"I thought this island was uninhabited," she said, her eyes now searching the treeline near the dock."That's what the chart said. That does look rathe... old..." There!" She pointed. "Right down from that tallest tree with the broken top."She waggled her forefinger while he squinted. His lasik surgery had not been a hundred percent successful because he'd insisted on going to that jerk McLaughlin instead of to Brilovic as she'd done. But this wasn't the time to point that out. She waggled it. “Huh?”“Are you okay? You got quiet all of a sudden.”“I’m fine,” I lied.He nodded slowly.“So, what can I tell you about camp?” I asked. I didn’t want to sink into brooding, and comparing myself to a dead paragon was a sure way to do that. Trip understood—he saw it in my eyes.“What are the people like?” he asked.“They’re just people.”“Are the women sexy? Are the guys well-hung? Is it one orgy after another?”I chuckled, which did a lot to banish my self-doubt.“Okay, it was probably a ridiculous. Just in case a fanger was unreasonable. Everyone defended against a fanger who broke the peace, and they usually did not escape justice.For all that they spoke the same, the fifty one tribes had people who looked very different from each other, but the babies were starting to look more alike all the time. There was a rule that said you couldn't mate with someone from the same tribe, or that if you did, you both had to leave and go as far away as you could, to beg entrance to another tribe.The. Michael had always wished so much that maybe he would have been able to catch his own mother with Santa Claus maybe even actually 'filling her stockings, ' so-to-speak, but alas, that was never to be. Not that it would matter, mused the boy, as he knew by looking at the clock, his mother's alarm would soon buzz her out of her dreams and into his own.When her son bounded into her bedroom, the pretty, young mother couldn't help but smile; she didn't have a clue as to what was soon to be her fate..