But there’s nothing there. I step carefully around the edges of the crumbling wall and when I find it…
I tip my gun down immediately as the dark green creature looks at me with enormous purple eyes. Risk would know what jewel they remind me of.
Sisan pum pum?
Kilo’s zurgle thinks of us as Sisans. I’d thought it was a misunderstanding of Sian, but this one…
Wild zurgles aren’t rare. They just don’t tend to go near Ilidi City, so I haven’t seen one before. But I know it’s not tame. It’s too big for that. Its hair is too long and coarse. Its teeth and claws too sharp.
Sisan yum pum pum?
Each pum coincides with a soft purring sound.
It licks its lips, and I watch it stalk forward. Curious eyes locked on me.
“I’m not food,” I tell it, and it straightens.
More purring, more pumming. Its ears twitch, back and forth like a scanner searching for signal, and then it turns to look straight up. Hunched, it searches the sky and then bolts into one of the buildings, and it’s my turn to look up. The drone is overhead.
I flick on the comm. “All I’ve found so far was a wild zurgle and a lot of empty buildings.”
“Yeah, I’m not seeing much from up here.”
“I don’t know why they left, but they didn’t do it in a hurry.”
“Riann wants to point out that there aren’t any birds,” Kilo says, and then, “Well, if you didn’t want me to relay it, you shouldn’t have mentioned it while I was in the middle of this.”
“The zurgle might have gotten rid of all the birds. Or maybe they just don’t like the bugs here.”
I look in the direction of the continued pumming, but I don’t feel like going on a wild zurgle hunt right now.
“I’m heading back to you. Searching this place is going to take weeks if we try to do it on our own.” And I don’t want to be here any longer than we absolutely have to.
Scanning the roofless homes one more time, I turn to head back… but I’m not the only one whose footsteps sound softly in the silence.
I pause, looking back over my shoulder. The zurgle sits on a low wall with its poofy tail wrapped around its feet.
Pum pum. Where go?It hops down and keeps pace with me.
“I am going back where I came from.”
Back? Pum?It stalks circles around me, but doesn’t interrupt my stride.Back where?
“You don’t sound hungry…” so I can’t think of any reason it might be a threat.
The thing laughs.
And I tighten my grip on my gun once more.
“Whoa.” Kilo stops beside me. “When Bowie does that, it sounds creepy. That was downright sinister.”
I didn’t tell them to wait at the car, so I can’t exactly scold Riann and Kilo for coming to meet me.
The zurgle’s head turns sharply toward Kilo.He is owned. Pum? Where is… Bowie?
In the pums, it makes a sound that is a littletooclose to being Bowie’s name and Kilo takes a step back.
Kilo can hear Bowie’s thoughts, or the zurgle projects them to him, I’m not sure, but I have to hope that’s what he thinks is going on when I tell him, “Bowie is at home. Probably curled up in a plush bed or eating tinned fish.”
