“If you let me go back to Laurus, I will have access to better medical supplies,” she repeated the request, hoping the second time would cause a different result.
It was the wrong thing to say. The three of them started shrieking again in unintelligible harmonized tones. Their meaning was completely lost in the cacophony of the overlapping voices. Eleri eyed her medkit and tried to take inventory of what was still viable. Mostly bandages and a few temperature-stable medications. When the shrieking finally subsided, Eleri waited for them to say something comprehensible.
The tallest ravik took the front position of the klatch again. “No. Here. Must be here. Help here.”
Eleri managed a tight smile. She wasn’t exactly in a position to disagree with the mandate. “Then you had better show me what I need to do to help.” She tried not to think about what would happen to her if the help was beyond the scope of her limited abilities and supplies.
“Come.” The first one said the word, and the other two started to echo until the single word swirled around them in harmony. Eleri grabbed her medkit and followed out of the tent and into a proper settlement. It was haphazard and built of mostly found items. She recognized fencing material stolen from Laurus holding up many of the dwellings. The uneven roads were paved with castoff shells from vela bean pods. But it was a settlement all the same. Large klatches of young ones scurried underfoot. So many of them crowded together that she couldn’t even begin to count where one began and the other ended.
Eleri followed them, feeling suddenly self-conscious in her mostly clean new clothing while her captors dressed in scraps of fabric riddled with holes. For a group of scavengers living in the shadow of their downed spacecraft, there was a surprising amount of civilization in what she saw. But she kept her thoughts to herself. She’d only been here for a few moments, and if her training had taught her anything, it was that first appearances seldom told the whole story. Her head continued to throb as they led her through the camp.
Some of the groups of younglings noticed her and stopped to stare. They chittered loudly in unintelligible unison. A few partnered raviks shooed them away with aggressive rows of teeth gnashing. The groupsof two seemed to move and coordinate with more thought than the three around her, and even more than the collections of five or more younglings. The swiping eyestalks and snapping jaws were enough to startle Eleri back a few paces. She made a point of sticking close to the four who had spoken with her earlier. If anything, at least they wanted her alive for the time being. The long walk up the bumpy main path brought brutal sunlight down on her, and she had no doubt the tips of her ears were starting to burn a path up her scalp.
Finally, after stepping around giant heaps of trash mixed with collectible junk, they approached a dwelling a bit less ramshackle than the others. It had a proper construction with four walls and a tarp covering the roof to prevent water from leaking inside. Random bits of foraged metal and stone decorated the exterior, and Eleri suspected someone important lived there. Two of the raviks in her personal escort dragged their talons across the door, following a pattern of deep grooves that had been worn in by similar gestures. In response to the sound, the door scraped open to reveal a lone ravik. The fur trailing up two long eyestalks was pale white, and it seemed surprised to see Eleri standing there along with her cohort. She hadn’t realized raviks were intelligent enough to show human-like emotions.
“Klatch Saakal, you have brought the healer?”
Eleri’s eyes widened to hear a coherent and accurate sentence spoken in universal. The three other raviks responded all at once, their voices overlapping. Although Eleri couldn’t make out most of the response, the ravik at the door seemed to comprehend them with no trouble. He turned to Eleri and examined her with a slick gleam in his eye.
“Offer a tribute for your safe passage here, healer.”
“Tribute?” Eleri glanced down at herself. She didn’t have anything beyond the contents of her medkit and the clothes on her body. Her hat had been lost in the abduction. “I don’t understand.”
“Klatch Saakal escorted you here unharmed. For every favor you must offer tribute or insult the Multitude themselves.”
Eleri wasn’t sure she considered being escorted anywhere after being kidnapped much of a favor, but she wasn’t about to argue when it could spell her death. She fumbled around in her medkit and produced a length of bandages.
“Will this work?” she asked. In response, all three members of Klatch Saakal snatched for them at the same time. Eleri relinquished the prize and the three of them scurried away, chortling something inan eerie chorus amongst themselves.
“Klatch Saakal has not developed enough socially to thank you properly, so I will thank you on their behalf. Now, I imagine you have questions about why you were brought here.”
“Many.”
“I will start with introductions. I am Singularity Niis, leader of this settlement. I defeated and consumed my own childhood klatch and the many others who fought for this position. But as Singularity, it is my responsibility to see to the needs of the klatches under my care.”
Some of the words the ravik said made sense independently, but Eleri found herself lost in the details of his introduction. Perhaps it was the heat, but her head was swirling.
“I don’t understand.”
“How much do you know about ravik life cycles?”
“Not very much.”
“Well, come inside. I will tell you how I came to be.” The door pushed open further, and Eleri found herself stepping inside despite the general sense of unease. The throbbing in her head was transforming to nausea now, and if she hadn’t been certain about a concussion before, she was now. She swallowed thickly, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth as she bowed her head in the low doorway. The room was cluttered with random objects and debris from floor to ceiling. Broken datapads glinted dully. Balls of fiber lint sat in puffs. Dead energy cells formed a mosaic underfoot.
“I don’t understand why I’m here.”
“Let me finish my topic first. I will answer your questions only after I finish my previous line of thought.” Niis’s eyestalks swiveled from one corner of the room to the other. “Their bones.”
Eleri glanced in the direction of its gaze and swallowed hard at the assorted pieces of skeleton limning the junction between the wall and thatched roof. “Whose bones?” she asked, although she wished she hadn’t.
“My klatch. And those who challenged my position. We are born in pieces, you see. Like Klatch Saakal who brought you here. Only one of them will survive to become a singularity. And once they do, they will challenge for my position, and I will kill them.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“So that you know that I will not hesitate to kill you if you are unhelpful. Every time I kill, I absorb their potential, their intelligence. You would be a fine addition to my collection.”
Eleri took a step backward and nearly tripped over a nest of fiber lint. “I still don’t understand.”
