Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 81280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 81280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
“Where’s Seeker?” Charger comes to the hut carrying an arm full of cords. The sky people must have been throwing a lot of good stuff off the edge lately. I’ve never gone back to that shadow land. It freaked me out the first time enough for me to never return. Charger is braver than I am.
“Dating Dart, I think,” I say.
There’s a clearing in the woods not far from the village, a place where men and women who want to mate go to, well, mate. It’s a very pretty location, were wildflowers grow in bright red and yellow clumps and willow trees spread their long boughs in sort of natural curtains between themselves and the river. I don’t go there either, for the exact opposite reason I’m not going to the shadow place. Some places are too bad. Some are too good. I like a comfortable medium place.
Charger snorts, sits down, and starts unraveling the interior of something she says are called VHS tapes. They’re ancient tech, she says. Real ancient. I have no sense of time, so that doesn’t mean anything to me.
“Dart,” Charger sneers. “He likes to get around.”
“So does Seeker,” Vani says.
They’re gossiping, but that’s part of village life. All we really have for entertainment purposes are each other. People who do interesting things are usually quite popular. It’s fun to have opinions on things people do.
Seeker is dating Dart, one of the hunters who live in the common house. He’s a cute guy with a blond mustache and broad shoulders he can sling a small deer over without problem. He’s very tall, and very handsome, and he likes to daub himself with animal blood under the full moon. Who doesn’t.
I haven’t been interested in any of the men. I don’t know why. Vani thinks it’s because of something in my past that I can’t remember. She’s probably right. I feel pressure from my memories sometimes, like they’re pushing at a membrane inside my mind that just won’t let them through. I don’t know how to dissolve it.
“You should drink the brew,” Vani says, apropos of nothing.
“What brew?”
“The dream brew,” she says. “We make it from a vine that grows in the forest. It gives you visions. It might help you remember things.”
“Hm. Maybe I should,” I say.
“It also makes you sick. From both ends,” Charger says, raising a brow. “And sometimes people die. Not often, but sometimes.”
“Okay, I’m feeling significantly less interested,” I say.
“I’ve done it dozens of times,” Vani says. “I only died a couple of times, and I got better.”
Charger groans. “I don’t like it,” she says. “Some people think they see the future, others think they see spirits.”
Before I can drink the brew, Seeker goes missing.
She doesn’t come back from her date with Dart. He says they were together by the river and he went to follow a rabbit to cook, and when he returned she was gone. We all search for days on end, but there’s no trail. No sign of a struggle. No broken bits of tree, no trampled grasses or flowers, no scent for the common house hounds to follow. It’s like she just evaporated.
The mood is low for a long time after that. I miss her a lot, and the sense of safety I once had in this place is eroded in a fundamental way. Some people say that Dart killed her and threw her in the river, but he is sadder than almost anybody. He no longer hunts, but spends every day trying to find Seeker. The irony is cruel.
More time passes. We start to feel happy again, in the way you do after something irrevocably terrible has happened. It’s like it’s okay, but there’s an ache in the background of everything.
We start to forget, a little. Not Seeker, of course, but her memory becomes less present in everyday life. Charger puts together a machine that is capable of receiving signals that are emitted from the floating cities above. We listen to them talking to one another, saying incomprehensible things. Some people think the audio is designed to be entertaining. Some of them say it’s just day to day life.
All I know is that it makes me feel uncomfortable. It presses on the sensitive spot where my memories live, so I don’t listen. I go out into the forest, and I walk the delicate line between remembering and forgetting.
CHAPTER 8
As the weeks pass by, I start to feel a little more comfortable, even with Seeker’s disappearance. I like the forest. I don’t think I’m from here, because it doesn’t feel completely familiar, but it feels safe and the people down here are very focused on survival—which sounds terrible when you think about it, but in practice is actually very relaxed. All anybody here wants is to get by, and once they’ve gotten by, they stop. There’s relaxation in between scrapping for survival.