“It only has enough charge to expand once,” he’d told me as we started patrolling. “So don’t use it unless you’re sure you have something.” Well, I was definitely sure, and I didn’t want to take the chance that the jarring of climbing the tree would break the egg sac or something.
I took the thin, octagonal plate out of my pack and laid it flat on the ground, positioning it under the pulsing blue netting before stepping on. It was about the size of a stepping stone in a garden walkway, big enough for both of my feet and not much else.
“Up!” I commanded, not sure what I was doing.
When nothing happened, I examined the plate and noticed what looked like recessed buttons set into the edge of the platform: up and down arrows, and a horizontal line with arrows on both ends. I crouched on it this time, took a deep breath and pressed the up arrow once, briefly, receiving a little jolt upward in reply.
Okay. I took another breath and pressed the button, holding it down this time and speeding upward. A branch nicked my shoulder painfully on the way up, almost knocking me off the tiny platform, but I managed to stay on.
I let go of the button about five feet from the sack and had a strong sense of déjà vu. Years ago, shortly after the avalanche, I’d had a dream very much like this.
I’d been alone in a tree, wondering how I had come to be there, and there was an egg sac hanging there, iridescent blue and pulsing with some kind of malevolent energy. I’d known that I had to destroy it. There hadn’t even been a question in my mind.
The egg sack was a danger to everyone I knew and loved, and in the dream, that had been a very long list of people relying on me. I’d had a scy in my hands and I’d known what to do. I went to work.
The dream had been so vivid that I couldn’t stop thinking about it the next morning, and it had been so strange that I described it to Dad and Sensei over breakfast. “…and they pulsed, like big, blue, pulsing grapefruits,” I said through a mouthful of pancake. It was the best way I could think of to describe the eggs. I thought they’d get a kick out of it, tell me what a vivid imagination I had.
Instead, Sensei exchanged a surprised look with Dad and replied, “Really. That sounds like a good exercise.” The next day I entered the workout room to find a rough wooden platform that stood about six inches high off the polished floor, eight feet wide, octagonal, and oddly reminiscent of my dream perch. In place of my usual heavy bag, there was a ten-pound, mesh bag of white grapefruit hanging from the ceiling.
As if I had still been in the dream, I had picked up my scy and stepped up to the bag of Texas’s finest, somehow already knowing Sensei’s instructions.
What I was seeing now looked exactly as I remembered from my dream all those years ago. The large, grapefruit-sized blue eggs looked soft and bumpy and were held together by a kind of organic netting. I remembered this feeling too, this thrumming in my blood, this instinct to kill. They were dangerous, unnatural - evil.
I looked down at the tiny octagon I clung to, fifteen feet in the air and swaying like an out of control car jack. That other button caught my attention and I thought, what the heck? It couldn’t hurt.
The platform immediately folded out from below, expanding in every direction until it either extended a good four feet from center, or hit part of the tree. I gingerly put my weight on the new, much thinner sections and found them springy, but stable. I looked back at the iridescent blue eggs and thought once again about calling for help, but some of the eggs were doing a funny stretching. They were hatching, I realized, and my heart rate shot through my chest. There wouldn’t be time for anyone to reach me here. Besides, I had this feeling that I couldn't wait. I had to destroy those eggs.
I pulled my scy from its sheath on my hip and pressed the button to extend it from resembling a police nightstick to full-sized deadliness. This was so much like my practice grapefruits back home, I thought. How hard could it be?
I started slicing in the old familiar rhythm, cutting a small hole in the netting first and catching each egg as it fell. I immediately realized that one thing was definitely not like my practice sessions back home. Grapefruits didn’t bleed.
The squirting blood and smell of wet feathers were enough to gag me. I swallowed hard in disgust and held my breath; this would be over in a minute.
The squishy eggs started falling faster and faster, cascading out of the loosening netting, some of them hatching in midair. Man, but these things hatched fast, exploding out of their shells. I was slicing as fast as I could, catching short glimpses of blue beaks and feathers, but I couldn’t concentrate on that now. Swinging, slicing, moving, jabbing. The rhythm took over and I stopped thinking. Several times I had to sweep off the platform with a swipe of my boot or blade as the bloody mess grew around me.
Finally, the sac was empty, and the last egg fell, its spongy shell splitting and bursting open on its way to the platform. I realized I didn’t even know what these things looked like. Morbid curiosity made me turn my wrist at the last second and I missed slicing it in half.
I’m not sure what I expected, some scaly gremlin thing, maybe. Instead, I saw a fat little chick emerge, all fuzzy with blue down and big dark eyes. This was the big threat? I thought incredulously, as it flapped its little wings and shook out its round, downy body, making it look even fluffier and cuter. I noticed as it flapped that it had two extra appendages: short arms growing from under the wings.
It tilted its head and looked around at the carnage surrounding it on the platform. I winced, hoping it didn’t know, couldn’t know what I had just done to its siblings. I felt suddenly guilty. Unsure if, in doing what I’d been trained to do, I had done the right thing. Absently, I put my scy down as memories of holding baby chicks on our neighbor's farm came to me.
I couldn’t resist reaching out and scooping it up in my hands, rubbing its adorable head with my forefinger. It looked up at me with big, liquid eyes and cheeped. “Cheep! Cheep, cheep!” sounding like a newborn chick. Soooo cute.
I was astounded. How could this adorable fluff ball possibly be trouble? I’d just had this thought when it turned its downy head and gave me a nip on the side of my finger.
Reflex made me drop it with a gasp as I stared from the chunk missing from my finger to the ball of cuteness on the platform, now eating the grisly remains of its kin with gusto.
Ugh! Completely disgusting! And freakin’ OW! It took me a minute as my finger bled profusely down my hand for my mind to wrap around the fact that this cute, fuzzy, baby bird could actually be as bad as they said, especially if there were a bunch of them. It had started on the tree truck, happily chomping into hardwood when I picked up my scy and swung.
“Well finally,” I heard from below. “I thought you were going to let it get away and burrow on us.”
Chapter 17: Blood in the Water
With relief I saw Thal grinning up at me. Next to him was a hover cart partly full of iridescent blue and bloody red. Yech. I tore a strip from my shirt and wrapped my dripping finger tightly before pressing the down button on the platform. It folded itself under me and zipped down so fast I thought I was falling.
“Ugh. That takes some getting used to,” I said, referring to both the freefall platform ride and the gory mess that fell with me to litter the ground.
“When Lyta and Otrere showed up without you, I was pretty sure they’d ditched you. You were supposed to call for backup though,” Thal chided, tossing chunks of meat into the cart as if it were no big deal. “But I can see they were already hatching, so you did the right thing. They would have been a lot worse as chicks.” He smiled again. “Good job. Only next time, take a second to call before you get started, just in case they get away from you, okay?”
"Okay,” I agreed, my stomach too queasy to give him much of a smile back. I didn’t even want to watch what he was doing. Stepping gingerly off the platform, I brushed it off as well as I could on some dry grass, then did the same with my scy before collapsing it back down to stow on my belt. I
kept my fist tight around the makeshift bandage to stop the bleeding.
“Come on, let’s go back and get you some stitches on that finger,” he said when the cart was full. We started walking back, Thal chattering away excitedly about the eruption, me still trying to calm my stomach. At this point, I couldn’t remember how far we’d come.
“I almost had a heart attack when I saw you holding it. What were you thinking?” he asked. I explained about the chicks back home and how harmless they were.
“Well,” he said with a little frown at that, towing the gory load, “all I can say is it’s a good thing you don’t have any major veins there. I can remember when the women used to wear full body chain mail to protect against bites, but it hasn’t been that bad in a while.”
"Okay, so what’s up with collecting the carnage?” I asked with a nod to the now dripping cart. “That’s disgusting, and where’d you get the cart from anyway?”
“You’ll see.” He gave a sly little smile. “And check out that other button on your platform.” I looked at the octagonal plate through the mesh, and sure enough there was a button on the other side I hadn’t noticed with a picture that sort of looked like a cart. Glad I hadn’t pushed the wrong one.
Back outside the Kindred, Thal filled a five-gallon bucket with the haratchi mess before dumping the rest into a covered bin. The edge and lid were smeared with dried blood and feathers, and I couldn’t help but notice a large bloody paw print on the side of the bin. The cats own personal snack shack, apparently.
Thal checked his link, took the bucket, and continued awkwardly inside, barely managing not to slop bloody remains all over the floor.
“Don’t worry, this’ll only take a minute,” he said. I really just wanted to get my hand taken care of, but followed him out of morbid curiosity.
After walking halfway around the compound, I realized that huge fish tanks were built into the outer wall all the way around. They were numbered and all filled with the same oddly pretty, silver fish with sunset bellies.
“Thal, with all the restrictions on water, why are there all these fish tanks around?” I asked. Altogether there had to be thousands of gallons of water in the tanks.
He grinned at me in excitement. “Watch,” was his only response.
We finally reached the tank with the number he was looking for etched into the stone above. Thal grabbed a short ladder from a corner, opened the lid on the tank, and poured the whole bucket in before slapping the lid closed again. The effect was immediate and grotesque in its primal viciousness. The haratchi remains were completely gone in less than a minute, leaving only a pink tinge to the water.
“Cool huh?” Thal was jazzed while I was once again trying to hold onto my lunch. “Ooh, you don’t look so good. Let’s get you to Mom, okay?” I nodded.
“We have to keep the fish for emergencies, but like I said, things haven’t been that bad in a long while. The last time the moat was filled was a few years ago.”
I tried to make sense of what he was saying. “Wait. You put piranha in the moat?” I asked incredulously.
“Well, yeah. They take care of a horde of haratchi chicks during an outbreak before they can get to the Kindred. You should see the video – it’s like an explosion! So cool. I can’t wait to see it again in person!”
Thankfully we entered the drab clinic and I was saved from having to respond as I collapsed into a chair.
After spending some quality time with Aunt Penthe getting stitches, I trudged my way to dinner. I hadn’t noticed it walking back with the suns on my hair, but now that I was inside, I was dragging.
Nearly everyone in the Great Hall had already heard about my lapse in judgment with the haratchi chick. Ethem teased me, Great-Aunt Nico huffed in annoyance on her way past, and Myrihn stopped to glare at me.
“I thought I told you to stay with Lyta and Otrere. Couldn’t even follow a simple order, could you? Had to make me look bad.” She probably got in trouble for the General’s newly-arrived daughter getting hurt on her watch. If she weren’t such a jerk, I might have felt bad about it.
Thal tried to help. “Sunny did a great job,” he said. “It was her first time even seeing a haratchi nest, and that one was huge!” But no one seemed to listen.
My mother only looked at my swollen, bandaged finger and pursed her lips together in disapproval before she disappeared into her office with a tray.
Thal led me over to a table with his mother and some other people I didn’t know. A few I’d met on patrol that day, and a few others I recognized from dinner the night before. The twins smacked my bite, pretended it was an accident that I got left behind, and sat with Myrihn.
“Hey,” Thal said, noticing me glancing over at them. “Don’t pay attention to them. They’re always hard on the newbies, and everybody makes mistakes starting out. That’s what training is for. You’ll catch up.”
“And everyone gets bit sometime,” Penthe added. “It will heal.”
I smiled at them in thanks and ate dinner quietly, trying my best to be invisible.
After returning my dishes to the kitchen, I went looking for my mother’s office. Not that I wanted to search out the woman who hadn’t bothered to take any time for me in the last fourteen years – I didn’t remember my first year with her – but it was necessary.
Besides getting advice from Andi on how to handle the twins, I still had to let everyone back home know that I had arrived okay. And I had to tell Dad about the crappy way mom was treating me. He’d get me out of this, and hopefully Andi could help me get back at the twins before I left for home.
Chapter 18: Communications Glitch
As I trudged down the echoing stone hall to my mother’s office door, I started to go over what I would say to her and stopped in my tracks. What do I call her, anyway? Vaeda? General? Mother? Mom? I scratched that last one off the list. Judith was the only mom I’d ever known.
When I finally came to the door, it was cracked open and I heard voices inside – a meeting in progress. I sat down in one of the chairs outside to wait. Through the opening, I could hear discussion over farm shipments and crop prices and - was someone growling? That seemed inappropriate. Those giant cats must have been in there too. Despite Thal’s reassurance that the cats were nice and would never attack anyone, I wasn’t too sure about them.
"Okay,” my mother’s voice was resigned, “I’ve got an email going to my ex anyway. I’ll explain the situation. Maybe he can find us some extra space on a cargo ship that comes his way.” Her ex? I’d never heard Dad call her that.
A nasally voice spoke up. “What I want to know is why it’s our job to feed every transient who comes through? We need to sell all our crops, not give half of them away every week.”
After seeing Anatolia for myself that day, I didn’t like the whiny tone of whoever was speaking.
“Because Myrihn, we can and no one else will!” a male voice I figured must be Ethem’s replied. “What are we supposed to do, let them starve? Ship them back where they came from? We all know the National Council isn’t doing a thing to help these people. And some of the other Kindreds pay almost nothing to people who aren’t family. If they’ll hire them at all.”
As the debate moved on from local food deliveries to how to advertise and sell more crops at the upper class markets in Glass City, my attention wandered until my ears perked up at Dad’s name.
“The test seed from Daniel, that Teague and Myrihn managed to, ah… bring… through customs for us, should help. These are varieties that our competitors won’t be able to easily ship in to undercut us.”
“If we can keep them from getting eaten by pests, that is,” someone grumbled. “And not just the haratchi. These things are going to attract every bug in a hundred miles.”
“Yes, they’re not genetically modified ‘super seed’ engineered by greedy FarmTech scientists, but that’s the point,” my mother said. “These crops will at least produce viable seed for next season, so we won’t have to keep buyi
ng it every year while FarmTech triples the price on us. They’re going to drive us into the ground if we don’t get away from them.”
“Well,” someone said hesitantly, “what about that deal The Foundation offered us?”
My mother grunted. “They keep it quiet, but FarmTech is the for-profit arm of The Foundation. Fleecing the farming community is one of the ways they fund all that so-called life-saving research the Foundation does. So why would they cut off their own funding source by offering us free seed and an end to our water rights dispute with Glass City?”
“Because they’re getting desperate?” someone asked.
“Exactly. The philanthropic Dr. Souchie,” even without seeing her face, the sarcasm was clear in my mother’s voice, “wants an in here at the Kindred and there is no way we're going to give her one.”
“But all she’s asking in return are a few blood samples for her research. What’s the harm? Isn’t that a small price to pay for what she’s offering?”
“There’s no way to know what exactly she’d be able to do with those samples,” someone else argued. “She only talks about the research she wants people to know about.”
“And, if we start owing her now, we’ll owe her forever,” Teague’s deep voice added.
“Exactly,” my mother agreed. “If she starts interfering in our water rights, pretty soon she’ll be holding those over our heads too. She won’t stop until she’s experimenting on us like some of her lab rats. I’m sending an official ‘no’ to her so-called generous offer, and warning her not to trespass here again.”
Jeez, paranoid much?
“But what if the other Kindreds take the deal and get their seed for free?”
“Well, then they can deal with the fallout,” Teague said. “And that’s why we’re switching seed now. So once those test plots are planted, we’ll need everyone to keep an extra-close eye on them, because they will attract every bug and haratchi for a hundred miles. Hopefully some will whorl out.”
The Faarian Chronicles: Exile Page 14
