some sleep that wasn’t stun-induced, but he deemed it best to take advantage of some time spent with a garrulous Norludian. He leaned against the doorjamb and folded his arms. “So, Temfilk… Are you as anxious to leave this place as your boss?”
“Absolutely,” Temfilk declared. “As far as I know, I’m the only Norludian on this rotten pile of dust. I was a kid when I got stranded here, and I’ve been hiding out in this hellhole ever since.”
“Does this hellhole have a name?”
“You mean this part of the city? Yeah, it has a name. It’s called the Barren Quarter, or just the Barrens.”
Moe didn’t have to ask why. “Yeah. It’s pretty barren all right.” He hesitated. “You said you were stranded here?”
Temfilk nodded, and for several moments, Moe thought that was the only reply he was going to get.
“We were all taken from our families to be sold as slaves,” Temfilk finally said. “The shithead who took us was about to get caught, so he dumped his cargo on the nearest planet, which happened to be this one. Didn’t bother trying to sell us. Just left us here to fend for ourselves. We’ve done okay, I guess. We’re all still alive anyway. I mean, he could’ve spaced us.”
Temfilk’s reason for being on Haedus was similar to Klara’s. As the only habitable planet for a long way in any direction, it was probably home to any number of displaced beings, most of them as anxious to leave as Moe was.
“Klara found me first,” Temfilk went on. “I didn’t tell her about the others right away, but she figured it out eventually because I was sneaking food to the Racks, even though Nexbit was pretty good at stealing. When he was little, he could transform into a dwithan and snatch food right off the vendors’ carts. Nobody ever caught him.”
“What’s a dwithan?”
“Oh, you know… they’re sort of green and scaly with long tails and a row of neck ridges. They’ll eat almost anything. Some of the Haedusians keep them as pets, but mostly they run wild.”
“A kind of lizard, you mean?”
“I guess so. Dunno what you’d call it. Anyway, Nex is too big to be a dwithan now. He could probably look like one, but he’d be too big to be convincing.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” Moe nodded toward the rather large, lumpy-looking bed situated by the far wall. “Is this his room?”
“Yeah. He’s the biggest, so he has the biggest bed. The Racks don’t need much more than a pile of rags to curl up on. We salvaged most of this stuff from the other buildings.” He paused, grinning. “We liked this place because we could each have our own room. It’s also one of the few with a decent roof and protection from the wind.”
“Not much in the way of windows, either.” So far, most of the windows he’d seen were high up in the walls and covered with metal grating. The shuttered windows in the common room appeared to be the exception.
“True, but that’s a plus when you’re in hiding,” Temfilk pointed out.
“I can see where it would be. Kinda dark, though. Especially if you shut the power down every night.” Fortunately, Moe had a Darconian glowstone in his pocket—something he wasn’t going to admit to possessing until he was a little more sure of his new cohorts. Glowstones were not only worth a bundle monetarily, they required no power other than thought to make them illuminate.
As he glanced up at the blank wall above the bed, the image of a large open window with billowing curtains appeared. He could even see green, rolling hills in the world outside it. Yet when he took a step toward it, the vision vanished.
Temfilk tapped his arm. “You okay, dude? You look like you’ve seen a sandworm.”
Moe shook his head. “No. I’m not sure what—Wait a sec. There are sandworms on this planet?”
“Oh, yeah. Really big and really nasty. You don’t want to venture out into the desert on foot.”
“You have to walk without rhythm,” Moe said absently, still slightly weirded out over the vision he’d just experienced. Such things weren’t uncommon among Zetithians, but this was Moe’s first. “They don’t respond to random sounds.”
The silence in the wake of his statement was prolonged enough for Moe to glance at Temfilk. Until that moment, he’d never appreciated how big a Norludian’s mouth would look when it was hanging open.
“How in the name of Leon could you possibly know that?”
“Something I