Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 91775 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 459(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 306(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91775 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 459(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 306(@300wpm)
Must be nice.
Flor loves attention and jokes, and when she makes the crowd laugh as she introduces someone named Dawn, I’m not surprised. Flor is always good at ingratiating herself and she’s a great person to be a welcome wagon for the new clones, who look almost as shell-shocked as Rem’eb. I should probably introduce myself to them at some point.
But right now, all I can think about is Rem’eb and how overwhelming this all must be. It’s a new world, new weather, and all kinds of new people. He stares at one of the newcomers who has skin like a green lizard and a long, thick tail, and his hand tightens on my shoulder. He probably needs time to process all of this, and the longer we hang out around the fire, the more it’s probably going to seem like “too much” all at once.
So when he finishes his bowl of stew, I grab my waterskin and gesture that Rem’eb should come with me. His hand never leaves my shoulder, and we walk away from the group as another surge of laughter echoes on the beach. They’ll probably notice we’re missing, but since we’re resonating, no one’s going to try and stop us.
I lead him through the maze of huts, noticing that there’s a few new places being built farther down the shore, no doubt to make homes for the newcomers. Hopefully no one is occupying my personal hut, the one that I’rec gave to me just before I left with R’jaal and the rest of Tall Horn to the fruit cave. I’rec had built it in the hopes that we’d resonate, and when he mated with Flor instead, she didn’t want to live in a house built for someone else. I can’t say I blame her, but I’m also profoundly glad that I have a place to call my own.
I point at the hut, glancing over at him. “That one’s supposed to be mine.” It sits in the midst of the Shadow Cat Clan’s little huddle of dwellings, but I don’t care. I like them all well enough. “Follow me.”
When I hop up onto the platform and pull the privacy screen away from the door, a little sand shakes free from the screen. I’m happy to see that my stuff has been undisturbed since I left, my bed just as I last made it. The firepit is cold, but that’s an easy enough fix. I indicate that Rem’eb should sit down and then I get to work on building the fire.
He doesn’t sit, though. As I break up a dung cake to fuel my fire, I watch him. He moves around the hut, touching my things—and touching the walls. This isn’t the perfect stonework of their people. The huts are made with crude rocks to act as bricks, held together by sandy mortar and shell mixtures. The walls go up to about seven feet before a lashed-down pyramid of waterproofed skins makes a roof and a smoke hole at the top. The floor is driftwood salvaged from several years ago, when all of it washed up in a flood from the now-destroyed island, and an open stone-lined pit in the center of the hut is the firepit and cooking hearth. Maybe he thinks all of this is rudimentary compared to his people. It’s just another strike against us.
“I don’t suppose it would help if I point out that back on Earth, we had really elite technology,” I say as I finish crumbling fuel into my firepit and reach for the tinder I keep nearby. “We tried introducing some more advanced stuff here but it’s hard to leap forward like that with a hunter-gatherer society. They don’t trust most of it and there’s no sense in depending on computers when we can’t fix the ones that are here, right? So we’re all Clan of the Cave Bear and shit. Most of the time you just roll with the flow but sometimes I miss the stuff we had back home. Like coffee. And razors. And movies. And…here I am rambling and you won’t know what I’m talking about.”
“This is so unusual,” Rem’eb says, touching a thickly braided rope that is anchored to the flooring and crosses all the way up to the ceiling supports. “So many skins. We do not have this in our tunnels. And you have tops upon your houses.”
“So it doesn’t snow on you, yes.” I give him a wry smile and smack the strikers until I get a spark. I blow on it until it becomes a baby flame and then I feed it tiny bits of fluff. “Guess you don’t have that problem below.”
“It feels nice in here…without the fierce air.”
I glance over at him. “Fierce air?”
He mimes it striking his face and blowing his hair back.