by Zaide Bishop
“Pregnancy suits her,” Whiskey muttered.
“What about the gardens?” Tango asked. Since they had come back from the mainland, she and Xícara had been glued at the hip. She was resting against him now, his arms possessively around her belly. “And the plans to rebuild the village on Pinnacle Island? What about the fishing and gathering?”
“The fishing party will go out as usual. I’ll stay here and supervise the garden. Sugar will lead a small group with the canoes to the reef. Then another small group can go to Pinnacle Island and decide if it’s feasible for us to move back to the caves together.”
Whiskey handed her daughter—now fat, milky and sleeping—to Fox, who took her as if she was made of eggshells.
“I will go with Sugar,” she said.
Sugar was not the only one looking surprised. “You’re not ready.”
“And you need to be here to feed her,” Fox said.
“She just fed. I will go.”
She stood up and gathered her bow and several knives. She could sense they were not entirely sure what to do with her. The birth had been traumatic, but the memory of her labor and birth seemed to be more vivid for everyone else than Whiskey herself. They acted as if she was wounded somehow, but beyond being tired, she felt fine. They should know better than to judge her on the same scale they judged themselves. She’d always been faster, more capable, more willing to do what needed to be done.
“Zebra, Mike.” Sugar motioned for the Elikai and Varekai to fall in with him as well, and they went down to the canoes. By the time they had dragged them across the narrow part of the island, through the village to the beach, the sun was halfway to its summit and the breeze off the ocean was cool.
Mike and Zebra had several thick spears each—the kind that could be used to drive away massive crocodiles and sharks. The archipelago was home to numerous crocodiles, some of which were twice as long as their canoes. Those were just the estuarine crocodiles. A little under a year ago, Fox and Whiskey had stumbled onto the den of something else entirely. A leviathan prehistoric crocodile that had probably been brought back from extinction in a laboratory in the world before. Fox had gone with a hunting party to kill it, but they had been beaten to their prey by a pack of megalania—giant, venomous goannas.
Frequently, Whiskey wished the people of the world before had let the dead stay dead.
The canoes glided out through the surf into the open water. Mike and Sugar were in one; Whiskey rode with Zebra. Zebra spotted a turtle winging its way through the water below the canoes. He grabbed a spear, leaning over the canoe to take aim.
“Stop that,” Whiskey warned. “We’re not here to hunt.”
“But it’s right there!”
“We don’t know what else we’ll end up bringing back, or how long we’ll be out here.”
He slouched back into place, looking sullen for thirty seconds before he became distracted by a caterpillar he found stowed away on the netting.
“What are you going to call the baby?” he asked.
“I don’t—”
“Hooo!” Mike was standing up in the canoe, waving her arms and an oar back and forth. The entire canoe was rocking alarmingly, and Sugar was wide-eyed with panic, trying to balance them out.
Whiskey followed Mike’s gaze. There were people on the stranded boat. She could see them waving and hear faint sounds that might have been yells.
“Sit down!” Sugar protested. “Do you want us to capsize?”
“People!” Mike said, flushed with excitement. “Other people.”
She didn’t sit so much as she flopped, and water sloshed in around their feet. Sugar gave a yelp and glared at her, but Mike didn’t even notice.
“People whom we are likely to kill,” Whiskey reminded them.
“The virus was outside,” Sugar countered. “The animals were infected with the...the tumor one. We learned about it on the mainland. If they’re outside, they must have some resistance to it.”
They paddled closer, the yells of the strangers becoming more distinct. They stopped waving after a time, but they stayed in sight. Four of them. Slowly Whiskey began to make out more details. One was bald, the others had white or gray hair. One was female, the other three were male. She could sense an otherness about them. They were not Varekai or Elikai. They had not been grown in a laboratory to be unleashed on a diseased and broken world. They were survivors from the world before. They were like the teachers.
And the teachers had been betrayers. Killers.
They didn’t look dangerous, though. They looked thin. Though, perhaps more than anything, they looked shocked. As they drew close enough for Whiskey to see the winkles and scars on their skin, she could see they were gobsmacked, with wide eyes and gaping mouths. One of the males had a white, rigid cast around his leg. She could see the bruising at the top and guessed his leg was broken.
“Do you speak English?” It was the female who called out to them.
“Yes, we speak,” Sugar called back. “We are the Kai. I am Sugar, this is Mike, Whiskey and Zebra.”
The strangers exchanged looks.
“They’re from the Eden Project,” one of the men said. “They’re actually out here, roaming around. Jesus fucking Christ.”
Sugar glanced over at Whiskey, and she raised an eyebrow at him. He tried again.
“We are concerned you may be susceptible to disease and that our proximity might be fatal for you. We’ve brought you food and water. Do you need it?”
“I am Dr. Dina Kay,” the woman said. “This is Dr. Ross Keller, Dr. Tony Jacobs and Professor Dominic Vivian. We are a research vessel. We left London after the riots—” She paused, perhaps recognizing the incomprehension on their faces. “We were trying to create a vaccine to stop the spread of the viruses. We did, but we were too late to save anyone else. You can’t infect us.”
“You hope,” Sugar said.
“It doesn’t matter,” the bald man she had introduced as Dr. Tony Jacobs said. “We can’t get the boat off the reef. The hull is split.”
“Did one of your tribe swim for shore?” Zebra asked.
The four strangers exchanged confused looks.
“No,” the woman said. “There is just the four of us.”
“Would you like to come with us?” Sugar asked.
They exchanged looks and brief, hushed conversations.
“We need to get some things,” Keller said, and he sprinted back below deck.
“Please don’t leave,” Vivian said. He was the one with the broken leg. He moved stiffly after his companion, and the woman followed, so it was only the bald man watching them, his eyes bright.
“You’re sure about this?” Zebra asked, moving the two canoes close together so he could speak to Sugar without being overheard.
“As much as I regret it, the Elikai and Varekai have killed one another before. If they pose a threat, we will deal with them. I won’t leave them to die. Besides, they might know how to stop Fox’s baby crying.”
He flashed Whiskey an apologetic look, but she suspected it was for the wrong thing. My baby, she thought, but she didn’t say anything.
The other three came back with bags made from a fabric Whiskey didn’t recognize. Judging by the lumps and shapes inside, she wouldn’t recognize much of what they were carrying either. They had a lot more things than Whiskey expected. She could carry every possession she owned, and her baby, and still have room in her arms for a piglet. The strangers were weighed down with their goods and passed them down off their boat onto the canoes as if they were as fragile as eggs.
“Careful, careful, try not to get any of it wet,” Dr. Ross Keller said. “It’s irreplaceable now.”
With their gear, there was not a lot of room left in the canoes for people. With the doctors on board, the canoes wo
uld sink so low they would be in danger of taking on water.
“Perhaps we should make two trips?” Zebra suggested. “If a croc comes, or even a wave...”
“Let’s just do the best we can,” Sugar said.
Getting the strangers into the canoes was harder than Whiskey imagined. They were stiff and slow and had all the balance of a coconut. Professor Dominic Vivian, with his broken leg, became an almost impossible task, with the canoes rocking and the luggage.
Somehow they got them all in without anyone being dumped in the ocean. Somehow they were afloat and not taking in water.
“I can’t believe it,” Dr. Tony Jacobs said with a nervous laugh. “Dry land, after all these years.”
“How many years?” Sugar asked.
“Nine,” Dr. Dina Kay said grimly. “Nine bloody long years.”
“What did you eat?” Mike asked.
“We fished. We have a water generator and an algae farm. Sometimes we caught seagulls. We had tomato plants, but in the end they died.”
“How do you generate water?” Sugar asked.
“We had a salt filter,” Dr. Dina Kay explained. “But they only work so long. We ran out of parts for it. So then we dismantled the refrigerator and hooked up the cooling panel to a solar panel. Condensation gathers, and we trickle that down into a bucket.”
“Is that still on the boat?” Sugar asked.
“Why, is water a problem?”
“Just curious,” Sugar said. “We have freshwater on the islands. There’s several springs, but you never know.”
“But you do have food, right?” Tony asked.
“We do,” Sugar assured him. “Mostly fish at the moment, I’m afraid. The islands were overrun by megalania and—”
He was cut off by Dr. Kay. “They were what?”
“Overrun by megalania. The female was in season, and—”
“Megalania. The prehistorical Australian lizards?”
“What is Australia? They were made in a zoo there.” He pointed to the mainland. “We assume. You can see them on a sign. The islands aren’t as bad as the mainland, though.”
The strangers looked at one another, faces slack with horror.
“Fucking dinosaurs,” Ross muttered. “We should have stayed on the boat.”
“The boat has a split hull,” Kay said sourly. “We would have been dead in a week.”
“But we can fix it?” Ross asked.
Jacobs gave a mournful shake of his head. “Maybe we can find another serviceable boat on the mainland, but I’m not going to live my whole damn life on the ocean. If possible, I’m never eating fish again.”
“The megalania kind of ate all the good food,” Zebra said. “We ate a lot of bats during the wet, and the storms killed a lot of the fruit trees, but soon everything will pick up again. There’s still snakes and rats.”
“Even rats sound better than fish and seaweed,” Keller muttered.
Whiskey frowned, wondering what he meant by “even rats.”
“How many of you are there?” Kay asked.
“Around thirty,” Sugar said.
“You’re named for the alphabet?” she asked.
“What?”
“The phonetic alphabet. Alpha, Beta, Charlie, Delta.”
The Kai shared confused, uneasy looks. “Yes,” Sugar said. “Those are Varekai names.”
“And you’re...sugar and zebra? That’s the British one, I think. You have two Novembers?”
Sugar shook his head. “No.”
“What’s a ‘Varekai’?” Keller asked.
“We were two tribes. The Varekai and the Elikai. In Eden we were kept separate, and when the world was born we were at war. But there is peace now. Now we know we need each other to breed,” Sugar explained.
The strangers exchanged looks that made Whiskey scowl. Their attitude suddenly seemed to have shifted to something condescending. The looks they gave one another were almost...pitying.
“You’ve had a baby,” Kay said, turning her attention to Whiskey.
“Yes.”
“Recently?”
“Yesterday.”
Whiskey’s reply seemed to shock the strangers into a temporary silence. “You’re on your feet quickly,” Kay ventured.
Whiskey shrugged. “I was curious. When India said there were people on the reef, I wanted to see them for myself.”
“I’d have thought you wanted to stay with your baby. To rest.”
Whiskey let a smile creep onto her lips. “I have only had a baby for one day. I have been a warrior all my life.”
Vivian held up his hands. “Your skills are wasted here, I promise. I can’t even walk.”
“I’m a research scientist now,” Dr. Kay said. “But I got my start in practical medicine. I was a GP for a few years. When we reach your village, I’d like to look at the baby. Check if it’s healthy.”
“It cries,” Zebra said. “All the time. Can you fix that?”
Kay chuckled. “Afraid not. All babies do that. Sometimes they’re hungry or hot or cold or gassy. But sometimes they just want to exercise their lungs.”
“There was a lot of objection to the Eden Project,” Vivian said. “People didn’t want humanity to be replaced with genetically modified super freaks. It was all very X-Men. Some of the facilities were hit by terrorists. None of the projects were mature when it went to shit. I honestly wasn’t ever expecting to see any of you.”
Sugar’s expression darkened. “Your people were stupid. The things they did to us... We were unprepared. Too many of us died before we realized we should be allies. They had no right to make us. To lock us away.”
Keller held up his hands. “Don’t shoot the messengers, kid.”
“The important thing is some of you have survived,” Kay said. “You’ve bred. The project still has the potential to be successful. You can repopulate—find one of the domes and learn to use the technology there.”
Zebra and Mike hoisted themselves into the shallow water as they approached the shore, dragging the canoes onto the sand. Whiskey stepped easily into the knee-deep water, but the strangers struggled, awkward and slow. Their limbs were atrophied and wiry. Some of the Varekai struggled to keep weight on, such as India, but even she didn’t have such knobbly elbows. It was like they were already dead and desiccated.
Mike and Ross had to carry Vivian from the canoe to the shore and up onto the dry sand to save his cast. As they put him down, he groaned.
“There is no way I’m going to keep sand out of this, is there?”
“It’s humid, Viv,” Kay said. “We’re going to have to watch it. You’ll get a fungus or a bug bite and end up with gangrene.”
Whiskey helped drag the canoes, bags and all up well out of reach of the waves and into the shelter of the trees. The strangers didn’t want to leave their things, hoisting equipment onto their shoulders and passing it out to Mike, Zebra and Sugar. Whiskey only carried her spear, and she dropped back to the rear of the group, letting Sugar lead the way.
The strangers were slow. They struggled in the sand. Even before they reached the path into the trees, Whiskey could hear them breathing, as if they had run from the point.
They were mostly starved, she decided. With no way to exercise on their boat. It would be a long time before they were back into condition. Maybe Vivian was right. They were no threat. Incapable of being a threat. If anything, they would be a burden. They would not be able to hunt or reproduce. They would simply consume resources.
Perhaps Sugar and Charlie would be interested in learning from them, but once they had nothing more to teach... Well, there were a lot of dangers on the islands. Predators, stonefish, vipers and rough terrain. Maybe the archipelago would deal with them before they became a hassle.
&n
bsp; The Varekai and Elikai came up the path to greet them, and with spears and knives they stood and watched the strangers pass with silent fascination. Charlie, who had clearly been overseeing the garden replanting, met them at the village itself—filthy to the elbow.
She grinned at the sight of them, as if it was good news.
“You did find survivors! Sheesh, look at them. Survivors of a sort, I suppose.”
“They’re scientists,” Sugar told her. “Doctors. They’ve been on the ocean since the world began.”
“Who’s actually in charge here?” Ross asked.
“Me and him.” Charlie indicated Sugar. “The Varekai answer to me and the Elikai to Sugar.”
“Males and females?” Kay asked. “The Varekai are women and the Elikai are men?”
“Mostly,” Charlie agreed cheerfully. “Someone get India.”
It took a few minutes for the little black-skinned Varekai to appear, so Sugar offered the strangers water and cooked green mango, which they accepted with gratitude, settling by the fire. India appeared through the trees, her arrival heralded by the clacking of the excess of bones, shells and flotsam woven into her hair.
She paused when she saw the strangers, then padded to Charlie. Whiskey watched their exchange—Charlie cheerful and remarkably blasé, and India quietly introspective. She nodded and moved away from Charlie, circling the strangers once before sitting across from them.
“Nothing is free in the isles,” she said. “You are weak. You are injured, and you are homeless. Charlie has asked me to decide if you can stay with the Varekai. I want to know what you have to offer us.”
“We have knowledge and resources that can make your lives easier,” Kay said. “I had a daughter, and I am a medical doctor. I can help with the babies. We can teach you a lot.”
“We have guns and ammunition,” Ross added. “No more spears for hunting.”
“Do you know of plants? Building? Astrology?” India asked.
They exchanged looks, and Kay nodded. “There are a great many things you can learn from us. I promise we will be valuable to you. More valuable than you could possibly understand right now.”
