“That is patently not true. That has never been true. That is why men fail with women constantly,” Thor says. “Women do not follow orders, and they rarely, if ever, submit.”
“To you, perhaps,” Drako laughs.
“Just let me stab him a little,” I beg. “Let me cut something off, at least.”
Thor sighs. Drako chuckles.
We embark on our ill-advised adventure.
We start walking, and as we do, we realize we don’t know where we are going. So then we stop. This is already very much not feeling like an organized expedition. There were times I followed goats for miles with more of a sense that they knew what they were doing than what we have any fucking notion of what to do next.
“Where are we going?” Thor asks the question none of us really want to answer.
“The horde will be on us if we are not careful. They generally prefer dead flesh, but they are also partial to living prey if it is available,” Drako says. “Any motion is good motion.”
“The fact that they exist means there are frequent mass death events on this world to allow an entire scavenger species to evolve,” Thor says. He is so smart, and what he’s realizing is horrific. I bet he’s been thinking about it since he woke up.
“We need to be careful,” he says. “What could be killing entire herds of animals regularly? Not a typical predator. Could be something else. Gas clouds, perhaps. Something that’s released or strikes… A virus, perhaps? Or a plague of small flies spreading bacteria?”
Drako shrugs. He doesn’t care about the reason for any of these things, clearly. He is all action and little thought. Big dumb hot dummy.
I wish I could say he looks like shit, but narrowly escaping death has done nothing but make him somehow more attractive. Scrapes and scars only ever improve men because they indicate survival.
Women aren’t supposed to get scarred up, because we are supposed to be protected.
I look at Thor, and at Drako, and I realize again, deeply, all the way to my gut, that these are the only two men here to help save me. Then I snort to myself at the concept of being saved by either of these two. Drako wanted to turn me into his slave. Thor turned me over to the captain. He rescued me once or twice too. He’s hard to predict. I have to treat them both like they’re not going to do shit for me. I am going to look out for myself.
“Anyway. We should think about the best place to be rescued,” Thor says. “When they send ships, they are going to locate the debris field and land there. We should stay as close as we can to the crash site in order to be found. They might come to the conclusion that everyone died if there are no signs of life.”
“You’re welcome to go and be picked clean at the crash site,” Drako says. “I say we need to put ourselves somewhere safer. Scavengers have already fed on the bodies of your crew, but predators will follow in their wake to feed on the scavengers. We need to find somewhere food rich and relatively calm where we can build a fortified camp. If you absolutely insist, we can visit the crash site and try to get a radio or something to send out distress calls.”
That’s a compromise Thor seems happy with. I want to be the hell away from danger for absolute certain. My instincts have always tended to get away from danger.
We have a plan, so that’s good. Feels like we’re starting to organize the chaos. In times like these, plans are all you really have.
“I’ll lead. Girl goes in the middle. You take up the rear, Golden Boy,” Drako says. I brace myself for another leadership challenge, but Thor seems satisfied with that idea too.
Are we… getting along?
We make for strange companions; a Vikar jarl, a Frayer officer, and me, the eternal rebel who doesn’t identify with anyone or anything, but when your life is on the line you make alliances where you can.
For the second time, we embark on our journey. This time, we make what I would call good progress. Drako points out food plants along the way, and we collect them, putting them into the pack Thor scavenges from the wreck. There are edible flowers, herbs, and some root vegetables that look close enough to potatoes to excite me.
It’s possible that everything is going to be okay, I tell myself. Just because absolutely everything has gone wrong for as long as I can remember, doesn’t mean that everything is going to go wrong forever. At some point, something has to go right, just statistically.
As we walk, the forest gives way to a grassy pasture with tall flowers that bloom in patches, yellow, purple, and rarely red. I find myself picking them as we pass, creating a three-toned bouquet that I know my sisters would like to display in their homes.
I wonder if they’ve already started building the batch of new homes that will cover over the land where we played as children,replacing the open ground with buildings and concrete forming a seamless wall along the river.
They’ll concrete the river too, to stop flooding. They’ll take away all the plants and the grasses that the fish and other creatures breed and hide in, and they’ll take down the little wood jetty we used to fish off of, because it’s not to code, and…
“Hey!” Thor grabs me by the back of the neck, moving me out of the way of a hole in the ground before I can tumble into it and disappear. It’s the strangest thing, a perfectly round aperture in the earth that is dark enough to look like it goes straight down forever. I want to drop a stone into it, but I can’t, because Thor is lecturing me.
“Where are you?” he snaps.
“What do you mean?”
He taps my forehead with his finger. “I mean, where is your head at? What are you thinking about? You need to lock in, Selene. One mistake out here is…”
