The Host_ A Novel - Stephenie Meyer [56]
The babble got louder as we moved forward, and the closer it got, the less it sounded like water. It was too varied, low and high pitches mingling and echoing. If it had not been so discordant, it might have sounded like an uglier version of the constant music I’d heard and sung on the Singing World. The darkness of the blindfold suited that memory, the memory of blindness.
Melanie understood the cacophony before I did. I’d never heard the sound because I’d never been with humans before.
It’s an argument, she realized. It sounds like so many people arguing.
She was drawn by the sound. Were there more people here, then? That there were even eight had surprised us both. What was this place?
Hands touched the back of my neck, and I shied away from them.
“Easy now,” Jeb said. He pulled the blindfold off my eyes.
I blinked slowly, and the shadows around me settled into shapes I could understand: rough, uneven walls; a pocked ceiling; a worn, dusty floor. We were underground somewhere in a natural cave formation. We couldn’t be that deep. I thought we’d hiked upward longer than we’d slid downward.
The rock walls and ceiling were a dark purpley brown, and they were riddled with shallow holes like Swiss cheese. The edges of the lower holes were worn down, but over my head the circles were more defined, and their rims looked sharp.
The light came from a round hole ahead of us, its shape not unlike the holes that peppered the cavern, but larger. This was an entrance, a doorway to a brighter place. Melanie was eager, fascinated by the concept of more humans. I held back, suddenly worried that blindness might be better than sight.
Jeb sighed. “Sorry,” he muttered, so low that I was certainly the only one to hear.
I tried to swallow and could not. My head started to spin, but that might have been from hunger. My hands were trembling like leaves in a stiff breeze as Jeb prodded me through the big hole.
The tunnel opened into a chamber so vast that at first I couldn’t accept what my eyes told me. The ceiling was too bright and too high-it was like an artificial sky. I tried to see what brightened it, but it sent down sharp lances of light that hurt my eyes.
I was expecting the babble to get louder, but it was abruptly dead quiet in the huge cavern.
The floor was dim compared to the brilliant ceiling so far above. It took a moment for my eyes to make sense of all the shapes.
A crowd. There was no other word for it-there was a crowd of humans standing stock-still and silent, all staring at me with the same burning, hate-filled expressions I’d seen at dawn.
Melanie was too stunned to do anything more than count. Ten, fifteen, twenty… twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven…
I didn’t care how many there were. I tried to tell her how little it mattered. It wouldn’t take twenty of them to kill me. To kill us. I tried to make her see how precarious our position was, but she was beyond my warnings at the moment, lost in this human world she’d never dreamed was here.
One man stepped forward from the crowd, and my eyes darted first to his hands, looking for the weapon they would carry. His hands were clenched in fists but empty of any other threat. My eyes, adjusting to the dazzling light, made out the sun-gilded tint of his skin and then recognized it.
Choking on the sudden hope that dizzied me, I lifted my eyes to the man’s face.
The Host
CHAPTER 14
Disputed
It was too much for both of us, seeing him here, now, after already accepting that we’d never see him again, after believing that we’d lost him forever. It froze me solid, made me unable to react. I wanted to look at Uncle Jeb, to understand his heartbreaking answer in the desert, but I couldn’t move my eyes. I stared at Jared’s face, uncomprehending.
Melanie reacted differently.
“Jared,” she cried; through my damaged throat the sound was just a croak.
She jerked me forward, much the same way as she had in the desert, assuming control of my frozen body. The only difference was