I draw back, not wanting to make myself sick, but at the same time I am not sated. Ruby is making little noises that reverberate through me and course through my blood to my meq. The more time I spend with her, the more I am becoming aware of her.
She is a warrior like me, and I want to warm her blanket…but unlike my brothers, I must wait to be asked.
She wipes her mouth. “Even if it kills me, it was worth it.”
My lips curve. “Agreed.”
“I gathered the wood…how do you plan on lighting it?”
That is easy. I lift my hand and let a spark dance between my thumb and finger.
“Nice.” She nods. “How humans survived long enough to destroy a world I don’t know. We should’ve been eaten before we discovered caves.”
While I understand her words, I don’t understand the meaning she is implying.
While she fills the water skin I light the fire and prepare the cloud-seekers. They have sat for too long. They will be chewy and will taste strong, but there is nothing I can do about it.
She sits next to me. “Thank you for following me.”
“I won’t let you be eaten before you find a cave.”
13
RUBY
“These are almost like birds…except they don’t have feathers.” I toss a bone on the fire. It’s only a small one, more than enough to cook the three little cloud-seekers. I could’ve eaten all three. Instead, I ate only one.
Aldit is bigger than me, so I told him to eat the other two.
“What is a feather?” When he mimics my word, there is a lilt to his voice as though the sounds aren’t ones he is used to making.
“You know, a feather…”the thing birds have on their wings.Except their cloud-seekers, their animals that fly, don’t have feathers. Their wings are skin, and their bodies are furry. “Kind of leaf shaped but made of little…bits of hair.”
From the way his forehead creases, my explanation hasn’t helped at all.
“I’ll draw one in the morning, because I can’t describe it.” One of the scientists would.
“You don’t have cloud-seekers?”
“We have birds with feathers. Not that I’ve ever seen one. I’ve only seen them in pictures.” All the animals I’m familiar with, I’ve only ever seen in pictures. Why they bothered teaching us about them instead of about the animals that live here, I don’t know. “Earth has them. Since I’ve never seen Earth, can I claim to be from there?”
“It is where your mother is from, even though you were born among the stars.”
I glance up at the dark sky. It’s not a solid black. It’s so bright with bands of stars and areas of deep purple through to a much lighter green.
He tosses the last bone in the fire. It hisses and spits for a second before resuming its soothing crackle. “To the Honey, the stars are the campfires of the banished warriors. They watch over their tribe.”
That’s pretty, and it’s a lie. They are just suns. Each one with their own planets, most of which can’t sustain life.
We sit in silence, both of us staring up at the sky.
Neither of wanted to be born into this and yet here we are. In the colony, I knew my place—I was never allowed to forget it—with Aldit, I don’t know what to do. I can’t survive in this world alone.
Have a made a mistake by choosing freedom over the safety of the colony walls?
If I’d never seen beyond them, perhaps I could have lived that life and come to resent it less. Or maybe I’d have hated it more with each passing day, suffocating with every decision that was taken from me until I joined the dissenters. And then what?
What are the colony leaders going to do when the whispers become shouts?
