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the key to him. Once he accepted us, he and Noriko and the girls settled in and made Acorn very much their home. They're good people. Even Michael's suspi-ciousness can be a good thing. Most of the time, it helps us keep alert

    "I don't think the crying was intended to lure us out," I said. "But something is wrong here. That's obvious. The people in that truck should either make sure we're dead or they should leave."
    "And we shouldn't hear them," Jorge said. "No matter how loud that kid yells, we shouldn't hear a thing."
    Natividad spoke up. "Their guns shouldn't have missed us,"
    she said. "In a truck like that, the guns should be run by a computer. Automatic targeting. The only way you can miss is if you insist on doing things yourself. You might forget to put your guns on the computer or you might leave the com-puter off if you just wanted to scare people. But if you're se-rious, you shouldn't keep missing." Her father had taught her more about guns than most of the rest of our community knew.
    "I don't think they missed us on purpose," I said. "It didn't feel like that."
    "I agree," Michael said. "So what's wrong over there?"
    "Shit!" Jorge whispered. "What's wrong is the bastards are going to kill us if we move!"
    The guns went off again. I pressed myself against the ground and lay there, frozen, eyes shut. The idiots in the truck meant to kill us whether we moved or not, and their chances for success were excellent.
    Then I realized that this time, they weren't shooting at us.
    Someone screamed. Over the steady clatter of one of the truck's guns, I heard someone scream in agony. I didn't move.
    When someone was in pain, the only way I could avoid sharing the suffering was not to look.
    Jorge, who should have known better, raised his head and looked.

    An instant later he doubled up, thrashing and twisting in someone else's agony. He didn't scream. Sharers who sur-vive learn early to take the pain and keep quiet. We keep our vulnerability as secret as we can. Sometimes we manage not to move or give any sign at all. But Jorge hurt too much to keep his body still. He clutched himself, crossing his arms over his belly. At once, I felt a dull echo of his pain in my own middle. It is incomprehensible to me that some people think of sharing as an ability or a power—as some-thing desirable.
    "Fool," I said to Jorge, and held him until the pain passed from both of us. I concealed my own pain as best I could so that we wouldn't develop the kind of nasty feedback loop that I've learned we sharers are capable of. We don't die of the pains that we see and share. We wish we could some-times, and there is danger in sharing too much pain or too many deaths. These are individual matters. Five years ago I shared three or four deaths fast, one after another. It hurt more than anything should be able to hurt. Then it knocked me out.
    When I came to, I was numb and sick and dazed long after there was any pain to share. With lesser pains, it's enough to turn away. In minutes, the pain is over for us. Deaths take much longer to get over.
    The one good thing about sharing pain is that it makes us very slow to cause pain to other people. We hate pain more than most people do.
    “I'm okay," Jorge said after a while. And then, "Those guys out there. . . I think they're dead. They must be dead."
    "They're down anyway," Michael whispered as he looked where Jorge had looked. "I can see at least three of them in the field beyond the chimney and the truck." He squirmed backward so that he could relax and no longer see or be seen over the rise. Sometimes I try to imagine what it must be like to look at pain and feel nothing. My current recurring nightmare is the closest I've come to that kind of freedom, not that it felt like freedom. But to Michael feeling nothing must be. . . well. . . normal.
    Everything had gone quiet. The truck had not moved. It did nothing.
    "They seem to need a moving target," I said.
    "Maybe they're high on something,"