In the days following the resumption of normalcy in the forest, Melanie had begun to notice that Allison, the thin girl who'd once been an abused wife, was in ways the "problem child" of the group; more than anyone else, she was inclined to argue with Jane's direction of the party, especially when hunters were in pursuit. Three times in the time Melanie had been there, Allison had broken from the group during a run, and once they had not seen her again until evening, when she'd straggled back into the village well after the siren had gone off. It wasn't unheard of for a girl to become separated from the party during one of these runs--which were at times desperate, headlong, affairs--but it appeared to Melanie that Allison at times went her own way deliberately. Talking with Jane and Sunni revealed that they had the same opinion.

And, on an afternoon when a light rain was falling in the woods, it happened again. In the wet woods, the girls had almost run into a party of four hunters before they'd seen them; the hunters had seen them, too, and a volley of arrows had followed their hasty pursuit. None of the girls were hit, and, in the rain, they were in the end able to elude the hunters. But it wasn't until late that afternoon that they were able to stop and take a head-count, and when they did, they discovered that Allison was missing.

Even though it was late, and the time for the sounding of the siren wasn't far off, they doubled back on their trail, looking for their lost companion and at the same time keeping a wary eye out for the party of hunters. It took at least an hour, but at last they did find her.

Melanie gasped when she first saw her. The thin girl had hidden herself very effectively in a dense thicket; it had, for the moment, saved her from the hunters.

But she had not been able to avoid all their arrows. One was set firmly in her chest, down through the upper part of her right breast, the razor-edged point deep in her lung. Blood, partly dried and partly washed away by the daylong rain, streaked her chest and belly. More had collected around her lips, and Melanie noticed that she was bubbling blood from her nose as she breathed.

"Guess I wasn't so lucky this time," she said as they rushed to help her. They half-carried her to a sheltered area under a tree, where she laid down on the wet ground.

"Damn," Jane said, shaking her head as she examined the wound. "This is really bad." She pursed her lips. "Did you see what kind of arrows they were using, Allison? Barbed points or regular?"

"What's the difference?" Melanie demanded. ":Just get it out of her!"

"You can't pull out a barbed point," Jill explained. "You'll do much more damage pulling it out than it did going in. Like a fishhook. A regular point you can."

Melanie stared at the girl. "And if we take her back to the village..."

"The doctor will put her out. That's a potentially fatal wound."

"They told us at the induction center..."

Jill nodded. "To kill yourself if possible if you were wounded like this. That was damn good advice, too."

"Yes, it was," Allison agreed. She gave them a wry grin. "I'm just not sure how to do that." She looked up at Jane again. "I did see the arrows. Barbed. That's why I haven't tried to pull it out myself."

"What're we going to do?" Melanie asked.

"The first thing we're going to do," Jane said, "is get this arrow out of her. Then we'll see where we are."

"But I thought..."

"Jane has her ways," Jill said.

"Come here," Jane said, motioning to the others. "Most of you know the drill." She looked directly at Melanie. "What I'm going to do is going to hurt her like all hell. You have to help hold her down, and you have to keep her mouth covered so her screams don't attract hunters. Got it? Let's do it."

"Why don't you just bash my head in with a rock?" Allison asked.

"We're not there yet and you know it," Jane said. "Come on, girls. Let's do this." Allison protested, but she was ignored; the girls gathered around, holding her arms and legs and covering her mouth.

Then Jane grabbed the arrow with both hands and started shoving it in deeper.

Allison jerked violently and screamed behind the hands covering her mouth, making a little noise in spite of their best efforts. Relentlessly, Jane kept on pushing until the arrowhead tore out of Allison's back just below her shoulder blade. The auburn-haired girl pushed on until the arrowhead and maybe an inch of the shaft was exposed. She then unscrewed the arrowhead from the aluminum shaft, and, finally, pulled the shaft back and out.

Quickly, they pulled Allison up to a sitting position, and Jane compressed leaves against the wounds, front and back, stanching the flow of blood.

"I'm not gonna make it," Allison muttered a short while later. "Not gonna make it..."

"We still can't take her back to the village," Sunni whispered.

"We can try," Jane gritted. "We'll slip her in in a group. Hide it from the rangers. Get her to one of the huts."

"We can't. It's a chest wound, they'll see it. They'll report her to the doc, they have to, and he'll send her out. And anyway, what're we going to do in the morning? This isn't going to heal overnight, Jane!"

"Sunni's right," Allison said, coughing and wincing in pain. "I'm done, it's over for me."

"I'm not ready to give up yet!" Jane cried.

"I am," Allison told her.

"No," Melanie said. "You stay in the village tomorrow. The hunters don't always search it, surely..."

"Pretty much, they do," Jill countered. "They do because they know someone may be there wounded. In the early days it happened a lot. They'll take her captive and kill her at their leisure. That can involve a lot of torture."

"Yes," Allison agreed. "Remember Tina?"

Jill gave Jane a meaningful glance. "A year ago... she was wounded, too. We got her in, but we got caught doing it. The doctor put her out, and some hunters took her. They built a pyre and burned her alive..."

"I heard about that..." Melanie murmured.

"Allison, I'm not going to kill you," Jane said. Her frustration was more than obvious. "And I'm not going to leave you out alone all night, either."

"You don't have to, now," Allison answered. "Now, we have a weapon." She looked toward the arrow and arrowhead that Jane had taken out of her. "Put it back together for me, would you, Jane?"

Jane was silent for several minutes. After a while, Sunni laid a hand on her arm. With her eyes wet, Jane picked up the arrowhead, screwed it back on the shaft, and handed the assembled arrow to Allison.

"Thanks," the thin girl said. "Help me up to my knees now, will you?"

Several of the girls did; once she was up, Allison, with shaking hands, set the nock of the arrow against the ground and carefully located the point at her solar plexus. "This look about right to you, Jane?" she asked.

"Yes," Jane said tiredly. "At that angle it ought to go up behind your breastbone and into your heart."

"Yes." She tucked it up tightly against her body, then looked up. "You know, I really do deserve this," she said. "I did kill someone..."

"Allison, you are such a fool," Jane said, her voice cracking.

"That's what you and Harry always said." She forced a little smile. "Take care, all of you. Make it. Think of me sometimes." She looked down at the arrow; then, holding it tight with her left hand, she put her right hand on the ground and extended her left leg behind her, putting most of her weight on her right arm. For a moment, her arm shaking with the strain, she held her position.

Then she suddenly raised her right hand, and her thin body fell onto the arrow. With a loud slurping sound, a full foot of the shaft went into her. She let out a little cry and fell over sideways, her body quivering, blood roaring out from around the shaft. The girls rushed to her, but she'd done it well; the arrow had ripped right through her heart, tearing it apart. She barely had time to blink before she died. Almost as an afterthought, her bowels and bladder emptied themselves noisily on the ground.

Jane looked away and wept for a moment. Then she raised her head and wiped her eyes. "Let's go," she said. "The siren's going to sound any minute. There's nothing else we can do here."

That evening, Jane hardly ate any of her dinner; she seemed inconsolable, Allison's death seemed to have affected her profoundly. After the meal, Melanie, Jill, Pi, and Sunni gathered around her, trying to say something that would somehow help.

Of course, there was nothing. "She always felt like she deserved to be here," Jane said. "She was the only one who felt like that. I tried to talk her out of it, so did Harry. She never let it go. I'm sure that guilt was what drove her to separate herself from us, and it finally got her killed. I couldn't save her, I couldn't save her from herself." The girls tried to tell her that she couldn't possibly save them all, some were going to fall to the hunters no matter what she did, but it still didn't help. Eventually Jane, saying she wanted to be alone and wanted to sleep, retired to her hut. So, after a while, did Jill and Sunni. Melanie, still wound up, sat by the firepit with Pi for a while longer.

"So unfair," she murmured, poking at the long-dead ashes with a stick. "Every single one of us, convicted by a court and thrown in here for crimes we didn't do..."

"Not every one," Pi said softly. "Every one but one."

Melanie looked around at her. "Yes..." she murmured. "Someone else said that... and when I asked about it, whoever I was talking to said to ask you about it... and then I forgot..."

Pi pulled one leg up and held her knee with her hands. "Easy to do here. Running for our lives, all the time... but yes, I am the one to talk to about such things. I, alone of this village, was convicted of no crime."

Melanie frowned deeply. "Then why...?"

"I was born," Pi said, "in Thailand. In the countryside south of Bangkok, a tiny village. When I was just a little girl a seer in my village said I would be the one to save my family, to bring them out of the terrible poverty they lived in. They took such things very seriously, so they scrimped and saved and borrowed and stole and sent me to school in Bangkok. I studied English and engineering. When I graduated, I came to the United States to make my fortune. By then, having paid for my schooling and travel, my family was utterly destitute."

"What happened, Pi?"

The tiny girl shrugged. "We live in a hard world now, Melanie. I did not know, not until I arrived in California, that every company is subject to racial and gender quotas passed down from the government. There were no openings in any of the software companies for female Asians, their quotas were full. I was assigned work in data-entry. It was very boring and it hardly paid enough for me to live, much less enough for me to send any money home to my family, who had invested everything they owned in me." She paused for a moment, staring blankly into space.

"So, I saved enough to pay the fee and I went to an employment firm. They said they could not help me; the waiting list for good technical jobs for Asian women was very long--because of the quotas. The man who interviewed me said I was a very pretty girl, and perhaps I could make good money in the government brothels."

"So you went to work in the brothels? I really don't know much about them..."

Pi nodded. "Yes. In Los Angeles. I was determined to make a lot of money, so I was very enthusiastic. I built up a big clientele of regulars. They kept me very busy." She paused, giggled, and patted her groin. "And sore!" she added. Her mirth departed as quickly as it had come. "But then, at the end of my very first month there, when I got my first paycheck, I was so disappointed... it wasn't much more than I'd been making at as a date-entry tech. I asked the brothel manager about it, and he asked me if I was aware that the brothel took a percentage of each girl's earnings for the government. I said I was, I knew they were intended as money-making businesses for the government, but I did not know that they took more than eighty percent!"

"Eighty percent!"

Pi nodded. "Yes. House share, room tax, medical testing, immunizations, all manner of things. A long list of charges, most of them so confusing one could not tell what they were for. I was heartbroken. I felt I had nowhere to turn. My family had driven themselves to despair providing for me and I wasn't able to send anything back to them. In the manager's office, I burst into tears. It was then he made his suggestion."

"I have a feeling," Melanie said slowly, "that I know where this is going now..."

Pi nodded again. "He told me I was a Class-B, and he told me all about the game preserve here. He said I could, if I wished, sell myself to the government--as game. He said they would pay me a lot of money if I did."

By this time, Melanie wasn't even startled. "So you sold yourself. You gave up your life..."

Pi sighed and stared at the ground. "It was for a very large sum of money," she said in a low voice. "A great help to my family. I get a bonus, too, if I walk out in ten years--nine, now. And my family gets the same bonus if--"

"If you get taken by a hunter."

"Yes." She raised her head. "Melanie, the advance plus the bonus is more money than I could have made in ten years as an engineer. It means a whole new life for my family. The seer was right."

"But almost no one makes it through ten years..."

"I know," Pi almost whispered. "They were honest about that part, Melanie. I knew that when I came here. I just felt I had no other choice."

Spontaneously, Melanie leaned over and hugged her. "It is a hell of a world we live in, isn't it?" she murmured.