Once again, Matthew hung back while Kiva moved forward to talk to the gathered crowd.
Kiva’s voice boomed as she spoke to them, but Matthew couldn’t hear what she was saying. He was distracted by something else.
He closed his eyes and held his breath.
“What is it?” came Dunne’s voice. “Are you okay?”
The pain that he’d felt by the ship, the blinding pain surging through his veins after Kiva had daubed her blood on his wound, had returned. It had grown as they walked nearer to the center of the village—and now it was practically unbearable.
As pain gripped Matthew’s body, voices crowded in his skull. He felt as though he were standing in the middle of a crowded room where everyone was speaking at once, in a language he couldn’t understand.
Matthew shook his head.
“It’s nothing,” he said.
Slowly, like a wave breaking on the shore and receding back into the ocean, the pain and the voices subsided.
Matthew opened his eyes and forced himself to breathe.
Panting, he looked into the cluster of small huts to find that the women had largely dispersed while his eyes were closed. Now, they mulled about in groups of two or three, speaking to each other in hushed voices.
Kiva walked toward Matthew, Dunne, and Sam. “Please come in,” she said. “This is the Sisters’ camp. This is where the women live—the leaders of the Vagri.”
Matthew and Dunne moved into the camp. Once again, Dunne ranged back and forth, looking for women who’d allow her to use her bioscanner on them. Matthew cast a glance over his shoulder and saw that Sam was frozen by the edge of the Sisters’ camp. His face had a peculiar expression on it—Matthew wasn’t certain if it was anger, fear, or some combination that kept him from moving forward.
Odd. What was there to be afraid of?
Matthew put Sam out of his mind and turned to Kiva. “Is everything all right? The women didn’t seem very happy to see us.”
“The Sisters don’t think it’s right for you to be here. They’re angry with me for letting you in and showing you our ways. We’ve never had an outsider come this far into our village.”
Matthew glanced off to the side at a group of three women who were whispering to each other by the door of one of the huts. As he and Kiva passed, they stopped their whispering and stared at him and Kiva with dark expressions.
“They wish that you had just killed us,” Matthew said, thinking of the tone of the voices he’d heard in his head.
“Yes,” Kiva said. “Some of them do. How did you know?”
Matthew squinted. “I don’t know. Somehow I just …” He looked down, splayed his fingers wide at his sides. “I don’t know.”
“You can still feel them inside you, then.”
“Feel who?”
“The Ancestors.”
Matthew shrugged. “I don’t know. What do they feel like?”
“Pain,” Kiva said. “You’ll feel them in a pain that courses through your veins.”
Matthew laughed bitterly. “Then yes. If feeling the Ancestors means feeling pain, I can still feel the Ancestors. You feel this all the time, then? How can you bear it?”
“I’ve gotten used to it. When I had my first vision, the pain was impossible. But I’ve learned how to control the Ancestors, how not to be overwhelmed by them.”
Matthew was about to ask her how, but then Dunne walked up to him, her face knotted with confusion.
“Dunne,” Matthew said, trying to blink away the throbbing pain in his temples. “Hey, what’s wrong with Sam? He’s still hanging back all the way at the edge of the camp, and I don’t know—”
“Forget him,” Dunne said. “I’ve got a more pressing question. I need you to ask how they reproduce.”
Matthew blinked and shook his head. “Wait, what? Please don’t make me ask that. You said that they’re the same as us, right? Didn’t you say that?”
Dunne nodded. “I did. The men are, anyway. Same sex organs, same kind of genetic material for reproduction.”
“But the women are different?”
“Not exactly. Basically, everything’s the same. But with one crucial difference. None of the women I’ve scanned—ten or twelve of them by now—have any genetic material to contribute to reproduction. I mean no ovaries. No eggs. Nothing for the male of the species to fertilize.”
“You mean …”
“I mean they’re barren,” Dunne said. “Every last one of them.”