Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 71832 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 359(@200wpm)___ 287(@250wpm)___ 239(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71832 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 359(@200wpm)___ 287(@250wpm)___ 239(@300wpm)
I did not know this. I did not know any of it. Devi then tried to rip apart a fish that Penny was filleting so she could show me said primordial lungs, but I told her we'd peek at them another day. Now I'm searching for a bowl that's supposed to be full of sand-scorpion, and it's nowhere to be found. "You don't suppose they got up and walked away? Or is it possible someone ate them already?"
Devi pauses in her chopping. "Wasn't Valmir working on it? I sent him off with a large basket of them an hour ago."
"He's got them? I'll go see how they're coming," I tell Devi, wiping my hands on my leather apron. "Anything else?"
She tosses the seaweed greens in a dark-looking sauce. "If the scorpions are not stewed yet, he needs to get them to Sabrina. We're behind and I don't want to waste food."
"Stew the scorpions. I'll tell him." I don't exactly know which guy Valmir is. Maybe I should, given that I know most everyone else's name at this point, but the gladiator clones who were dropped at the same time with us are a weird lot. They tend to all stick together, whispering and staring at the women. A nice guy named Vordis (also a gladiator) told us that they're not usually around women and this could be why they're being weird about the situation. I suspect Valmir is one of the cat ones. Him and Chalath. There's a lizard one named Skarr, but I know him because he bothered poor Vivi until she gave in to him. There's a big gray dude named Kyth and a human guy named Jason, but the two cat men keep to themselves.
Sabrina would know, though. Sabrina knows everyone.
When I go to find Sabrina, she's stirring a bowl with a spoon in one hand and gesturing at two people butchering meat with her other hand. Someone runs up to her and asks a question before I can swing in, and nearby, a pot bubbling over one of several cookfires overflows and begins to hiss. "Grab that," Sabrina shouts, surging into action and handing off the bowl she's stirring. "Who's got the seed cakes?"
You know what? Sabrina looks a little busy at the moment. I'll come back.
I step away from the madness that is the food prep area and look for a friendly face that also doesn't seem too busy. My friend Dawn is nearby with a large platter on her legs, dicing chunks of not-potato, a vegetable the size of a beach ball that everyone seems to go nuts over around here. I head in her direction, my bowl of spices on my hip. I'm told that if the stewed scorpions need a bit of zhuzh, I'm to flavor them up with no less than two handfuls of spice. "Hey, Dawn. I don't suppose you know which cat guy is Valmir, do you?"
"The shitty one," my friend replies.
"Like that narrows it down?"
We both chuckle at my joke, and Dawn makes a "mic drop" motion with her bone knife. It's a truth several of the women have acknowledged between ourselves. The clone men we've been stranded with are hot, but man, some of their personalities suck. Valmir and Chalath seem to be fighting each other for the "most unlikeable" title, which is hilarious considering I thought Skarr was going to run away with that one. Ever since he set his eyes on Vivi, though, he's calmed down and now just talks about how amazing his new mate is.
Which, okay, is a little cute. Not that it redeems him, but it bumps him up on the list from "the worst" to "slightly less bad."
"He's the cat guy with ears and the tail," Dawn tells me.
I nod thoughtfully, comparing the two feline-like aliens in my head. "As opposed to the cat guy with the ears and no tail." Now that I'm thinking about it, one of them has a stumpy little bit of fluff for a tail instead of a full-length tail. "Gotcha. Thank you."
"What are you up to?" she asks, wiping her brow. "I feel like I've been cutting vegetables for hours."
I heft the basket of spice to show her. "I'm seeing how the stewed sand-scorpion is coming along. By the way, did you know we've been eating stewed sand-scorpion?"
Dawn just shakes her head. "I learned not to ask what I was eating a while ago."
I laugh, because we have to. "Yeah, I feel like I'm going to need some serious therapy after this is over...except my therapist is one billion miles away."
"And you're a clone," Dawn points out helpfully. "Which means it wasn't your therapist in the first place."
"And I'm a clone," I agree. I'm trying to take things in stride here on this new planet, but it's hard to be relaxed when the world around me is so strange. At least I'm here with a big, warm, friendly community. "More fodder for the therapist! She'd say I need to be more ainokea."