“A teacher I had said the EG doesn’t like people to know that,” said Sima. “About pollution, because it makes people want the government to clean it, and they won’t.”
“I never did school.” Juan shook his head. “I’m only eight.”
Lissa looked up at the sky until she fell over backward in the grass. “I was first grade.” She counted from one to six. “I’m six years ol—” She broke up into a coughing fit, her face reddening.
Sima held her, patting her back until the choking subsided. The girl turned her head and spat a glop of faintly-pink-hued mucous into the grass.
“Eww,” muttered Austin.
Lissa snuggled against Sima, having lost her talkative mood. Silent tears of pain wet her cheeks. Any of the mean things Sima may have blurted to little kids back on Earth had never caused one to make such a face. With no idea what else to do, she cradled the girl and rocked her softly.
“Aren’t we supposed to start a fire or something?” asked Austin.
“There’s no wood.” Juan shook his head. “And it’s already hot.”
“What happened to the ship? Did they kick us out?” Austin glanced at the lifeboat. “Or did it blow up?”
Sima brushed Lissa’s hair with her fingers, overcome by the girl’s far-away stare. “I’m not really sure, but I think it blew up. I don’t believe the EGSF wanted to kill us… just kick us off the Earth. The ship was supposed to land and turn into a city or something.”
“Cool,” said Juan. “Like Mechopolis.”
“Nuh uh.” Austin smirked. “That’s a cartoon robot. The ship’s not gonna turn into a robot. It just lands and opens up like a noodle bar awning. Then people build onto it. But it’s not gonna. Lifeboats launch automatically. Something bad happened.”
“There’s no city?” whispered Lissa.
“I don’t know.” Sima kept brushing at the girl’s hair.
“It exploded,” muttered Austin. “Or there’d be people looking for us. It’s been a couple days and no one’s come. The lifeboats have distress signals. If anyone was alive, they would’ve found us already.”
“Sima did,” said Juan.
“Yeah, but she’s another kid like us.” Austin tilted his head at Sima. “Did you find any other lifeboats?”
“No. I haven’t seen even one other. Just yours and mine.”
Austin gestured with his hands, trying to draw a sketch in midair. “If the ship blew up in space, the escape pods would’ve come down all over the planet. If it was lower, maybe some are closer.”
“It’s going to be dark soon,” said Sima. “We can look around a bit in the morning, but now, it’s time for bed.”
“We don’t have anywhere to sleep.” Austin eyed the wreckage. “Except back in there.”
“No,” wailed Lissa, triggering another brief coughing fit. “I don’t like it in there. Can’t breathe.”
They almost suffocated in that pod. “It’s okay. We don’t have to go back into the lifeboat. It’s warm. My first night as an Outcast, I slept on this old sofa outside in an alley. I was crying so much, and so scared I couldn’t sleep. But, I never had the sky over me at night before. And it was kinda pretty, even if only a couple of the really bright stars came out. We can sleep right here.”
Lissa calmed and waved her hand back and forth at the grass. “This is soft. It’s like tickly hugs.”
“It’s grass,” said Sima. “A plant.”
“It’s not grass,” said Austin. “This isn’t plastic.”
Sima chuckled. “There used to be live grass on Earth too, but not blue like this. Shorter, and green.”
The bracelet screen activated as it typed, ‹There still is grass located in some places, though several districts away from where you lived.›
Austin reclined on the ground, his skinny frame almost vanishing in the blue fluff. “Heh. She’s right, it does tickle.”
“Wait here a moment,” said Sima, while setting Lissa down to sit beside her. “I need to pee.”
Though the girl gave her a pitiful look for walking off, she didn’t follow. Sima went far enough into the jungle to find cover, but not so far she couldn’t hear the kids in case something strange happened. Instead of another Outcast walking by, a couple of fuzzy pig-like puffballs trotted into view and stared at her. Somehow, animals staring at her had the same halting effect as people. She waved her hand and whisper-shouted, “Shoo,” which sent them scurrying off.
Once she finished, she hurried back and sprawled on the ground. Lissa cuddled up beside her. Juan flopped nearby. Sima stared up at the vast swath of blue-indigo overhead, flecked with millions of stars, everything from faint pinpoints to huge, glowing ones. As the last traces of sunlight faded from the world, bands of pale blue and orange gas became visible, making the sky distinctly alien.
It had been a long time since she’d spent her first night on a sofa that reeked of wet dog, staring into the sky. The dread of being on an entirely different planet without a scrap of civilization made the fear she’d felt at being on the street at twelve seem trivial. At least there, she had people to beg from and the idea, however unlikely, that she could still go home.
Yet, despite the acute danger and terrifyingly real chance that they could die at any moment, the awesome celestial beauty took her thoughts far away from reality.
16
Aurak
Sima awoke to find all three kids piled on top of her.
Huh? Guess it got chilly at night.
She yawned and took stock of her surroundings. Juan lay face down on top of her, a small puddle of drool on her shoulder. Lissa curled up against her right side, Austin at her left. The long, tonal calls of sky mantas passed overhead, clicks and notes like whalesong mixed with shorter bird trills. Steady wheezing came from Lissa, though she slept with a faint smile.
The weight of three kids on top of her added to laziness, and she didn’t bother trying to move right away. Austin awoke next, a little while later. He rolled away onto his back and yawned hard. A few minutes went by before he sat up, yawned again, and wandered off into the jungle. Sima eased Juan to the side and extricated herself from Lissa’s grasp on her right arm. She, too, found a spot to relieve herself in private.
When she returned to their ‘campsite,’ she found Austin pouring the last of their water down his throat. When it ran out, he held the bottle over his mouth and shook it to chase out a few more drops. Watching him do that made her thirsty as hell.
She crouched by the two smaller kids and tickled their bellies until they woke up laughing. “It’s morning, you two.”
They sat up and wiped their eyes. Within seconds, Juan curled up and cried.
“What’s wrong?” asked Sima, scooping him up into a hug.
“It’s not a nightmare. We really crashed,” whimpered the boy.
Lissa, sitting in the grass nearby, observed his meltdown with a dispassionate expression, tapping her big toes together.
“We did.” Sima stared at him for a few seconds, not quite sure what to do with a sobbing small human. She eventually decided to rock him while patting his back. “We crashed, but we’re okay. We have water to drink and there’s so many of those fruits, we’ll never run out.”
“We’re ’live,” said Lissa, her voice breathy. “We didn’t died.”
Juan gradually stopped crying, but made no effort to squirm out of her embrace.
“What are we gonna do?” asked Austin.
“Oh, we’ll figure a way.” Sima glanced around at the jungle. “Maybe we’ll wind up building a house or something. Or there’s this cave I found. That might work to live in.”
“I meant today, not like in general.” Austin scratched his head. “There’s nothing to do here. No video games. No people to beg from. Nothing to scavenge and sell.”
“No school!” said Lissa, giggling into a cough.
“That’s not a good thing.” Austin kicked his toes at the grass. “Now we’re gonna grow up to be stupid.”
Lissa scrunched up her nose at him. “You liked school?”
“I didn’t wanna stop going. It was okay.”
“You didn’t like it?” asked Juan. “My father really wanted me to go. Told me how great it was, but I couldn’t go.”
“Why not?” asked Sima. “Little kid school doesn’t cost anything.”
“We lived in La Propagación,” said Juan. “Going to school could’a shot me.”
Austin looked at Lissa. “Why didn’t you like it?”
She pulled her feet in to sit cross-legged and leaned forward, fussing at the grass. “It wasn’t happy there. Other kids made fun of me, but I guess the food was nice.”
Sima raised an eyebrow. “Why would other kids make fun of you? You’re totally adorable.”
Lissa stuck out her tongue. “’Cause my parents didn’t have ’nuff money. I had to wear the same dress all the time, and I had the yellow packets.”
Austin cringed, though Juan didn’t react. Sima bit her lip. While Sima’s mother hadn’t been the warmest of parents, she had, at least, made a decent enough living not to need the yellow packets. Any family with kids under twelve could qualify for government-subsidized nutri-packets, but the free food came in glaring yellow pouches (as opposed to the standard silver). Rumors said they were everything from toxic to radioactive to made from rejected soybeans, and many children teased people who had to eat the lower-class food.
“No one’s gonna care about that here,” said Austin. “There aren’t even yellow packets on this planet.”
“Yeah,” said Juan, looking utterly confused.
Lissa smiled. “Stupid packets.”
“We’re out of water.” Sima stood and picked up the bottle. “Let’s go fix that.”
She walked into the jungle with the kids following in a single file line. Austin started off right behind her, with Juan behind him and Lissa bringing up the tail end. Lissa began coughing less than a minute into the hike, so Austin faded back to walk behind her. Sima slowed her pace, not used to people with tiny legs needing to keep up with her.
What’s wrong with that kid? She gets tired so easy. Ugh. I hope I don’t catch whatever she’s got.
She raised a hand to stop low hanging vines from smacking her in the face. Every so often, one of the kids drifted off to either side, drawn by curiosity of a bright flower or mushroom. Sima fidgeted at her sports bra, feeling conspicuously underdressed to be around other people. Of course, some ads she’d seen back home showed women with much bigger bosoms in ‘bathing suits’ that covered less than her underwear did. Those women didn’t seem to have any problem being out in public in such garments.
Her debate about why a bikini didn’t embarrass people but underwear did came to a sudden stop at a high-pitched scream from Lissa, which broke into choking after two seconds.
Sima whirled.
The little blonde girl leapt backward from a wrinkled-up powder-blue pod about the size of her head. Near it, large puffy spheres the same shade of blue tugged at their stems like some cross between helium balloons and mushrooms.
Austin caught Lissa from behind when her rapid backward scramble made her trip on a thick ground-running vine.
“What happened?” yelled Sima, rushing over.
Still coughing, Lissa pointed at the shriveled thing.
“She touched it and it made this noise and popped,” said Austin.
Sima patted Lissa on the back a few times.
“Sorry,” wheezed the girl. “I just touched it like this.” She traced her fingertips on Sima’s leg, pressure barely noticeable. “Like that.”
Sima grasped her by the wrist and turned her arm over to look at her hand. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary, no damage on her fingertips, no blood, no stains. “Did it hurt?”
“No.” She coughed and spat to the side. “It scared me.”
With a faint puffing sound, the crumpled mass of vegetation re-inflated itself back to a head-sized bubble. Sima approached, studying the bizarre plant. Thin transparent hairs covered the outside of the bulbous gas-filled sac.
“It’s probably some kinda reaction to being touched,” said Austin.
“Stinks,” muttered Juan. “It smelled like a fart.”
Austin laughed.
Lissa giggled between coughs.
“Well, don’t touch them, okay? Anything that smells bad is probably dangerous,” said Sima.
She ushered them back in motion, following the map projected by her bracelet. Soon, they arrived at the edge of the stream where she’d filled the bottle before. All three kids rushed to the edge and spent as much time gawking at free-running water as drinking. Sima knelt by the bank and scooped water to her mouth in double handfuls as well.
“Can we swim?” asked Lissa.
“I dunno. Can you swim?” Sima smiled.
“Kinda. It’s not deep.” Lissa pointed at the water. “Behind where I lived, we had a big truck box and it had water. I swimmed in it.”
“Okay.” Sima reclined in the grass, staring at the clouds.
Juan cracked up into giggles.
Austin sat next to Sima. “Uhh, she just took her pants off… and so did Juan.”
Sima sat up.
Both of the smaller kids had already made it to the middle of the creek, standing chest-deep in the water and splashing each other. Two pairs of bright white EGSF-issue underpants sat on the grass by the bank.
She opened her mouth to scold them for it, but decided not to bother. The other day, she’d gone skinny dipping as well, not wanting to get her only clothing wet. And both were too young to care about being embarrassed. Given the overbearing humidity, if they got their clothes wet, the fabric would stay damp all day and into the night, and be damn cold. Perhaps unhealthy even. Sima sighed.
Whatever.
“Are you gonna yell at them?” asked Austin.
Sima shrugged. “We could get sick if our clothes are wet at night.”
He raised one eyebrow. “This isn’t ‘clothes.’ It’s underpants.” He pointed at her chest. “And whatever that thing’s called.”
“I’d adore having something else to wear, but they didn’t put anything in the storage bins.”
He frowned. “Yeah. I’d even take a pink jumpsuit.”
Juan and Lissa kept flinging water at each other and laughing. She made a squeal and dove under, swimming around behind him. The boy, evidently not having been in water before, lost track of her and refused to let his head go under. She sprang up and splashed him.
Sima glanced sideways at Austin. “Pink jumpsuit, huh. So you got detained?”
“No!” He blushed. “I mean… I saw kids in pink jumpsuits. I mean I’d even, umm, take one of them right now.” Austin held up his arm. “And if I got arrested, I’d have a handcuff mark, like you do.” He held up his wrists to show off a total lack of bruises or lines.
Sima rubbed a finger at her right wrist. “Not if you didn’t struggle.”
Austin’s cheeks got redder.
She smiled to herself, but didn’t want to make him talk about it since it clearly bothered him. “Are you going to swim?”
He shrugged. “I dunno. Are you?”
“Not yet. I don’t really trust this place.” She looked around, eyeing the plants for anything that looked potentially useful for making garments. It felt too weird to strip around kids, even if she technically remained one herself.
“You think there’s dangerous stuff?” asked Austin.
“I don’t know yet. Just trying to be safe.”
He poked her in the side. “Or you’re chicken.”
“So are you.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “You’re not in the water either.”
“Yeah.” He shrugged. “But what the hell. We’re tribal now.”
Austin stood and walked to the bank. It took him a few minutes to work up the nerve before sliding his briefs off and entering the water. Both Juan and Lissa set upon him with splashing. Austin shrieked from the cold spray and spent a l
ittle while futilely trying to run away while hip-deep in the stream, but eventually dove under.
Sima sat on the bank with her legs in up to the knees, wondering how in the hell she went from doing everything possible to avoid being around children to winding up responsible for three small lives. Dividing her attention between the kids and the jungle around them, she found herself unable to relax. Her only knowledge of any sort of wilderness came from a few science classes as well as plenty of movies. Living creatures existed on this planet, but so far, nothing she’d seen with the possible exception of that giant bug appeared threatening. Nature most likely didn’t work too differently on this planet, so she suspected there had to be something out there with the potential to be dangerous.
At every snap or rustle in the foliage, she tensed, staring in that direction for several minutes, but nothing ever showed itself.
“Lissa,” shouted Austin.
Sima tore her gaze from the distant trees. Austin dove under the surface chasing a drifting cloud of blonde, leaving only Juan in sight. The smaller boy stood armpit deep, looking around with a wild-eyed, worried expression, unsure what to do with himself. Sima shoved off the bank, wading into the freezing water toward where Austin pulled Lissa’s head above the surface.
“What happened?” yelled Sima while collecting the unconscious girl.
Austin looked up with terror in his eyes. “I dunno! She just like passed out.”
Sima cradled the limp girl in her arms and carried her out of the stream.
“Hold her upside down or something,” said Austin. “Maybe she breathed in water.”
“Lissa!” Sima set her in the grass and held her ear by the child’s mouth. Fortunately, the girl did seem to be breathing. She sat back on her heels, staring down at the frighteningly thin and pale girl, feeling helpless to do anything for her. “Uhh…” After a few seconds, she reached down and rolled Lissa on her side, patting her on the back. “Come on, Lissa. Open your eyes.”
Austin knelt nearby and held a hand by her mouth. “She’s still breathing.”
Juan climbed out of the water and scurried over.
“Please wake up,” said Sima, patting harder.
Out of Sight (Progenitor Book 1) Page 18