“And anyway, I bet they don’t have sunsets like this one.” She puts her hands on her hips to admire the scenery.
She has a point. The sunset here on the beach is incredible. Our quickly lengthening shadows stretch from the pristine white sand into the jungle. Unlike Earth beaches, there’s not a speck of plastic trash or medical waste anywhere. It could be a paradise if it weren’t for all the deadly wildlife. The whole place feels like a zoo. Every time we leave the safety of the saucer, it’s like stepping into a huge cage—one that contains all the most lethal animals ever.
Most of them are dinosaurs, alien monsters that range in size from leopard to a good-sized office building. I hate it here, despite the tropical paradise vibe.
Otis comes bounding in one of his sudden bouts of energy, and I squat down to pick him up. He squirms in my arms and snakeshis long, furry tail around my neck, tightening it just on the safe side of strangling me.
We can’t quite figure out what he is. At first, we thought he was a rodent of some kind, but he’s got strong hunting instincts and reminds me more of a cat. A crimson cat with six legs, a long double snout, and two purple eyes the size of tennis balls, perhaps—but still with enough feline qualities to satisfy me. His random mix of complete aloofness and sudden surges of aggressive affection only confirms his catness. To me, anyway. The other girls are less enamored with my alien pet, saying that I’m crazy to feed him and keep him around, considering his claws and impressive set of fangs. But I don’t care. He was abandoned by his mother and her brood of other cubs in the nest she’d made under the saucer, so I saw no other option than to care for him.
His affection displayed for today, Otis jumps out of my arms and prowls off. His non-retractable claws leave just one or two minor scratches on my forearms.
“He’s growing,” Callie says, eyeing him skeptically. “You know he could become the size of a lion, right?”
“Nah, let’s stay optimistic,” I misunderstand her concern on purpose. “He’ll grow to at least buffalo size, I’m sure.”
She side-eyes me. “Mmm-hmm. Maybe then he can hunt for us, do something useful?—”
“Get inside!”comes a distant yell from the jungle. “Monster!”
We both whirl around and sprint toward the saucer. Cora has made it clear that when she and Sprisk are here, they’ll handle any dinosaur attack, and we should retreat to the only safe place whenever they tell us to. This is the fifth attack since theyarrived, and I can’t help noticing that it’s two more than the total number of aggressive dino sightings we had in all the years before the couple came here.
Morgan and Riley reach the saucer at the same time as us. The hatch is open, but we stop outside and turn to listen. There’s a clang of a blade against a dinosaur’s thick skin, as well as an occasional roar from the monster and a loud rustle from the vegetation.
“Where’s Cora?” Riley whispers. “She doesn’t even have a spear. She can’t help him.”
I glance at the weapons Sprisk has made for us—long, pointed spears hardened with fire, two of them tipped with slim iron heads the size of tent stakes. I would hate to use those to fight a dino. “Must have climbed a tree. Sprisk always wants her to get to safety when he fights one of these things.”
“Think it’s the same one as last time?” Morgan asks. “That one just retreated.”
There’s a crash of breaking tree trunks and bushes. I swear the ground shakes for a second.
Then all we can hear is the waves roaring in the distance.
“Quick fight,” Riley says, adjusting the jumpsuit around her chest. “Maybe it wasn’t that big this time.”
I peer into the dark jungle. “Had to be many tons. Should we go and look?”
Cora comes toward us, making her way through the dense foliage with her own steel-tipped spear in her hand. “That was it. It’s a nice one, too. Lots of fat on it, Sprisk says. So we can make oil for the lamps. It burns brighter than the leaf oil. Smells a bit,but you get used to it. Go and check it out if you want. Sprisk will keep you safe.”
The jungle is much darker now that the sun is almost fully below the horizon. But we don’t have to go far before the dinosaur carcass comes into view, amid a circle of fresh, violently kicked-up dirt and broken trees and bushes. It smells strongly of both dinosaur and sap.
It’s one of the smaller ones, the kind that looks like a velociraptor. It’s still the size of a Suburban, all claws and teeth, pink and dreadful even in death. It’s not obvious how Sprisk was able to kill it, but I spot a small wound in its narrow chest that would correspond well to the pointy horn he can make slide out of his forehead. One stab in the right place might do it, even for a monster like this.
Sprisk is standing on top of it, cutting off pieces of skin that can be treated and used for clothing and such. The timing is good—Callie and I won’t be able to kill a dinosaur, and after seeing Cora’s outfits, I’ve been wanting to make shoes or boots from dinosaur skin. They should be impossible to wear out, unlike the slipper-like alien things we got at the space station, which all four of us had to discard years ago. The jumpsuits are much sturdier, but they’re unspeakably dirty, and we all long for new clothes.
Sprisk nods to us. “A good Big,” he says in his caveman language. “Good skin. Lots of fat.”
After he and Cora arrived, we started a crash course in the lingo so we could understand at least some of it. The other girls were more interested than me, since they’d already decided to go to Cora’s village. But I learned a lot, almost despite myself, because the language has a logic to it that’s extremely permissive and letsyou structure a sentence almost any way you want. Cora says they give up some precision for that, but I have no intention of discussing complicated things with those guys. Or anything at all, if I get my way.
“You very good hunt,” Riley praises the caveman. “Much bigger than you.”
“I would never hunt this Big,” he says as he continues his work. “Too dangerous. Only when they attack do I kill them.”
I look around the darkening jungle. I’ve rarely been even this far into it. With Sprisk right there, it feels perfectly safe. I totally get what Cora means when she talks about the bubble of safety a caveman gives off. You know he can keep you safe, even here.
What would it be like if he weremycaveman? If I had someone like that, huge and strong, someone who could-
“Look,” Callie says, and points to a cluster of fat, white mushrooms. She marches over and kicks the caps off all three, then stomps the remaining stalks into the ground.
