CHAPTER 2
APRIL
WEEKS AGO AT THE DING-DING FEAST
"Where's the stewed scorpion?" Devi asks me as she hands me a bowl of dried seaweed.
Where's the what? I stare at her as I take the bowl. "Please tell me you're joking. We've been eating scorpions here on this planet?"
"We eat everything." Devi beams at me. "And the scorpions are especially tasty. If you can eat a crab, you can eat a scorpion. They're both arthropods."
I give her another blank stare. Like it matters if they're arthropods?
"Arthropods are—"
"Scorpions, or crabs, I get it," I tell her, biting back a laugh. "I'd seen the shrimp tea, but I didn't realize we were eating sand-scorpions, too."
I don't know why I'm surprised. Everyone here has a great respect for the land and its creatures.
If something can be eaten or utilized, we do so.
The land might give us its bounty, but there's no rule that says it has to be attractive.
I put aside the fish I'm scaling, then pause to say a pule over it before I forget.
"Did you say something?" Mari asks, leaning over me to grab the salt cellar.
"Just thanking the fish for feeding us today," I tell her, then look around for a bowl full of dead sand-scorpions in the vast array of food prep at our station. "Have you seen sand-scorpions?"
"Nope." She snags the salt cellar and races off.
All around me, people are rushing about to prepare food for Flor's wedding feast. It's supposed to be a surprise, since Flor and I'rec have pretty much been together since I met them, and they resonated so there wasn't a wedding ceremony, but Flor wanted a traditional Filipino wedding feast and so we're putting one on as best we can.
Or rather, Sabrina is putting it on with the help of several of the women and men here.
I'm just trying to help any way I know how.
I've been assisting Devi because she's friendly and chatty and you can't help but enjoy her enthusiasm for everything.
She never gets mad if you're terrible at doing whatever chore you help her with, and if you stay around her long enough, she starts giving you scientific tidbits like how they'd found a fish here that has a thick layer of blubber, which makes it not really a fish but a mammal, and blubber is full of collagen.
Or did I know that the fish on this planet developed an extra set of fins and some show primordial sets of lungs?
I did not know this. I did not know any of it.
Devi then tried to rip apart a fish that Penny was filleting so she could show me said primordial lungs, but I told her we'd peek at them another day.
Now I'm searching for a bowl that's supposed to be full of sand-scorpion, and it's nowhere to be found.
"You don't suppose they got up and walked away?
Or is it possible someone ate them already? "
Devi pauses in her chopping. "Wasn't Valmir working on it? I sent him off with a large basket of them an hour ago."
"He's got them? I'll go see how they're coming," I tell Devi, wiping my hands on my leather apron. "Anything else?"
She tosses the seaweed greens in a dark-looking sauce. "If the scorpions are not stewed yet, he needs to get them to Sabrina. We're behind and I don't want to waste food."
"Stew the scorpions. I'll tell him." I don't exactly know which guy Valmir is.
Maybe I should, given that I know most everyone else's name at this point, but the gladiator clones who were dropped at the same time with us are a weird lot.
They tend to all stick together, whispering and staring at the women.
A nice guy named Vordis (also a gladiator) told us that they're not usually around women and this could be why they're being weird about the situation.
I suspect Valmir is one of the cat ones.
Him and Chalath. There's a lizard one named Skarr, but I know him because he bothered poor Vivi until she gave in to him.
There's a big gray dude named Kyth and a human guy named Jason, but the two cat men keep to themselves.
Sabrina would know, though. Sabrina knows everyone.
When I go to find Sabrina, she's stirring a bowl with a spoon in one hand and gesturing at two people butchering meat with her other hand.
Someone runs up to her and asks a question before I can swing in, and nearby, a pot bubbling over one of several cookfires overflows and begins to hiss.
"Grab that," Sabrina shouts, surging into action and handing off the bowl she's stirring. "Who's got the seed cakes?"
You know what? Sabrina looks a little busy at the moment. I'll come back.
I step away from the madness that is the food prep area and look for a friendly face that also doesn't seem too busy.
My friend Dawn is nearby with a large platter on her legs, dicing chunks of not-potato, a vegetable the size of a beach ball that everyone seems to go nuts over around here.
I head in her direction, my bowl of spices on my hip.
I'm told that if the stewed scorpions need a bit of zhuzh, I'm to flavor them up with no less than two handfuls of spice.
"Hey, Dawn. I don't suppose you know which cat guy is Valmir, do you? "
"The shitty one," my friend replies.
"Like that narrows it down?"
We both chuckle at my joke, and Dawn makes a "mic drop" motion with her bone knife.
It's a truth several of the women have acknowledged between ourselves.
The clone men we've been stranded with are hot, but man, some of their personalities suck.
Valmir and Chalath seem to be fighting each other for the "most unlikeable" title, which is hilarious considering I thought Skarr was going to run away with that one.
Ever since he set his eyes on Vivi, though, he's calmed down and now just talks about how amazing his new mate is.
Which, okay, is a little cute. Not that it redeems him, but it bumps him up on the list from "the worst" to "slightly less bad."
"He's the cat guy with ears and the tail," Dawn tells me.
I nod thoughtfully, comparing the two feline-like aliens in my head. "As opposed to the cat guy with the ears and no tail." Now that I'm thinking about it, one of them has a stumpy little bit of fluff for a tail instead of a full-length tail. "Gotcha. Thank you."
"What are you up to?" she asks, wiping her brow. "I feel like I've been cutting vegetables for hours."
I heft the basket of spice to show her. "I'm seeing how the stewed sand-scorpion is coming along. By the way, did you know we've been eating stewed sand-scorpion?"
Dawn just shakes her head. "I learned not to ask what I was eating a while ago."
I laugh, because we have to. "Yeah, I feel like I'm going to need some serious therapy after this is over...except my therapist is one billion miles away."
"And you're a clone," Dawn points out helpfully. "Which means it wasn't your therapist in the first place."
"And I'm a clone," I agree. I'm trying to take things in stride here on this new planet, but it's hard to be relaxed when the world around me is so strange. At least I'm here with a big, warm, friendly community. "More fodder for the therapist! She'd say I need to be more ainokea."
My friend pauses. "Huh?"
I pause, too. My head really thought that ainokea was a word, but the translation chip has nothing. "Never mind. I think my brain hiccupped."
She chuckles and picks up her knife again. "Drink some water. The last thing we need is your chip short-circuiting. Meanwhile, I'd better finish this chopping before Sabrina notices I'm not done. Enjoy hanging out with the cat guy."
"I'll tell him you said hello," I comment dryly before heading off again.
Valmir is the one with the tail, I remind myself.
I wind through the encampment, dodging people who are busy at work on the feast. Some are decorating, stringing together painted seeds onto a garland.
Others are getting fuel for the fire, and one of the kids is painting the faces of the other children.
Some days this beach feels like it's empty, and some days it feels as if it's overflowing with people.
Today is the latter, I decide, as I dodge two of the hunters coming in with a horse-sized dead animal, its legs tied to a pole that they have braced on their shoulders.
U'dron begins to play his drum, and someone picks up a bone flute, making a little music.
So domestic. So happy. So Outlander meets Clan of the Cave Bear.
Everyone's delightful and I love how they work as one big extended family.
There might be two dozen huts on the beach, but everyone is in everyone else's business.
If someone needs something, they all pitch in and help out.
No one's a stranger, and everyone is automatically community.
No, more than community. There's a word for it… but it escapes me.
At any rate, I adore the new beach family I have, and I adore the beautiful (if cold) nature here. It makes me feel like this place is already home…not that I can remember home. I have warm, vague memories of a place I was very fond of and a life I was happy with…but not much more than that.
I think it helps that our memories of home back on Earth are all fragmented and messy.
Since we're clones, I guess we don't get the full factory install, just pieces of it.
I think if I remembered everything I'd left behind on Earth (assuming I wasn't a clone, of course), I'd probably be going mad with grief at this point.
As it is, memories feel distant and foggy and crop up only when I least expect them.
Natalie and Vivi might be the luckiest of us all because they don't remember anything. Factory reset for them.