Book 1, part 1 – 1671 words
The Shoals of Paradise: Book One
Leila lay on her back, staring up at the white clouds in the sky, ignoring the call to come back for chores and dinner and then lessons with the witch. She liked the clouds, liked the shapes they made, liked how they made her think of things, liked how sometimes they sent her to sleep and then she could watch them behind her eyelids. Most of all, she liked how she could watch the clouds and pretend she was doing work for the witch.
Of course, the witch wouldn’t see it that way. The witch would just stare at her, then snort and put her to some new task that she wouldn’t understand, not until much, much later. For example, when the witch had told her to go outside and sit nowhere in particular, to just go and enjoy the air and the light and the sun or the moons, she had done exactly what the witch had said with great pleasure. And when she returned to the witch’s hut, the witch had questioned her about all sorts of things; if she felt the land was sleepy or awake, what animals had appeared, if she had fallen asleep and what she dreamed of, if anything, how she felt when it was time to leave. Now she understood that the witch had wanted to see if she could feel the gods underneath the land.
It didn’t seem to matter what she said, the witch had merely nodded, staring at her, before starting again with some seemingly nonsensical task. For now, it was the clouds. Leila wasn’t sure what she was supposed to learn, but the witch never said anything, and her parents continued to press upon her the importance of doing whatever the witch said.
So she lay on her back and watched the clouds until she heard the soft scrape of dried grass against boot leather, and even then, she didn’t bother to sit up to greet the interloper.
“Ma says you’re to come home and eat your dinner.”
Leila shrugged, closed her eyes. “She should come get me herself, then.”
Her brother sighed, sat down heavily next to her. He smelled of the day’s stale sweat and the pig pen. “She doesn’t like it up here.”
“I can’t help that,” she answered. She swung out her arm and plucked a stem of something, shoved the end of it in her mouth to chew on. “She doesn’t like anything outside.”
“True enough.”
They sat for until Loh got bored and wandered away.
At some point it was just easier to drift asleep, let the day fall away into night, so that when she awoke, night had fallen and she could watch her star go fly by, high high high. It was just the one, but the witch had specified that it was her star, a tiny ball of silver light scudding swiftly overhead. It appeared all the nights it was clear, and maybe even when it was overcast or snowy or rainy. The witch assured her it did, and there was no reason for Leila not to believe her.
A rumble in her stomach reminded her how long it had been since she had last eaten. With a long sigh, she rose and headed to the trail leading down the bluff. Halfway down the trail, where the pinchleaf bushes came up from the dry stream bed, a flash of light caught her attention. It was sharp and clean, like sunlight sparking off of water or a shard of glass.
Leila stopped, alert for the slightest sense of off. A man from the village on the lake had been killed in the fall, and a woman said she had been attacked by strange creatures only a few days past Etter. Insects began to sing again, the nightbirds chirruping and whistling. Keeping an eye on the bushes, she sidled by as quickly as she could and hastened past the crumbling edge where the trail had washed away during the spring flood.
She would tell the witch about the flash after she ate her dinner. No doubt it would be of interest, the witch was always telling her to be aware of her surroundings, of things she had never seen before, of things that could be seen of in a new way.
Even so, she was completely surprised to find someone she’d never seen before after she rounded the mottled Uncle tree. Shocked, she stopped dead in her tracks. The…person…person shaped thing, dressed like the tree bark, in mottled gray and white, facing her, crouched down but looking directly at her. Yet there was no face, only a shiny reflection of herself and the trees and the bluff in the egg-shaped head.
She took a step back when it abruptly stood, and another when it gestured sharply towards the Uncle tree. Something moved in the tree’s upper branches – she spun around to run – the world went black.
PART TWO:
Micah yawned, pushed back the blankets, made a half-hearted attempt to get out of bed before flopping back on the mattress with a disgusted huff. It wasn’t that she wasn’t excited to be back…just that some days, it didn’t feel like effort was worth all that much.
A complete lie, considering the haul she’d brought back to Paradise Station. Okay, it probably wasn’t a lot by the standards of the big crews, but she made a living far better than any of them ever realized. She wasn’t stupid enough to bring the best to Paradise apart from a few shiny baubles. No, the best she brought to the main hubs, selling a piece here, a piece there. The Shoals weren’t an open treasure chest by any means, no, you needed maps or intuition or your best guess, and even then it was hard, dangerous work. Ships were lost, crews lost, pirates abounded. And then, even if you made it back, there was the chance of getting assualted off the docks or brought up on charges by Station Security, although one could always conveniently pay a ’small fine’ before heading off to the assayer’s office.
So it wasn’t that she didn’t have things to do today, she did, she had to check on the status of the ship, make sure the Sugar wasn’t drifting too badly, check location, see if she’d tapped out where she was mining.
Basically, she wanted to do…something else. Almost anything, which was pathetic. She’d chosen to leave home, leave her sisters, leave her mother, pretty much leave everything she’d ever known for this chance at…life? A future? Something different from what she was expected to do by whom, exactly? Sarah and Toby were nearly 10 years older, she’d rarely seen then them apart from holidays home from boarding school and the odd summer weekend. Her mother had preferred the hands off approach, always supportive, rarely disciplinary, although in retrospect Micah had been very disciplined on her own. Perhaps that was because they had lived on their own, away from her grandparents and the mess they had created with her sisters. Half-sisters, in truth. Peter wasn’t her father. Her mother had said only that her real father was someone she had met on holiday and that he wasn’t aware of Micah’s existence. Moreover, she preferred that Micah never know…while letting slip, one drunken New Year’s party, the secret that he was still alive and would probably outlive her, and that, oh, when she died, all of his details would be passed on to Micah to do with what she wished. The last bit? Apparently, according to her mother, she was the very image of her father, although everyone else said she favored her mother, with the plump figure, dark brown hair, grey eyes, and pale, luminescent skin.
Deep thoughts weren’t going to get the work done any faster, though, and she finally forced herself out of the bed and into the shower for a brief, one minute wake up. Afterwards she searched for something clean to wear from the selection of clothing on the floor. One day she was going to put everything in its proper place… She wanted a mood lifter, something bright and shiny, but ended up wearing yet another pair of black pants and black shirt. The only bit of color she wore was the elastic she tied her braid off with, a bright red band.
Once dressed, she grabbed a bite from the galley, toast and eggs with real butter from her dwindling supply, a weak cup of tea from the very last leaves of organic English Breakfast from the shop at home. She wolfed down the eggs, brought the tea and toast with her to Ops.
Scanning the boards, she saw that everything was nominal. The Sugar had drifted a bit further than she’d allowed for, but that was alright, she’d found most of her best goods from the drift. A lot of miners hated the drift, were scared by it, and rightly so. If you got lost, you might never find your way out. Micah had an ace up her sleeve, though, the best systems money could buy, courtesy of her mother’s occasionally questionable acquaintances. Which wasn’t to say her mother was involved with, no, really, it was better not to think about it. Gift horses and all that.
Still, she kept an eye on the instrumentation, noted speed and direction, spied, destroyed or ignored flotsam and jetsam from other ships, the odd bit of rock. Four hours later and she was getting impatient, the result of too much tea (she’d switched to herbal) and not enough mental stimulation. Crosswords were too much, word search too little. She was on the verge of dialing up a drama, or maybe a comedy, to listen to when the ‘target’ notifier beeped.
“Okay, let’s be something good,” she muttered, magnifying the junction of coordinates to something her eyes could actually see.
