The Spawning (14 page)

She was so hungry from lack of food and smelling the meat roasting by the time the sun set that she’d lost any real interest in studying the Hirachi. Her entire focus was on the meat that had so thoroughly revolted her when she’d watched it butchered and cleaned.

“My god! Do you think they just put that there to torture us?” Deborah asked. “I feel like my stomach is about to cave in.”

Miranda grunted an agreement. “If they don’t offer us some pretty soon, I think I’m going to have to beg—as much as I hate to be reduced to begging.”

Almost as if they’d heard the conversation, one of the Hirachi left the fire pit, glanced toward their group and finally made his way to them. She didn’t think it was one THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 61

that she’d met yet, but then she couldn’t tell that much about him. With the fire at his back, his identity was pretty much concealed by the shadows. He nodded in greeting.

“You are welcome to come and share our kill with us.”

A half dozen of the women hopped up immediately. Miranda couldn’t identify

them in the gloom either, but she suspected it was probably the ‘youngest’ members of their group, the barely legal ones. The others got up a little more cautiously.

She would’ve been among the bimbos herself if she hadn’t been handicapped by

her ankle. It just took her a little longer to get up—particularly since she was also stiff from sitting so long. Deborah offered to act as crutch to help her. She accepted but uncomfortably. “I could make it on my own, you know. It’ll just take me a little longer.”

Deborah flicked a searching look at her. “I think I can manage to stave off

starvation a few more minutes.”

“I suppose I’m going to have to brave the jungle tomorrow and see if I can find a stick that’ll work as a crutch.”

“We’ll go together,” Deborah said firmly. “I don’t think any of us should go out there alone.”

Miranda released a snort of amusement. “As much as I appreciate that—and I

know you’re right in a sense—I’m not sure groups of us going out would be that helpful.”

Deborah shrugged. “Two could scream louder than one. I could help you run.

And, if it looks like its going to get us, I could just leave you as bait and make my getaway.”

Miranda sent her a startled look and burst out laughing. “That’s one way of

looking at it. Maybe we should take Carol as bait?”

Laughing, Deborah shook her head. “We need her. How else are we going to

figure out how to entice … uh ….” She broke off when she realized they were close enough to the Hirachi by that time to be overheard. “You know. We need our experts.

Why don’t you wait here and I’ll go see if I can grab some grub for both of us?”

Miranda nodded a little reluctantly. “God I hate being crippled!”

“If you stay off that ankle you’ll probably get better faster.”

It was probably good advice but it didn’t make it chafe any less. She wasn’t used to having to depend on anybody else for anything. She hated it. She despised feeling helpless and she was uncomfortable feeling like she owed anyone anything. It wasn’t that she minded helping anyone else. She just didn’t like feeling indebted.

Like she was to the Hirachi even for breathing.

The worst of it was that she didn’t think there was anyway she could pay her

debt—certainly not any time soon.

Actually, the worst of it was that she didn’t see anyway she could keep from

accumulating debt in the foreseeable future.

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 62

Chapter Seven

It rained. It would’ve been bad enough if it was just a sprinkling. It did in fact start out that way, just a few drops splattering on her arm and cheek to rouse Miranda enough to make her wonder if somebody was standing over her spattering her with water drops to annoy her. She’d barely opened her eyes enough to peer around for the culprit when the sky lit blindingly with a bolt of lightning. The light show was followed almost instantly with an explosion of sound that brought everybody wide awake, screaming.

And then the sky opened and rain poured down on them in heavy, bone chilling

sheets.

The first two nights had been pure hell. Sleeping under the stars wasn’t

something Miranda had ever aspired to, and evidently she wasn’t alone in that lack of interest in getting closer to nature. Everyone else hated it far more vocally.

It wasn’t just the constant, damp breeze blowing off the water at night that chilled their sunburned skin and made them shiver no matter how tightly they huddled together.

There were biting insects that feasted off of them at night when the wind wasn’t stiff enough to blow them away and the sounds of animals in the jungle outside the compound made them feel even more vulnerable and exposed.

The rain was the last straw.

The screams of fright turned to outraged squeals, but although most of them

jumped up, there was no where to run, no shelter beyond the little bit provided by the vertical wall at their backs. After surveying the empty compound in hopes something would suddenly appear, most of them simply flopped on the ground again and wept with a mixture of hopelessness and anger.

Miranda drew her arms inside her gown and, when she discovered that it actually seemed to repel the water, pulled the neck of it over her head like a hood. There wasn’t a sign of the Hirachi, she discovered when lightning lit the sky again. It puzzled her as much as it alarmed her to discover there was no one in the compound with them—no stalwart warriors to beat the beasts from the jungle off of them if one should happen to scale the wall that protected them.

Surely to god the men weren’t
working
?

They had to rest
sometime
, didn’t they?

She hadn’t seen them either of the two previous nights since they’d arrived, but she’d just assumed they were all sleeping near the far wall and it was too dark to actually see them.

Unable to sleep with the rain pouring down on them anyway, she sat for a long

while staring at the water where the men usually came and went, watched a good while after the rain stopped, but eventually she fell asleep again.

Sounds of activity woke her a few hours later. Considering she’d been awake

most of the night and it was overcast for a change, she thought she might have slept a good while longer if not for the sounds of movement and the faint thuds as the men emptied their nets into the bins. She’d been listening for indications of the Hirachi, THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 63

though, she realized, even after she’d finally given up watching for them.

They’d been forced to designate the closest corner of the beach/water as their sandbox. As little as any of them had wanted to and as disgusting as they found it to be, they had needs that couldn’t be ignored for very long. No one could quite get up the nerve to brave the forest to squat and there wasn’t any place, besides the water, inside the compound that gave them even a modicum of privacy or dignity.

None of them were comfortable about making use of their latrine when the

Hirachi were anywhere around, though.

Deciding to ignore that particular discomfort, Miranda got up a little stiffly when she saw Khan and began the arduous task of hobbling over to talk to him. She didn’t particularly relish it, but somebody had to and it didn’t look like anybody else was going to volunteer.

He noticed that she was headed his way, thankfully, and, after studying her for several moments, left the others and strode to meet her. His expression wasn’t particularly welcoming. It made it that much harder to gather the nerve to ask and she struggled for a few minutes trying to think of a way to start.

Finally, with an inward shrug, she just plunged in. “I was wondering if we could borrow something to cut with?”

Something flickered in his eyes, suspicion, she thought. “What do you want to cut?”

Miranda frowned. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a clue of how to go about

making any kind of shelter and she doubted any of the others had any better idea than she did. She just knew she—they—couldn’t stand much more of being so completely

exposed to the elements. Her head was stuffy today from having to sit in the rain half the night—and it was obviously the height of summer. They were all going to die of pneumonia if they had no way to protect themselves by the time the weather began to cool—and she assumed it would.

“Small trees, I guess, and some kind of brush or maybe fronds if there’s anything with big leaves. We need to make a shelter.”

She couldn’t quite decipher the thoughts that flickered across his face that time.

“We have shelter we will give you until you can make your own. We were only waiting until you had recovered some of your strength to take to you to our village.”

Miranda stared at him blankly. “Your village?” she echoed. “You don’t live

here?”

He gave her a strange look. Lifting his head, he glanced around the empty

compound. She could tell he was insulted when he looked at her again. His entire face was taut. “This is the prison where we were kept when the Sheloni took us,” he said through clenched teeth that made it clear he despised being within the walls at all. “We bring the
jasumi
here that we trade with the Vernamin for goods. This is the rendezvous for pick up.”

“Oh,” Miranda said a little blankly, feeling her face redden with embarrassment and more than a little irritation. How the hell were they supposed to have known that when it was where they’d been brought and nobody had told them any differently? “Is the village far from here then?”

He turned at the waist and lifted an arm, pointing to some distant spot above the far corner of the seawall. Miranda followed the direction, but she couldn’t see anything THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 64

but the tall wall and a little sky from where she stood. Confusion filled her. “I thought there was an ocean beyond the wall.”

He nodded.

“It’s on an island then?” she asked, her confusion deepening. “Or … I guess

maybe a peninsula?”

He gave her another strange look, seemed to consider it for a moment. “A shelf, not an island,” he said finally. “About fifty feet above the floor.”

“Floor?” Miranda repeated blankly, wondering if her mind was still as sluggish with sleep as it seemed to her. The bizarre sense washed over her that they were speaking at cross-purposes, but she couldn’t figure out why that was. “How far would we need to walk?”

He looked taken aback and she could see he was as confused as she was. “Not

walk. Swim.”

Miranda’s eyes widened. “We’d have to
swim
? How far?”

His gaze skimmed down her length and back to her face. “For us, it is about an hour.”

Miranda looked him over as he had her. She hadn’t actually studied any of them before, not up close—certainly from a distance, but they’d pretty much kept their distance and during her ‘close encounters’ with them right after she’d arrived she hadn’t been in any state to notice a hell of a lot besides their size.

She
had
noticed the oddly loose skin along the backs of their arms that stretched from just above the elbow to just below it, she realized, and the odd little extra skin along the wrists. She’d noticed the hardened ridge that ran along their arms and across their shoulders and even a slight, nearly unnoticeable webbing of skin between their fingers.

Everything about them was strange, though. She hadn’t really considered the

significance of any of those things.

Even noticing it more strongly now, she drew a blank.

She met his gaze again. “I don’t think we could swim that,” she said finally.

He nodded. “It would take more time for you. This is why we thought it best if you rested before you tried.”

Miranda bit her lip. She was a pretty good swimmer—she didn’t know about the

others—but even she wouldn’t willingly tackle a swim that would certainly take her a good bit more than an hour. “There isn’t any way to reach the village without swimming?” she asked a little hopefully.

He stared at her blankly. She could see the thoughts churning in his mind. “It is thirty feet or more below the surface. Even if you could reach the area without swimming there would be the swim down.”

Miranda’s jaw slid to half-mast. “It’s
under
the water?”

Khan stared at her blankly. “Of course.”

Slowly, as she stared at him, it finally jelled in her mind. “You’re … the Hirachi
live
in the ocean?”

He seemed as stunned as she was. “You can not live in the water?”

They stared at one another as it slowly sank into both of them that they’d made assumptions that weren’t true for either one of them, that they were far more different than any of them had realized. After studying Khan in stunned disbelief for some time, Miranda turned away from him, looked around blankly, and started hobbling back toward THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 65

the human enclave, still struggling to digest what she’d learned.

It wasn’t until she’d reached her spot and dropped heavily on the sand that

Miranda realized she’d completely forgotten that she’d gone to Khan in hopes of getting tools if she couldn’t prompt him to offer to build a shelter for them by asking.

From out of nowhere, the urge to cry assailed her. She didn’t understand where it had come from or why she felt it until she glanced up and saw that Khan hadn’t moved, that he stood where she’d left him, staring at her.

Hopelessness, she realized. She hadn’t even been aware that a seed of hope had been planted, that she’d not only accepted that she might actually survive but that she might have a future, a life.

Despite her best efforts, she felt the tears gather in her eyes and overflow.

They weren’t the same. The lizard bastard had lied. They might surmount all of the other things—all of the vast differences between their cultures and beliefs and every misunderstanding that could arise out of it.