Total pages in book: 61
Estimated words: 58483 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 234(@250wpm)___ 195(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 58483 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 234(@250wpm)___ 195(@300wpm)
“If that young Ocretion had died? You’d be questioned. Possibly tortured. She did the right thing.” Leylah coughs.
“They’d never know we watched.” Rannah shifts in her seat. “The adults were gone. But we’d know. And we’d carry it inside us like a flame. A victory. We can pass that down.” She narrows her eyes.
Leylah’s eyes shine in the dark, the whites bright. Her skin, nearly as dark as mine, is in shadows. I can feel her disapproval without examining her expression. She’s the one who teaches us patience, and fortitude. The ability to heal, not just in body but in mind.
“We are all doing the best we can.” Her voice is soft and full of pain. “Rannah-lei, that is all we have.”
“Well, thanks to her”—Rannah won’t even say my name—“now we don’t even have the pleasure of knowing their spawn is temporarily squashed. Instead, he grows stronger. In several more solar cycles, he’ll take one of us as his pleasure slave, and we’ll find her blood soaking the floors. You can thank her when you see that.”
She gets up and the chair screams, wood on wood. As she leaves the barracks, the door slams behind her.
She won’t go far. The perimeter of our slave area is guarded; we’re not allowed beyond the fence at nightfall. I imagine she’ll end up at the patch of wall-eck trees with their sour, bitter fruit that we turn into tea—the fruit that gives Ocretions a stomachache, so it’s relegated to human areas. Maybe she’ll sit on the scratchy grass below them, the stems that cut like a file if you run them the wrong way against your skin, because our tough work trousers are built to withstand the razor edge of the foliage on this rock. She’ll curse me and grow anger inside her.
I grow anger too. We all do. It’s only a matter of time before it metastasizes into something powerful and potent that will kill us all before the Ocretions do. At least in spirit.
We may share a secret, but little by little, our hate divides us from each other. It feels like either I or Rannah need to leave, so the rest of the group can be one again.
The others follow, and then it’s just me and Leylah.
I won’t cry, because that doesn’t help, but I sag in my chair.
Leylah clucks her tongue. “You’re stronger than that. Don’t you feel sorry for yourself.”
I straighten. “Suggestions on what to do instead?” I raise my eyebrows and try to smile, but it comes out crooked.
She smiles. “You come here and help me with this.” She glances around, as if to make sure we’re alone, then pulls out a small metal box. From her expression, I can tell this is something new.
Secret.
“What is that?” My voice is hushed, and I glance around, too, as if there are faces lurking in the firelight.
“This is a microsyringe.” Leylah puts the gloves back on and points to the cabinet. “Put on the other pair and come here. We’re going to load the venom into the syringes.”
“You are making a toxin.” I raise my brows. Stop in my tracks, the gloves in one hand. “Just like Rannah suggested.”
“Bring the other small bottle too.” Leylah points. “And yes. I am.”
I fetch the item. “What’s in here?”
Leylah uses a small dropper to transfer fluid from the second bottle to the syringe. She coughs. “Remember this.” She lowers her voice. “I used equal parts of the venom of the two asps you’ve gathered; one I altered with heat, one with a substance I distilled from the sour fruit of the wall-eck trees.”
She points to her little burner, set up with three coals. “The heat from this, you see?” She coughs. “It’s told that this combination”—she holds up a loaded syringe and examines it in the light—“can kill a full-grown Ocretion in three seconds. Just one drop.”
I whistle softly. “Wow.”
“That’s right. Of course, it will kill us even faster. So don’t let it touch your skin.”
“I’m not planning on it.” I draw away, still transfixed. “How do you know it works?”
Leylah clucks her tongue. “When you girls come back wounded”—she flinches and her eyes glisten—“there is sometimes”—her voice cracks—“Ocretion residue under the fingernails. In your core. I take that.” Her tone becomes hard. “And I test my serums. When I created a mix that made their blood dissolve and turn clear, I knew I had it. That is the way we tell. According to my information.”
I have learned that one does not ask Leylah from where she obtains her information. She tells if she wishes it, and even so, her answers are sometimes too cryptic to understand, involving augers and visions and whispers that only she can hear. Stories she was told as a child that she locked into her brain and saved until now, some of them.