Alight_ Book Two of the Generat - Scott Sigler Page 0,83
“Food.”
She’s so single-minded she doesn’t seem to understand how close we just came to getting caught. What would have happened to Barkah for hiding us?
“Maybe I can draw the purple fruit,” she says, then moves to the fire. She flips over a sketch, picks up a piece of charcoal and starts to draw.
That catches Barkah’s attention, makes him excited. He glances at the closed doors, then two hops take him to Spingate’s side.
She sketches an oval. She starts to shade it in. The charcoal is messy. She’s pressing too hard, sending dust everywhere.
She holds up the sketch for me to see. “Does this look like the purple fruit?”
“It looks more like a turd.”
I hold back an embarrassed laugh. When Matilda was a little girl, saying the word turd would have gotten her punished. Badly. Our father didn’t like nasty language of any kind.
Barkah squints at the drawing. He mumbles something I don’t understand. I get the feeling he’s not impressed with Spingate’s artistic skills.
Spingate sighs. “Let me do it again.”
She puts the fabric back on the ground, starts to draw, hesitates, wondering how to make it look better.
The air erupts with a boom so loud and hard that it shakes dirt down from what’s left of the steeple’s ruined ceiling. The sound echoes through the jungle even as another sound joins it, a steady roar that makes everything around me shudder.
“Oh no,” Spingate says, then she’s up and out the doors. Barkah and I rush out behind her.
High in the sky, a trail of white. Memories flashfire, more of Matilda’s childhood floods in, and with a wash of heartbreak, fear and despair, I recognize what it is.
“A ship,” Spingate says. “It just entered the atmosphere, it’s coming down.” She looks at me, dread in her eyes. “It has to be the Grownups.”
Barkah hops into the steeple.
The twelve-year-old inside me cries out: This isn’t fair! We were so close. We’ve worked so hard, lost so much. Brewer told us there was only one shuttle; he lied.
Barkah comes out with my spear in one hand and his musket in the other. He tosses the spear at my feet. He waves his hand outward in a gesture that needs no translation: Go away.
Spingate shakes her head. “No, we have to learn from each other, we—”
Barkah opens his wide mouth and roars: a grinding, hideous noise. He holds the musket in both hands, shakes it at us. He’s leaning forward, his tail out straight behind him. Open aggression looks the same on his kind as it does on ours.
Spingate takes a step back, surprised, maybe even hurt.
I grab her elbow, gently pull her away. “Let’s go.”
“But why is he mad? He must have also seen our shuttle come down.”
“Look what happened after it did,” I say. “Eight of his kind are dead because of us. We have to take Visca’s body and get back to our people. Now. Look where that ship is going.”
She looks to the sky. The white line descends toward the horizon. It’s coming down fast.
Whatever it is, it will land inside the city walls.
“Maybe we should leave the body,” she says. “It’s going to slow us down.”
“He’s going to slow us down,” I say. “Not it. We’re taking him.”
We run around to the back of the ruined church. We each take a pole of Visca’s cart. It hurts so much to hold the pole, more to pull it, but pull it we do.
We head for the trail, Visca’s tied-down body bouncing along behind us.
By the time we reach the city gate, night has fallen. Spingate and I are drained. The cart is on wheels, but that didn’t make the hike through the muddy trails any easier. Raw blisters cover our palms, our fingers. My hands feel like Visca’s ghost hit them with his sledgehammer.
We call out. Coyotl slides through the tall doors, runs to us. I wait to see Bishop come out as well, but he doesn’t. Of course not—as soon as that smoke trail arced overhead, he knew what it was and went back to protect the shuttle.
Coyotl carries Visca’s body up onto the spider. Spingate and I join them. To think that this very machine might have been used to slaughter thousands of Springers, native beings who were guilty of nothing other than being where my kind wanted to live.
The spider is fast. The ride is smooth, silent—no more whine. And that rear leg…it’s not dragging.
“Coyotl, is this the same spider you rode before?”