouble of finding someone to play guard. Keep the gun close and don't forget it's there," he told Jamie.

I protested again, but both the man and the boy refused to listen to me. So Jamie slept with the gun on the other side of his body from me, and I fretted and had nightmares about it.

The third day of chores, I worked in the kitchen. Jeb taught me how to knead the coarse bread dough, how to lay it out in round lumps and let it rise, and, later on, how to feed the fire in the bottom of the big stone oven when it was dark enough to let the smoke out.

In the middle of the afternoon, Jeb left.

"I'm gonna get some more flour," he muttered, playing with the strap that held the gun to his waist.

The three silent women who kneaded alongside us didn't look up. I was up to my elbows in the sticky dough, but I started to scrape it off so I could follow him.

Jeb grinned, flashed a look at the unobserving women, and shook his head at me. Then he spun around and dashed out of the room before I could free myself.

I froze there, no longer breathing. I stared at the three women-the young blonde from the bathing room, the salt-and-pepper braid, and the heavy-lidded mother-waiting for them to realize that they could kill me now. No Jeb, no gun, my hands trapped in the gluey dough-nothing to stop them.

But the women kept on kneading and shaping, not seeming to realize this glaring truth. After a long, breathless moment, I started kneading again, too. My stillness would probably alert them to the situation sooner than if I kept working.

Jeb was gone for an eternity. Perhaps he had meant that he needed to grind more flour. That seemed like the only explanation for his endless absence.

"Took you long enough," the salt-and-pepper-braid woman said when he got back, so I knew it wasn't just my imagination.

Jeb dropped a heavy burlap sack to the floor with a deep thud. "That's a lot of flour there. You try carryin' it, Trudy. "

Trudy snorted. "I imagine it took a lot of rest stops to get it this far. "

Jeb grinned at her. "It sure did. "

My heart, which had been thrumming like a bird's for the entire episode, settled into a less frantic rhythm.

The next day we were cleaning mirrors in the room that housed the cornfield. Jeb told me this was something they had to do routinely, as the combination of humidity and dust caked the mirrors until the light was too dim to feed the plants. It was Ian, working with us again, who scaled the rickety wooden ladder while Jeb and I tried to keep the base steady. It was a difficult task, given Ian's weight and the homemade ladder's poor balance. By the end of the day, my arms were limp and aching.

I didn't even notice until we were done and heading for the kitchen that the improvised holster Jeb always wore was empty.

I gasped out loud, my knees locking like a startled colt's. My body tottered to a halt.

"What's wrong, Wanda?" Jeb asked, too innocent.

I would have answered if Ian hadn't been right beside him, watching my strange behavior with fascination in his vivid blue eyes.

So I just gave Jeb a wide-eyed look of mingled disbelief and reproach, and then slowly began walking beside him again, shaking my head. Jeb chuckled.

"What's that about?" Ian muttered to Jeb, as if I were deaf.

"Beats me," Jeb said; he lied as only a human could, smooth and guileless.

He was a good liar, and I began to wonder if leaving the gun behind today, and leaving me alone yesterday, and all this effort forcing me into human company was his way of getting me killed without doing the job himself. Was the friendship all in my head? Another lie?

This was my fourth day eating in the kitchen.

Jeb, Ian, and I walked into the long, hot room-into a crowd of humans chatting in low voices about the day's events-and nothing happened.

Nothing happened.