Merritts of Writing 3

Chapter 25

Angie

Back before the canisters fell choosing a person to spend your life with was a complicated and lengthy process. Once a prospective spouse or Farmate was chosen, ancestral charts were read and matchfinders were consulted. Farmates were truly for life despite who else came into your family, or what transgressions they incurred.

Today, everything was less complicated. Or so I thought.

THE NEXT DAY

I don't think any of my family slept well the previous night. Jam, although the river water had helped in healing his wounds, looked drawn and pale. The wrinkles around his eyes and bracketing the sides of his mouth were deeper than they had been only days ago.

In contrast Emmalee looked to be as fresh as the new morning, her skin glowing. Even her eyes seem brighter, although I detected something amiss when she declined Stevron’s offer to come with us.

Me, on the other hand had slept fitfully. Stevron’s revelation about the effects of using his healing blood, nagged at me.

It wasn't so much the sex part. Alright, it was to a certain degree. I could handle Stevron’s raging male hormones. In fact, his increased drive to mate after providing someone with a 'treatment' was understandable. He was helping to preserve someone’s life, so why not have the urge to create a life himself?

It made things easier. Breaking down sex to the basic elements. The physical needs of carnal lust. No emotional bonds, no expectations, and no one else involved. Two people mating, then moving on. That suited me fine. I had no desire for a man and besides Stevron wasn’t a Far Beyond, like myself, so our match would be forbidden.

It was the killing urge that Stevron had so easily admitted that had kept me awake. How close had he come to ending Jam’s or even Emmalee’s life? And would he succumb to those urges in the future? My brother was far from being healed enough to have Stevron stop giving him his blood.

I forced those troubling questions out of my mind. I didn’t want to give Jake another opportunity to seep through the tiniest crack in my barriers. I’d already had several panic attacks in the last few days and I didn’t want to chance it. My resistance was way, way down and I needed to rebuild myself. Last night’s lack of sleep wasn’t helping. Besides Jake’s warnings about my father and Carter were too disturbing to think about.

Mylane, wedged tightly between myself and Carter on the bench seat in the cab of the truck, shifted her weight. Her knee dug into the side of my leg. “Look.”

My eyes followed the direction her finger was pointing. All I could see was flat, dry hard packed earth. It seemed to stretch out before us for miles with no end in sight.

“I think we’ll stop here,” Stevron said. He brought the truck to a halt.

Carter opened the passenger door and helped Mylane to the ground. Stevron exited the truck and I followed him. I walked around the front of the truck and raised a hand to shield my eyes from the bright sun. The vista was just a vast nothingness. There wasn’t even any sound to hear.

From his pouch Carter extracted a couple of pairs of seeing glasses. He handed a pair to me as Stevron opened the back of the truck for Calvin and Dirk.

A moment later Stevron was standing beside me. “What direction should I be looking?” I asked.

“Directly ahead.” He pointed at the exact spot where Mylane had. I still saw nothing.

Carter raised the second pair of seeing glasses to his eyes. “That’s interesting,” he said.

I put the seeing glasses to my eyes and adjusted the lens. I had a difficult time getting a good focus, so I lowered them. I squeezed my eyes shut. I hated to admit it, but my sight was weakening.

Carter whispered. “It’ll help if you switch on the shades.”

I opened my eyes and flicked the tiny blue button on the seeing glasses. I put them back to my eyes. Carter was right. Everything was better focused now that the glare of the sun bouncing off the ground wasn’t so strong. I scanned the area until I spotted a tiny puff of what looked like dust rising in the far distance.

I turned the focus dial on the lens. The thin veil of dust dissipated and I could see what Carter did.

I took a deep breath. What I saw was something I’d never seen before. The ground was littered with hundreds of fyre eggs, but the elongated shells were no longer glowing as I knew they should be. Then I noticed the cracks. The eggs had hatched. I moved the seeing glasses from side to side. I couldn’t see any fyre wings in the vicinity.

I lowered the glasses and handed them to Calvin. “I don’t understand. I thought fyre wings laid their eggs in caves and abandoned burrows. Not out in the open where there’s no protection.”

“They do,” Stevron said, ‘these are fyre crawlers burrows.”

Fyre crawlers? I’d never hear of such things.

Carter handed me his seeing glasses. “Take another look. Concentrate on looking beyond the eggs.”

I put the seeing glasses back to my eyes. Carter had done a good job of focusing the lens. I could easily see what looked like small creatures emerging from vast holes in the parched ground. “They’re so tiny.”

“About quarter the size of a fyre egg.”

“That’s actually quite big. Are they from a branch of the ant family?” Calvin inquired.”

I took a breath. Obviously Calvin knew about fyre cralwers. I wondered why he hadn’t told me.

“No, fyre crawlers are not a branch of the ant family,” Stevron informed our tiny group. “Although they do burrow and can carry more than a hundred times their weight, fyre crawlers are designed more like a crab. Hard shell with a soft underbelly. But unlike a crab fyre crawlers are highly poisonous. That’s why we're not getting any closer than we are right now. ”