Astra (24 page)

‘Lil, this is Astra. Astra, meet Lil.’ Hokma’s hand was on the girl’s back, rubbing her shoulders as Astra, her arms crossed, toed the dirt patch behind the Wise House verandah. It was two days since the Fountain night. The girl didn’t look happy either. She was clean now, her hair had been combed into two paintbrush braids and she was wearing a pair of Gaia-blood panties Nimma had organised, but the scowl on her face could have stripped bark from an oak.

‘Hello,’ Astra glowered. She had only been allowed to come to Wise House today if she’d promised to be
friendly
. It was unbelievable. Wise House was
her
Shelter home. Why was the frigging girl staying here? And why didn’t
she
have to be friendly too? Everyone knew that apart from the occasional brief demand for food Lil was refusing to speak to
anyone
. She wouldn’t wear shoes, either. But even though Nimma said Lil didn’t need to because her soles were hardened, she’d sorted through Astra’s cupboard looking for sandals and boots that might fit her. ‘
I still wear those!
’ Astra had been forced to insist. Nimma had given her an exasperated look and put her hand on Astra’s brow. ‘You’re not ill, Astra,’ she’d said. ‘I don’t know why you’re displaying such a temper.’

The girl stuck out her hand. But that hand wasn’t friendly, Astra knew. It was on the end of an arm that was straight as a spear. It was a blade, ready to slice her palm open.

Behind them, Helium and Silver and the three current trainee Owleons were tethered to their pegs on the lawn. Helium was slowly blinking his giant orange-planet eyes. Silver was waking up from his afternoon nap, stretching his moth-grey wings like a taut, brocaded shawl. The birds
needed to be flown, and Hokma was waiting. Silently, briefly, Astra brushed her hand against Lil’s. The girl was taller than her but she was very skinny. For sure she could take her in a fight.

‘Is she sleeping in
my
bed?’ she asked Hokma indignantly.

‘She is, but you can sleep in with me, like you used to. I’ve moved your stuff over to my loft.’

Sleep with
Hokma
? ‘
I don’t want
—’

‘It’s just for now, Astra!’ Hokma snapped, and blood rushed to Astra’s face. She gripped her dread and began twirling it ferociously between her fingers.

‘IMBOD will soon find Lil’s home,’ Hokma continued smoothly. ‘In the meantime, I want you to be kind to her. Lil knows lots of interesting places in the woods, don’t you, Lil? Maybe if you’re nice to her she’ll show them to you, Astra.’

Hokma was being
impossible
. Astra flung her dread back over her shoulder and sullenly scanned Lil’s face. The girl’s tea-brown eyes didn’t respond with so much as a scintilla of invitation to the woods.

‘She’s not going to help train the Owleons, is she?’ she muttered.

‘Lil’s going to help clean the aviary pens. She can watch us train the birds if she wants.’

What?
Astra wanted to shout again. Why was Hokma being so
stupid
? This girl, Lil – or so she
said
she was called – had been spying on them for
years
– and now Hokma wanted her to observe all their secret Owleon manoeuvres?

‘But—’ she tried.

‘Astra.’ Hokma cut her off. ‘Be
nice
. Okay, girls, let’s grab some buckets and brooms and get to work on those cages.’

Hokma started up the verandah steps and behind her back Lil flashed Astra a smile – not a nice smile; not a sensitive, shy, I’d-really-like-to-get-to-know-you kind of smile; not a cheeky, eye-rolling,
aren’t-adults-bossy
, shared pain kind of smile; but a nasty, sly, triumphant little smile: a smug smile with glue slathered over it and broken glass sprinkled on top.

For an hour they worked in silence. Astra’s arms ached as she scrubbed the cage floors, endeavouring to out-clean Lil, who slopped too much water around and had to go back to Wise House twice to refill her bucket. That was wasteful, but Hokma didn’t tell her off. When they finished cleaning Hokma said ‘well done’ and ‘thank you’ to them both, in exactly the same infuriatingly brisk and encouraging manner. Astra couldn’t
remember when Hokma had last been this cheerful. Normally they worked in near-silence, taking the three trainees to the clearing first, and flying them for an hour. But today Hokma said, ‘Let’s show Lil how we fly Helium and Silver,’ and so after they had put the buckets and brooms away and filled two pouches with alt-meat, it was the older birds they untethered first.

It was obvious that Lil couldn’t touch Silver – Silver was Astra’s Owleon and even IMBOD officers knew not to hold him – but Hokma gave Lil a glove and let her take Helium. As the huge Owleon stepped onto her wrist, the girl’s eyes shone with a wild fire. She grabbed his jesses and bit her chapped lower lip until it practically disappeared. At last Helium spread open his huge wings and the dark screen of feathers hid the horrible image of Lil’s contorted delight.

Silver perched daintily on Astra’s wrist, his black eyes gleaming and his heart-shaped face tilting in response to sounds inaudible to human ears. Astra sometimes wondered if he could hear her heartbeat. If so, he would be worried, because today her heart was clenched tight as a fist, its knuckles rapping angrily on a locked door. She lagged behind as they walked through the woods behind the aviary, keeping Silver close to her chest and stroking his snowy breast feathers with a crooked finger. ‘I’m sorry, Silver. I’m in a bad mood today. It’s not your fault.’

He nipped at her knuckle as he sometimes did when they were walking. It never hurt and didn’t mean he was annoyed with her; he was just seeking food.

‘Not yet, Silver. We’ll be there in a minute.’

Ahead of them she could see Lil striding a couple of feet in front of Hokma, her slight frame dwarfed by Helium’s dark feathery mass. She
willed
Lil to let her arm drop. Helium wasn’t that heavy, but he still gripped your arm until it hurt. She shouldn’t be able to carry him far. Surely after Hokma unlocked the back gate Lil would hand Helium back?

But Lil tucked her right hand under her left elbow and held her skinny arm steady, all the way through the woods to the cedar hedge that ran between the Wise House grounds and the flying field. Astra closed the hedge gate and trudged through the long grass to the near perches. Silver was lighter on her wrist now, half-lifting in anticipation of food and a flight. But the gentle pull of his talons on the glove didn’t raise her spirits as it usually did.

How long was Lil going to be here? Hokma said until they’d found her family – but the girl didn’t have a family. Her Code-Shelter father had died, that was what Nimma had said yesterday after the emergency Or meeting that none of the Or-kids were allowed to attend. The local IMBOD officer had come to it, galloping up on a sleek black horse he’d tethered to a tree near East Gate. Astra and Meem had fed the horse apples and after the officer had mounted and ridden away again Nimma and Klor had summoned them to the Earthship for a Shelter house meeting with Yoki and Peat.

Astra had sat on the floor with her knitting. The girl, she knew, would have told the adults a pack of lies. But if Astra said so, she might get into an argument and that would be dangerous for her and Hokma. The best way to avoid losing her temper at Shelter house meetings, she’d learned, was to focus on something else. Right now she was knitting a pair of socks for Craft class. The stitch was easy, but the gold yarn and the needles were thin and she had to concentrate hard to control her gauge. Nimma had said that if the socks were good enough, she could send them to a constable in the Southern Belt.

Klor and Nimma’s report was even worse than she’d feared. Lil, it appeared, had managed to fool
all
the adults, even the IMBOD officer. She was a traumatised young girl, Nimma said, and Elpis had clearly sent her to Or to be healed. The girl hadn’t spoken at the meeting, but when the IMBOD officer said if she didn’t co-operate he’d take her away with him, she’d begun nodding or shaking her head to their questions. Her Code-Shelter father had left his community with her after her Birth-Code-Shelter mother died, eight or nine years ago – the girl wasn’t sure how long it had been, and she couldn’t point on a map to where the community was located – and he had wandered with her in the mountains ever since, coming down to the steppes at night if they needed supplies.

Peat was taking minutes. He looked up from Libby and frowned. ‘That’s weird,’ he commented. ‘Why would he want to leave his community?’

It was unusual behaviour, Nimma said, but grief did sometimes make men do irrational things. He’d obviously loved Lil very much, though. She’d drawn pictures for the meeting showing how they’d lived in caves, and how he’d taught her how to make fire with a piece of flint, and felt blankets from the wool he gathered from fences on the sieppes so even in the winter they were warm. He’d taught her how to read, too, for she was
carrying a tattered book of Gaia hymns and stories in the pocket of her old hydropac. ‘Imagine that,’ Nimma sighed. ‘A
book
. It must have been a family heirloom.’

Sure it was
. Astra pulled the yarn tight. The man was an
infiltrator
and he was making sure his kid had a cover story for when they both got caught. He’d probably
stolen
the hymnbook. IMBOD should search the crime records for
that
.

‘Watch your tension, darling,’ Nimma warned, and Astra examined her stitches. Annoyingly, her gauge had been shrinking. She scowled and started unpicking.

Peat was still puzzled. ‘Eight years ago?’ he persisted. ‘So how did she have her Security shot?’

Without warning, this had become a red-light conversation. Astra concentrated on getting her row back in order. She had to soften her shoulders and work on nice loose stitching until the topic had passed.
Knit two. Purl two. Knit two
.

‘We think she didn’t,’ Klor said. ‘Perhaps that was one reason he took her away.’

Peat was amazed. ‘But that’s child neglect – child
abuse
. She won’t be able to fit in anywhere now.’

‘She won’t have any friends,’ Meem said complacently.

‘She’ll be lonely,’ Yoki echoed.

It was her turn. ‘She’ll be sad,’ Astra contributed from the Sec Gen’s interchangeable stock of Imprints concerning the disastrous effects of Serum deprivation. These were learned at school – never repeated in front of the older children, of course, but expressed among themselves in tones of crocodile solicitude whenever one of the Or-teens was going through a tempestuous period. It was obvious to Astra that these comforting maxims weren’t all strictly true. Despite – or perhaps even
because
of – her trauma, Congruence had strengthened her hold on her friends
and
starred in Ahn’s film, while Durga had visited recently from Atourne to shyly announce she had made a Gaia bond with another young woman in her Craft College class. But still, it did look like life without the shot could be a terrible struggle. Everyone knew Pristina was having a difficult time on IMBOD Service because she wrote long, weepy letters to her Code parents begging to be allowed to come home. And just this morning Stream had been observed shouting at Torrent on the Kinbat track and then storming into the woods in tears.

Hokma always said that Astra wouldn’t be lonely or sad when she grew up because she’d go to college in Atourne and meet older non-Sec Gen people like her, but in the meantime one of the adages was definitely true: she
didn’t
fit in. The teens treated her like just another Sec Gen kid, but though the Sec Gens accepted her, she was only ever half-present in their company. They were fun to play chess or
hnefatafl
with, and they were good at teamwork in the kitchen or the garden, but none of them liked to make up stories or ask questions, and none of her Shelter siblings ever took her side if she was upset with Nimma. Sometimes this was a good thing and Meem’s giggles or Peat’s Code-talk would coax her out of a strop; other times, though, she festered and had to stomp up the path to Wise House to let her anger loose on Hokma.

‘What he did was legally wrong in many ways,’ Nimma responded, ‘but the important thing is that Lil’s here with us now. Hopefully one day she’ll have older non-Sec Gen friends and be happy with them. Not everyone’s as lucky as your generation, are they?’

‘We’re
very
lucky,’ Meem beamed.

Yoki looked troubled. ‘I don’t like non-Sec Gen kids,’ he announced. ‘They’re selfish.’

‘Yoki,’ Nimma tutted, ‘that’s not a nice thing to say. Durga’s not selfish, is she? And neither is Congruence. She helped you in the garden the other day – I saw her.’

Yoki considered this. ‘Yes, she did,’ he conceded.

Peat had been tapping on Libby. Now he looked up with the air of a researcher. ‘What did they eat?’ he asked.

Nimma glanced at Klor. ‘Well, they ate nuts and berries –
safe
berries, of course. And other fruit, and wild herbs and mushrooms. We think that he stole flour and other food from communities – the IMBOD officer said several such thefts had been reported in this area. And’ – she twisted her emerald ring – ‘they hunted.’

Nothing about Lil would have surprised Astra, but the other children recoiled, their faces stricken with disgust and disbelief.

‘Hunted? You mean they
killed animals
?’ Yoki exclaimed.

‘Yes. It looks like her father taught Lil how to make traps and how to use a bow and arrow. They caught and ate birds and fish, and occasionally rabbits.’

‘Whoah!’ Peat exhaled.

‘But that’s …
bad
,’ Meem stammered.

‘We have to assume he was invoking the self-defence law,’ Klor said.

‘But the self-defence law only lets us protect the crops.’ Peat had recovered his composure and was now analysing the information in context. He was in Year Eight, and as expected, he was acing Law class.

‘That’s true,’ Klor said. ‘But if you don’t have access to alt-meat or enough vegetable protein then hunting does count as self-defence. Some tribal people still do it, and Is-Land doesn’t table objections at CONC meetings.’