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a person?”
    He pondered how best to answer and replied, “Not for food.  I’ve been told people taste horrible.  Like vultures because people have such a wide varying diet they apparently taste putrid.  Also, it would seem odd.  I suppose we survived this far into evolution because most things didn’t want to eat us and weren’t interested in eating each other, either.”
    She looked at him unconvinced, “So why did you kill them?”
    “Can’t you tell when someone is trying to change the topic?”  He replied.  He began to walk again.
    “Well, I don’t believe you.”  She said as he was walking away.  Then she started to follow him again.
    “Good.  Because I did lie.  I have eaten people and so have you.  What do you think is used to make that you call food, down there?  However, I have to admit the reports that people taste putrid are true.  And that is why I prefer it up here.  That’s why I spent the extra on the rat meat you were eyeing up.”
    She looked at him and ran a few steps to catch up to him.  “That’s not funny.  That’s not what it’s made out of!  We aren’t animals.”
    “No, you’re not.  Animals don’t eat people very often.  Didn’t I just say that?”
    She frowned and then asked, “Do you really believe that what we eat is people?  It’s something else.”
    He tilted his head and sighed.  Then he grabbed her wrist.  They appeared in a very large room and it was very cold in there.  Especially given the contrast from where they just were.  “Look for yourself, but stay quiet, this time!”
    She watched as some synth people with gloves and masks and something over their heads were loading the dearly departed onto a moving belt.  She watched as they went into a machine and she could here its blades and the chopping of bone and skin.  Then out from that came the remains.  He grabbed her wrist again and they appeared in the rafters above where the belt leading the remains went.  She saw them chopped into the units of the size of the food she had always eaten.  Then she watched as they continued on a metal belt and then charred from three sides.  Then he pointed.  Their pieces were being cooled and put in the packaging she was familiar with.  She gasped.  He grabbed her wrist and they were back only a few feet from where the snake’s head still lay in the sand.
    “Didn’t I say, ‘be quiet’?  You never seem to do that when I mention it’s important.”  Then he looked at her.  Her hands were over her mouth.  He realized she was thinking very deeply, her eyes were still wide with what she had seen.  He felt for her.  He had always assumed the people down there knew what they were eating.
    She looked up at him with a pleading why on her face.  Then she asked it out-loud, “Why would they feed people that?”
    “Well, it’s meat.  There aren’t a lot of things left to eat.  There were a lot of people in the world and resources were low then.  But then during the gathering of the people, they also took most of the animals that people used to eat.  So the main resource is the people who have died.  Which sadly is not too old because you can’t keep eating those so unhealthy they died and then expect to remain healthy and live.  It was the only logical way to survive.  It’s what they fed the synths before they were awoken.”
    She looked at the snake and then at him.  “How long before we get to shade so we can eat that?”
    “I don’t know, but we have to gather some things to burn so we can cook it.  Best not to eat things raw.  I’ll explain that another time.”  He reached a hand out to her shoulder and pulled her into him and hugged her.  He could tell she had only ever been hugged by one being and that person was part synth.  He held her and ran his fingers through her hair as he pulled her face against his chest.  He realized it was probably a mistake to have shown her that.

CHAPTER 6
    “She was beautiful and