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 am I?”
“Earth, of course.” A friendly young woman around my age with amazing curly hair and the biggest, most happy smile I’ve ever seen stops to talk to me. She has a kitten in her arms, which is batting at one of the curls of her hair.
“I forgot everything. Doctor says I might remember. But right now I don’t.”
“Oh,” she says. “I’m Seeker. What’s your name?”
“I don’t know?”
“You look like a Carrie,” she says. “I had a friend called Carrie once.”
I almost ask about what happened to her, but even in this very limited mental state, I realize that’s not the best question to ask.
“Maybe just call me Miss,” I say. “Then one day, when I remember my name, we can add it to the end?”
“Good idea,” Seeker says.
“Doctor says I should go to the common house and find somewhere to sleep?”
“Oh, you don’t want to go there,” Seeker says, crinkling up her nose. “There’s men there. You don’t want to end up under one of them.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t. I definitely don’t.”
I don’t know what’s going on, but I know I’m not interested in men right now.
“Do you want me to help you out and find a place in one of the women’s houses? I’ve got a spare space for a bed in my hut? There’s me and a couple other girls. Come on. We’ll go ask now.”
“Really? Thank you so much.”
We go to the edge of the village, where a pretty sort of hut sits in a small clearing. There’s a whole lot of flowers around the door, and the hut, which looks like it was made of daubed mud that was then painted with some kind of white compound, also has flowers painted on it in orange, pink, purple, and green. It’s so cute, with a wood pallet door and a thatched roof.
“Vani! Charger! We’ve got a new girl. Mind if she moves in?” Seeker shouts to her friends.
Vani is short with bright red hair and very pretty green eyes. Charger is bigger and quite muscly and I wish I was as strong as her immediately because she looks like she can probably rip a tree out of the ground if she wants to.
“More the merrier,” Charger says. Vani jumps up from where she’s sitting and gives me a hug.
Something inside me breaks. Not in a bad way. Like I’ve been holding on to something for a really long time, trying to be strong, and in this moment, my body knows I don’t have to do that anymore. It’s like being freed.
“Aw! Don’t cry! Or cry if you want! It’s hard being new here. Did you fall?”
“I don’t think so?” I don’t really know what she means. “I just woke up in the doctor’s hut. I don’t know where I came from.”
“Oh,” Vani says, nodding. “You arrived mysteriously. That happens a lot here. Sometimes people come out of the woods. Sometimes they fall from the sky. Sometimes they just get left in the middle of the village when we least expect it. It’s weird. But fun.”
“We should show her the place,” Charger says, running a hand through her short, dark hair. “The dangerous stuff, you know?”
“Good idea,” Seeker says. “There’s some stuff you really need to know about living here. It’s nice, but it can be risky if you’re not careful. Like, stay away from the common house. I can’t believe the doctor sent you there. That’s crazy. You’d be pregnant by morning, I bet.”
I give a shudder.
Seeker hands the kitten off to Vani, takes me by the hand, and gives me a tour of the village.
“Okay. Most important thing is the fact that there’s stuff above,” she says. “See over there, outside the village? No? Come with me.”
She leads me on one of many trail paths out of the little place. I try to remember which one it is. I think I’ll be able to, because there’s a yellow marker at the beginning of the trail and other little yellow dots on trees along the way.
I know when we’ve reached our destination because the temperature drops, the sun goes away, and the forest stops being the forest. For what looks like hundreds of hectares, it’s just scrub and weird ferns and scraggly bushy things that look dead, but are still somehow thorny and present.
“What happened here? Was there some kind of explosion or something? A fire?”
“Look up,” Seeker says.
I look up and see vast shapes above us, casting areas of the land below into constant shadow. Nothing good grows in the shadows. I shudder a little, feeling creeped out. I feel as though I can see things scuttling in the shadows. Some parts of the land are so dark because almost all the light is blocked out that there’s no way to even see them. I don’t need to be told not to go in there. Fuck everything about going in there.