by E J Frost
“And the baby?”
“We don’t know. The doctors say they
won’t know until it’s born. Each time she
fucks up, they run more tests, but they don’t
know. Please—” She puts her hand on my
bare chest. “Don’t say anything.”
I put my hand over hers. Tap my
fingertips against her wrist. “Might be better
for everyone . . .”
Her hand slides up to cover my mouth.
“Don’t say it. I think it too often anyway.”
I take her hand off my mouth. Grip it in
mine. “C’mon, kitten. All this talking’s bad
for the digestion.”
She smiles ruefully, taps the entry plate
with her thumb and leads me into the house.
The sounds hit me first. The sounds of a
number of people sharing a confined space.
The babble of voices. Doors opening and
closing. Footsteps. Running water. It reminds
me of slam for a moment. But there’s a
difference and my ear registers it
immediately. The sounds of slam are
regimented, institutionalized, harsh and
hostile. These sounds are organic.
Unsyncopated. They’re the sounds of humans
living, rather than humans biding their time
until they can start living again.
Then I register the smells. A clean, sweet
soap smell, the same soap Kez uses in her
hair. Green fragrances, growing things. A
warm, meaty, animal smell that I assume is
from various human bodies, until a half-
dozen, knee-high balls of fluff bound into the
vestibule and surround Kez. She kneels
down among them, ruffling fur and long,
floppy ears. I take them for dogs at first,
except Kez said she wasn’t a dog person,
and they don’t move like dogs. They sort of
. . . hop.
“What the fuck are those?” I finally ask.
Kez scoops up one of the fur balls and
holds it out to me for inspection. Round
head, round body, floppy ears, soft dangly
front paws, powerful haunches and long,
fluffy feet. It could be a miniature kangaroo.
Or a miniature wooly mammoth.
“They’re Norgir rabbits,” she says.
They don’t look like any rabbits I’ve ever
seen. They’re twice as big as a rabbit should
be for starters.
Kez tucks SuperBunny under her arm,
like a furry cushion, and crosses the
vestibule towards an open door into the
house. “I started keeping them when Ape
moved in with me. They’re an excellent
protein source. But we don’t farm them
anymore. They’ve become pets. This is
Ronnie.”
Ronnie-the-Rabbit seems totally content
to be toted around under Kez’s arm. Also not
like any rabbit I’ve ever seen. The others
bound down the hallway after her. A white
one, whose fur must be ten centimeters long
and looks like a rug-in-motion, tags Kez’s
heels and butts its head against her calf when
she pauses at the door.
Kez stops, shakes her head at Torro-the-
Bunny, and puts Ronnie down. She gives the
white one a pet on the head, but doesn’t pick
it up. “This is Helas. She’s the dominant
female and she doesn’t like it when I pay
attention to the others. Don’t pick her up. She
likes to nip.”
I’ve got no intention of picking up any of
the hopping carpets. “Good protein source,
huh?”
Kez nods. “We don’t eat them anymore,
so don’t get any ideas.”
I give her a grin.
She rolls her eyes and taps the door open.
Chapter 12
Beyond the door, the Colony pre-fab,
with its permacrete walls and durable fiber
flooring, ends and something very different
begins. I’m not sure what to call Kez’s
house. It’s a greenhouse, except that people –
and mutant rabbits – clearly live in it. Down
a short flight of stairs from the platform we
stand on, the flooring’s been taken up and
grass and plants create a living green carpet.
There’s furniture among the plants. Some of
the furniture could be plants: real wood,
twisting frames, soft, floral-patterned
fabrics.
“Hey,” Kez calls. “Has anyone fed the
rabbits?”
Gig’s capped head pops up from a couch
on the far side of the room. “I did.”
“Then you’re just piggies,” Kez says to
the monster bunnies clustered around her
feet. They don’t seem to register her censure.
Ronnie-the-Rabbit stands up on his hind legs
and puts his paws on her thigh. “Softie,” she
says. But she picks him up again and carries
him across the huge open greenhouse to a
raised, tiled area of counters and equipment
that’s clearly a kitchen.
“Whaddo you feed them?” I ask. “Giant
carrots?”
Kez chuckles. “No. They eat grass and
we grow some plants they like as well, but
they need a supplement that we give them in
pellets. The grass here isn’t as nutritious as
on Norgir, where they were bred.”
She obviously knows a lot about her
rabbits, as well as Kuseros’s underworld.
We reach the kitchen area and set down
the bags of take-out on the counter. Kez
begins pulling plates off a rack above a big
double-sink.
“Want me to unload?” I ask her.
“Yes, please. You’ll have help in a
moment. Now that the food’s arrived, the
kemwars will descend.”
She’s not wrong. Gig, who was lazing on
a couch, rises, sniffing, and gravitates in my
direction. On the far side of the sink, a door
opens and a dark-haired girl emerges in a
puff of steam.
“Oh, hi,” she says. “You must be Snow.
I’m Chiara.”
Tyng’s daughter. She’s surprisingly
unremarkable, given her family’s power.
Light brown skin, almond-shaped eyes and a
cap of silky black hair reflect her pan-Asian
ancestry. She’s got a pleasant, round face
and a comfortable, rounded body stuffed into
too-tight clothes. She’s not beautiful by any
measure. But her brown eyes are alert and
intelligent.
I nod at her, and when she offers me her
hand, shake it firmly.
Chiara turns to Kez and takes the plates
out of her hands. “Kezzy, I’ll take care of
this. Nev’s in the bath.” She tilts her head at
the door from which she’s just emerged.
Kez nods and glances at me. “Will you be
okay for a moment?”
“Yeah, long as your rabbits don’t eat
me.”
She rolls her eyes. “Play nice.” I’m not
sure if she’s speaking to me or the rabbits.
She slips through the doorway and closes it
behind her.
Chiara organize
s dinner in less than a
minute. She directs me in setting out the plaz
food containers. Gig gets rounded up to carry
the plates out into the garden where there’s
evidently a table hidden in the foliage.
Another man, quietly playing a game on the
huge vid screen set between the couches, is
summoned with the call of, “Dunk! Drinks!”
With a resigned snort, he quits the game and
joins Chiara in the kitchen. As he passes me,
he nods and says, “Duncan.”
“Snow.” I return his nod. Observe him
unobtrusively while I continue unpacking.
Kez has bought enough food to feed a
platoon.
Duncan’s the oldest person I’ve seen
among Kez’s little crowd. Where Gig is still
a boy, and Ape is in all the ways that count,
Duncan probably has a few years on Kez,
who I figure is in her mid-twenties. Duncan
might even be looking closely at thirty, if the
laugh lines engraved into his brow and
around his mouth are any indication. Thirty
standard is still young, even on Kuseros
where the average life-expectancy is only a
little over a hundred. But it surprises me to
see someone that old in this crowd of
orphans.
Whatever his role, Duncan doesn’t act
like a father figure. Chiara bosses him
around, even telling him to get different
beakers when the ones he takes out of a
cabinet aren’t to her liking. He obeys her
with a tolerant smile.
Chiara hands me a large plaz tray.
“Could you put the food on that and carry it
to the table?”
Time to establish my place in the pecking
order. “Could if you use the magic word,” I
say.
Chiara looks startled, then blushes and
says, “Sorry. Nev going off the deep end
again . . . it’s made me forget my manners.
Could you please carry that to the table?”
“My pleasure.” I load the plaz containers
on the tray as I ask, “How bad is she?”
Chiara touches her hand to her forehead,
a gesture she’s gotten off Kez. “She’s started
the coldspiral. That’s why I put her in the
bath. She’s just . . . she’s completely out of
her head. I’m not sure she even knows where
she is.”
“How long before she comes down?”
Chiara shrugs. “Depends on how much
she took. It could be hours.”
“Long night ahead,” I say and she nods,
confirming my fears. I’m not interested in
losing another night’s sleep, particularly
over someone as messy as Nev. By the time I
feel ready for some alone-time with Kez,
Nev is going to be down for the night, one
way or another.
I pick up the tray and start off into the
garden. Spot Gig’s cap in a grove of purple
trees. Making my way into the grove, I nearly
trip over two of the exploding fur balls. They
seem to have free run of the place. One of
them is the white one that Kez said was the
dominant female. I put the food down on the
long table hidden in the trees and squat down
to eyeball Alpha Bunny.
She rises onto her hind legs, floppy ears
and front paws dangling, and meets my gaze.
She has blue eyes, a lot like Kez’s. Her furry
nose twitches. I offer her my hand to sniff.
“Bite me and you’re breakfast,” I tell her.
She snuffles at my fingers, then drops
onto all fours and shoves her head under my
hand.
“That means she wants you to pet her,”
Gig observes over my shoulder.
“She tell you that?” I ask, ruffling the
rabbit’s ears the way I saw Kez do. The
white fur is incredibly soft.
“No, it’s lagomorph language.”
The bunny stays still under my hand. It
doesn’t purr like a cat or pant like a dog, but
I can tell it likes being petted. I rub my thumb
down over the twitchy white nose. “What the
fuck’s a lagomorph?”
“A rabbit.”
“I thought rabbits were rodents.”
“Jeez, don’t let Kez hear you say that.”
Gig leans down and offers his hand to the
other rabbit I nearly stepped on, an extremely
round gray and white fluff ball. It goes into
the same head down, butt up position as the
one I’m petting. Gig rubs its head.
“Say what?” Kez asks, walking towards
us with a handful of chopsticks. She looks
from me to the bunny I’m petting. “Wow,
what’d you do? She’s never nice to
strangers.”
I smile and rise, dusting fur off my
fingers. “Kindred spirits.” I’ve been called
an animal so many times, I guess there’s
some truth in it.
“Er, Snow,” Gig begins, a moment before
I feel a distinct bump against my shin. I
glance down in surprise to see Alpha Bunny
ram me again.
Kez laughs. “She didn’t say you could
stop grooming her.”
“Is that what I’m doing?” At Kez’s nod, I
settle back onto my haunches and offer my
hand to Alpha Bunny. She goes back into the
pet me posture and I give her a scratch
behind the ears. “Don’t think I’m doing this
all night,” I tell the rabbit.
“You’re on the hook now, Snow.” Gig
chuckles as he heads back to the kitchen.
“See that?” I say to Alpha Bunny. “He
walked away and your little friend there
didn’t bulldoze his leg.”
Kez laughs from behind me. “Helas is the
queen rabbit. She says who grooms her and
when.”
“You put up with that?”
“The first thing you have to understand
about rabbits is that they’re dominant to
you.”
I raise my eyebrow at the fur ball
shedding white hair all over my hand while I
rub its forehead. “Think so, huh?”
“She’ll prove it to you again if you stop
before she’s ready. She’s a very aggressive
rabbit.”
“What’s that noise it’s making?” The
rabbit’s started making a funny mumbling
noise, which I can’t just hear, I can also feel
through my fingers, like a jackhammer’s
vibration.
“Oh, she’s tooth purring. They rub their
teeth together when they’re really happy.”
“Looks like true love,” Duncan says as he
steps past me, carrying a tray of beakers to
the table.
“Great. How long do I have to do this?” I
grumble. But I’m actually enjoying petting
the rabbit. Its fur is a tactile delight: warm,
soft and oh-so-silky. The tooth purring is
gratifying. And it gets me out of setting the
table.
Chiara and Gig join us while I’m still
petting Alpha Bunny. Once the table is set to
Chiara’s sa
tisfaction, they sit down on the
long benches that frame the table. Kez pats
the empty bench next to her. “Come on,
Snow. The food’s getting cold.”
“Yeah, I’m just worried about losing a
leg to Assault Bunny here.”
Chuckles all around the table. “Here,
give her a little of this and she’ll leave you
alone.” Gig hands me a piece of crispy flat
bread. I break off a corner and offer it to the
rabbit, who takes it delicately in her teeth
and hunkers down to nibble on it.
Before I can rise, four other fluff balls
rush me. Kez giggles. “They’ll all want some
now.”
“Escape while you can, Snow,” Gig
advises.
I survey the fuzz balls. A black and white
one rises up on its hind legs and looks at me
the way Alpha Bunny did. Like a furry
periscope. They’re hard to resist when they
do that. I give it a piece of bread. That gets
all the others standing on their hind legs, too.
Only they’re kind of bottom-heavy, and two
topple over.
I can’t control a chuckle.
A black one that toppled over rights itself
with a wriggle and hops away, flicking its
furry back feet at me. I may not know
lagomorph language, but even I can tell that’s
Bunny for don’t you fucking laugh at me.
“Aww, poor Bobble,” says Chiara,
amidst general laughter.
“Second thing you have to understand
about rabbits is that they’re easily offended,”
Kez tells me. She’s already started eating,
and whatever she’s wolfing down smells
better than good. Time to stop playing with
the pets.
I break up the bread, pass it out between
the three that are still begging at my feet, and
leave the rest on the ground in case the black
one comes back. Then I slide onto the bench
next to Kez. She passes me a plaz container
of food, meat and veg in a glossy red-brown
sauce. The smell’s not familiar, but it smells
good. Spicy, as I discover when I take a bite.
Delicious. Ginger and coconut and spices I
don’t have names for. The taste reminds me
of something and after a moment I place it.
The first time I kissed Kez, her mouth tasted
like this. “You have this last night?” I
murmur to her.
“Uh-huh, I always have rendang.” A little
frown creases her brow. “How did you
know?”
“You gave me a rendang kiss.”
Kez giggles into her hand. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. It tasted good.” I lean into her
so I can whisper into her ear, “You can give