Chapter One
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Her fingers crackedunder the pressure she exerted on the shell. Her knuckles locked as she dug her thumb through the slit of brittle stone.
They say it’s like a mussel. I don’t... even—she strained her wrists trying to force it open—know what a... mussel...is!It snapped open. Rylie sucked her thumb, soothing the raw pad.
She had calluses—a fair amount of them on her hands—but they didn’t always protect her from the nuggets. Rylie buried her head against her arm and wiped the sweat from her face and thrust her hands into the waves to clean them; the large nugget held firm between her knees.
The contents were goopy, slimy, and smelled of uncooked fish. Her nose wrinkled while she dug her hands in and hoped for the best.
The third one today...
Her fingers caught something and she tugged it out of the wet mess of the crevice.Please be something.She dipped it into the water and rubbed it clean, only to lift it to the sky and find the stone clouded.
“Gah damn it, oh what the?” Rylie muttered under her breath.
“Another one?” her da yelled out from the watership. The ship sat right outside the jetty she was in, perched on one of the thousands of rocks her father had placed before her birth. It hadn’t changed once, not once, in all the years since.
“Yah, Da, another one,” she called back. Her knees parted to let the open nugget fall from her lap and back into the water. She watched it dip into the crystalline waves and disturb the swimmers that nipped at her feet.
“Come on back up then, no sense in wasting our time here.”
He mumbled something more but she didn’t hear it.
She didn’t want to hear it. It would only add to her stress, and when both Montihans were on edge, it erupted in tirades and passive-aggressive musings. Rylie lifted herself off the sea algae-covered boulder, turned away from the inlet, and dove into the ocean. She clutched the stone as she swam to the watership.
Da stood at the top of the ladder and helped her back into the boat. She stepped past him and submerged her hands in a bucket of fresh water.
“Let’s see it then.”
Rylie handed him the stone as she grabbed a fresh towel and dried up.
“It’s worse than the others. How can that be? A year ago it was one in a thousand but now, now it’s three in a day?” Her question came out more anxious than she wanted it too.
He lifted the stone to let the sun shine through. His wrinkled, sun-bleached lips downturned as he inspected a rock that didn’t need inspecting.
What’re we going to do?
“This one isn’t so bad.”
“It’s just as bad at the others. It may even be worse.”
“No, no, this has some clarity, we can carve into it and pull out the clear parts,” he argued. Rylie bit down on her tongue as he wiped the stone clean and put it away in the lockbox.
Quinten Montihan had been a soldier once, back before she was born, and even forty years after the war had ended, he was still as stubborn as ever. A lover of freedom and a hater of aliens, he had settled on the Earthian controlled planet, Kepler, where he’d met her mother, a woman who shared the same views.
But amongst the eight other Kepler rock farmers who laid claim to the agri-lots in the Eastern hemisphere, her da was the only one who would sell to the aliens. He made a fortune because of it but made just as many enemies for it, too.
The Montihans were respected—money demanded respect—but were not liked. Rylie wrung out her hair with thoughts of the cerulean waters of her home planet in her head.
Da ducked down into their watership with a heavy spring in his step. The sounds of the ocean lapping against the plastic rim of her home-away-from-home filled her ears. She took hold of the spare moment of peace but he came stomping back up, shattering it, grey hair swept away from his face and with fresh wrinkles lining his mouth.
“We going out to check the other lots today?”
But as she asked her question, a black dot appeared in the sky overhead. A ship, appearing from space, aimed straight for their settlement.
Seeing a spaceship wasn’t unusual but it was infrequent, especially so close to home. She caught him watching it.
