Stung - By Bethany Wiggins Page 0,5

against my throat. I swallow a spitless swallow, and my throat bobs against sharp roughness. I hardly dare breathe.

Above, the hollow smack of feet echoes. The child and I stay frozen in a tense embrace, my mouth still covered by a grimy hand, the sharpness warming against my neck.

The footsteps pass, but the child doesn’t move a muscle. Yet the child’s heart thunders against my back. We stand frozen together for a long time—until the child’s heart slows—and then, without a sound, I’m released. I stumble forward, arms flailing in pitch-blackness. A hand grabs my elbow before I fall, and the child starts guiding me through the darkness, over the squelching floor. The child’s feet don’t squelch. Just mine.

I hold my hands forward like I’m sleepwalking, but the child obviously knows where to go. In spite of the blackness, we walk at a steady pace. The child counts under its breath, and when it gets to a certain number, it pauses and we turn … left or right, always different. Every once in a while starlight, slatted by the bars of a storm drain, filters down to where we creep. And every time we pass beneath a storm drain, the child clasps a grimy hand against my chapped lips.

We walk a long time, silent, until the child asks, “Why are you so clean?” The whisper, out of place in the dark tunnels, startles me.

“What?” I say.

“You’re clean. Your clothes, your skin. And you smell like …” It sniffs. “Plants and iodine. Are you from the right side of the wall?”

“What wall?” I whisper.

“Shut up!” The hand is over my mouth again. We turn a corner, and blue starlight glows down from a storm drain. I walk on my toes, and the squelching becomes a muted wet squish. We pass the glow and walk for a few minutes in silence before the child speaks again.

“Are you from inside the wall?”

“What wall?” I ask a second time, my voice a whisper. Even if I wanted to speak louder, I don’t know if I could. “I’m thirsty,” I say, panting.

We stop walking and the child releases my arm.

“Look here, girl,” the child growls. “I just saved your life. You’re the one who should be giving me water. You owe me. And you’re gonna pay me back, or I’m gonna leave you here. In the dark. Right now. To shrivel up and die like everything else.” The child’s voice is high. Feminine.

“Pay you back?” My hand goes to my throat, tracing the dip of my collarbone, searching for a necklace. But there’s nothing there. I lower my empty hand. “How can I pay you back?” I ask. “I don’t have any money or jewelry.”

“Money? Jewelry? I can’t eat those, or trade them. Do you have any food or honey?”

Honey. I remember honey. Gold. Sweet. Melted with butter on wheat toast at breakfast. Drizzled in tea. Made by bees. Bees are on the endangered species list. And now I can hear my sister’s voice like she’s standing beside me.

“Since the bees are endangered, we have to plant these special flowers to help feed them.” Lis dug a shallow hole in the dirt and dropped a seed inside for Jonah and me to see. “Bees love lavender—the color, the smell,” she explained. “And so do I. Here, you guys plant some.”

She put three small pale-purple seeds into my hand and three into Jonah’s.

Using my fingers, I dug a shallow hole in the damp soil.

“What will happen if the bees go extinct?” Jonah asked, burying his first seed.

“First of all, there would be no more honey. It would become the world’s most rare, most precious food—even more precious than gold,” Lis said. “But that’s just the beginning. Bees pollinate a huge percentage of the world’s crops. If bees die out, things like apples and peaches and vegetbles will die. Lots of plants will die without the bees’ pollinating them. And if the plants start dying, then the things that eat plants will start to die, like cows and chickens, which means no more meat for us to eat. If we have no fruits or vegetables to eat, and no meat, our world will experience a major famine. People will start starving to death worldwide.”

I looked at the tiny seeds in my hand and wondered how something so small could make a difference if the bees were already going extinct.

“Don’t look so scared,” Lis said, patting the top of my head. “My biology teacher says that the government