“I’ve done it dozens of times,” Vani says. “I only died a couple of times, and I got better.”
Charger groans. “I don’t like it,” she says. “Some people think they see the future, others think they see spirits.”
Before I can drink the brew, Seeker goes missing.
She doesn’t come back from her date with Dart. He says they were together by the river and he went to follow a rabbit to cook, and when he returned she was gone. We all search for days on end, but there’s no trail. No sign of a struggle. No broken bits of tree, no trampled grasses or flowers, no scent for the common house hounds to follow. It’s like she just evaporated.
The mood is low for a long time after that. I miss her a lot, and the sense of safety I once had in this place is eroded ina fundamental way. Some people say that Dart killed her and threw her in the river, but he is sadder than almost anybody. He no longer hunts, but spends every day trying to find Seeker. The irony is cruel.
More time passes. We start to feel happy again, in the way you do after something irrevocably terrible has happened. It’s like it’s okay, but there’s an ache in the background of everything.
We start to forget, a little. Not Seeker, of course, but her memory becomes less present in everyday life. Charger puts together a machine that is capable of receiving signals that are emitted from the floating cities above. We listen to them talking to one another, saying incomprehensible things. Some people think the audio is designed to be entertaining. Some of them say it’s just day to day life.
All I know is that it makes me feel uncomfortable. It presses on the sensitive spot where my memories live, so I don’t listen. I go out into the forest, and I walk the delicate line between remembering and forgetting.
CHAPTER 8
As the weeks pass by, I start to feel a little more comfortable, even with Seeker’s disappearance. I like the forest. I don’t think I’m from here, because it doesn’t feel completely familiar, but it feels safe and the people down here are very focused on survival—which sounds terrible when you think about it, but in practice is actually very relaxed. All anybody here wants is to get by, and once they’ve gotten by, they stop. There’s relaxation in between scrapping for survival.
I am walking in the forest one afternoon gathering berries from bushes. I want to make a pie for some of the others. I’m learning how to make flour and I think I can make a pie crust. I don’t actually know how to make a pie crust, but one thing at a time.
A bush ripe with berries catches my eye. There’s enough on it to feed everyone, and it looks like the birds haven’t gotten to it yet. I rush toward it with excitement, not considering the fact that most of the bushes around here have been picked clean by birds and other animals and it’s actually quite weird that there is one that doesn’t seem to have been touched.
Fwomp! Arrrgh!
That is the sound of me being swept up in a net, caught like an animal in a trap.
“Fuck!” I curse at the top of my lungs as my heart hammers in my chest. I am squirming all over the place, trying to free myself from the rope weave. This isn’t like any of the snares I’ve seen set in the village, or nets made by hunters or fishers. This is made of a material that feels uncomfortably hard against my teeth. This is a trap designed to catch something exactly like me.
“Let me out!” I scream. “Help!”
I have to hope that my cries will be heard by others. I’m not the only one out here in the wilds. I am almost certain of that. But nobody calls back, and that makes me feel uncomfortable. And then I am aware of the other bad thing. The forest is silent. No birds are singing whatsoever. I remember being warned about this. I was told to run. But I can’t. And the more I move inside the net, and the harder I try to free myself, the more it wraps around me.
I wish I had a knife, but I came out here without weapons. I’ve never needed them, and I never hunt, so it never occurred to me to take one.
“Quiet.”
Something speaks to me in a strange way. I can hear them quite clearly, though they seem to be at a great distance. It’s almost as if someone is speaking directly into my ear, though I remain alone.
Motion catches my eye.
Slowly, but surely, emerging from the bush, a creature approaches. It is walking on two legs so at first I assume it’s ahuman, because why wouldn’t I? People are all I know. But the closer the thing gets, the more it is so obviously demonic. The others have warned me about the things that appear in the forest from time to time. Some said this was what happened to Seeker, that she was stolen away by a demon. Am I about to be spirited away?
The creature gets closer, and I let out a little shriek of fear. It’s little, because screaming at the top of my lungs feels like a waste of time, and because there’s something about the way the thing is looking at me that makes it hard for me to move my lips.
This is definitely not human. It has big, murderous eyes, like some kind of strange insect. Its face is not at all personable. The nose is flat against the skull. But that’s not the weirdest part. The strangest thing is that there are tendrils around its mouth, sort of like the legs of an octopus. The mouth has no lips, but a beak.
“What are you?” I ask the question in raw, hushed tones. “Please don’t eat me. Let me go.”
“Quiet, human,” it says. “I am going to let you out of this net, but you must promise me not to try to run away.”
“Okay,” I say quickly. “I promise.”
He reaches to a tree and unwinds the rope that is holding the net up. When he lets it play out, the net sinks to the ground, and then sort of opens up enough for me to scramble free. The first thing I do is run.
“I warned you,” the creature rasps.
The next thing I feel is pain. Extreme, terrible, body-wide pain, a complete agonizing electric charge crackling over every bit of me. I fall to the ground, writhing and shrieking. Why isn’tanybody coming to help me? The forest is still so quiet. I have the feeling nobody can hear me. I’ve been isolated and picked off from the pack.
