Chapter 2
- Theodora -
I look for Callie everywhere. Not that there are many places to look. She’s not walking on the beach, and she’s not within thirty feet of the saucer. That means she’s not inside the carefully disguised barricades that Sprisk made, and that’s alarming.
I check the raptor carcass. Nothing left but bone and tiny scavengers that scurry away when they notice me. No sign of Callie. The dread hits me, heavy and sour.
It’s not like her to just leave without a word. She would never do that. If she changed her mind and wanted to come with Cora after all, she’d just say so. My stomach turns cold.
Damn, I never noticed before how wide and empty the beach is. And how cold the air blows.
She could be out getting fruits or nuts, but why so early?
We never start working before we’ve had a while to light the fire and eat something and chat while we wake up.
I try to find her footprints, but I was never a tracker, and the thick, tall grass around the saucer doesn’t show me anything useful.
I search through the saucer again and again, hoping she’s just found a new spot to sleep that I somehow missed the first time, despite the saucer not being that big. But she’s not in there.
Otis comes stalking, nearly impossible to spot despite his red fur because he makes incredible use of the terrain and the bushes, staying hidden until he’s ready to attack.
He never pounces on me, but I can see that he wants to.
His whole body is tense, tendons standing out on his legs and his freakishly long tail pointing straight backward. Those huge eyes stare right through me.
I tense up too. One day he will strike. I’m sure of it.
“Hi, Otis. Did you see Callie today?”
He stares at me for five more seconds. Then he blinks, and the tension is gone as he relaxes and proceeds to punch a loose leaf with one paw.
“No, huh? I’m sure you could track her if you wanted. But I don’t know how to ask you to.”
I throw some leftovers from last night’s dinner on the ground for him to enjoy, then go to find a piece of raw meat that I really should save for myself. I toss it on the ground, and Otis attacks that first. Cooked meat was never his favorite.
At noon, I give up. Callie has never been gone for this long. None of the girls have. Ever.
She must have followed them. Maybe she was awake for hours, worried that she’d made a mistake.
Nighttime can be like that. And then she made her decision, realizing that the girls would get further ahead with each minute and that she really should get going without having to deal with my bullshit first.
I shake my head, nose clogging up. “No, that’s not it. You would never have done that. You would have told me.” But my voice isn’t steady when I say it.
I go back into the saucer and check her spot.
When we were abducted from Earth, Callie and I had cell phones in our hands, and they came with us—until the space station, where the gray Vyrpy aliens took everything.
So none of us had anything from Earth when we were dumped here.
But Callie’s mug and wooden spoon are in their usual place.
All the stuff Cora and Sprisk gave us is still here.
If she left on purpose, she brought nothing with her.
Of course, there’s a chance that she answered the call of nature in the middle of the night and got lost in the woods. Maybe she was more drunk than I thought.
Sprisk warned us about making sounds in the jungle, which we never did anyway, because you instinctively feel that you don’t want any of the monsters to know you’re there.
But this I can’t stand. I go outside and funnel my hands in front of my mouth. “Callie!”
The yell sounds thin and weak against the constant roar from the surf.
Just as I’m about to call her name again, the jungle stirs.
It’s not Callie.
Something taller. Broader. Moving like it owns the ground.
I back off as liquid ice fills my veins. It’s not her. It’s a caveman.
He’s Sprisk’s size, so a good eight feet tall and nearly as wide.
All muscle, of course. But this one doesn’t have the spikes that Sprisk does, and he doesn’t have the chameleon-like skin.
This is how Cora described regular cavemen, with stripes and fangs and long iron swords.
The stripes on this one are powder blue.
His eyes are, too. I know that because he’s staring right at me.
“Stop,” I gasp, because he keeps coming toward me, and his hand is on the hilt of the sword.
It hangs from a wide belt over some kind of thick skin wrapped around his hips.
That means most of him is bare, displaying thick muscles everywhere.
His hair is dark with golden highlights that I think must be natural, but his dense beard is dark brown, shot with gold here and there.
He’s not a beauty, mostly because of the strange proportions of his face. He’s too manly—the chin too strong, the cheeks too hollow, the eyes too clear and too deeply set. And every instinct in me screams that he’s just as deadly as any dinosaur.
He doesn’t slow down, so I stagger backward until I turn to run the six yards over to the saucer and into the hatch. Just as I reach for the button to close it, the caveman grabs my arm and yanks me back out.
“Hey!” I yelp as I grab one of the spears that are leaned up against the saucer.
The caveman lets go of me, ducks his head, and steps into the ship. His big, bare feet leave dirty footprints on the metal-like deck. He’s walking into our home like he owns it.
The first shock gives way to fury mixed with panic. “Get the hell out of there!” I push the sharp tip of the spear against his rib cage from behind, not being too gentle.
The caveman grunts and grabs the shaft behind him, then yanks the spear out of my hand and tosses it out of the hatch without even looking.
Fury flares in me, but under it there’s something else, too. Something warm and wrong.
I grab one of the other spears, but I don’t touch him with it. The last thing I want is an actual confrontation. He’s three times my weight and has a long sword, so the outcome is a given. But I’m not going to give up without a fight. This saucer is the center of my existence right now.
“Hey! Get the hell out of here, you brute!” Changing my mind, I poke him with the blunt end of the spear.
“This is my home! Get out!” Of course, he won’t understand English, but the meaning can’t be misunderstood.
I follow him as he makes his way into the control room, where some of the instruments are showing dim lights.
He stops and looks around, head bent to not hit it on the ceiling. “What is this place?” His voice is deep and resonant.
“It is my home!” I seethe in cavemannish. “You go out! It is not yours!”
He gives me a blue glance. “Your home? You live here? It is very strange.”
“It is strange,” I agree, “and taboo! Holy place! It is very bad you be in here. The Ancestors be angry! Go out!” Cora and Sprisk taught us a good amount of caveman culture, although they didn’t seem to believe in any of it.
But they assured us that the cavemen tribes do.
Some believe it very much. As a last resort, they told us we could pretend to be the Woman, some kind of mythical creature that they all look forward to meeting in the jungle.
On this woman-less planet, simply seeing a girl must seem absolutely magical.
But this guy doesn’t seem that awestruck.
The caveman bends to check out the consoles, and for a split second I start to hope that maybe he knows something about this stuff. But that’s absurd. He wouldn’t ask what this place is if he were a saucer mechanic.
He straightens as much as he can and puts his hands on his hips. “There’s no trace of any Bigs or Smalls or Tinies in here. They fear it. Only you come in here.”
“And you,” I point out. “But it is not yours. Go out now!”
He knocks on a wall like a building inspector, ignoring me. “Where are the Plood that came with it?”
“No Plood came,” I assure him. “Go out!”
“Is it safe?” he asks and looks around. “Can it move like an irox? Fly in the sky?”
“No. No thing for you here. Out!” I shake the spear at him, pointy end first.
He gives the interior of the saucer a final look. “No sign of any Bigs,” he repeats to himself before he saunters past me and goes out the hatch.
I hesitate for a moment. It would be tempting to stay in here, close the hatch, and be safe.
But this is our home, dammit. That goes for the outside area, too.
I have to demonstrate ownership and not just abandon everything the first time a caveman comes along.
Cora warned us that this might happen, but she had no particular advice for meeting cavemen.
Everything depends on what kind of caveman would come here.
This one sure doesn’t seem like a good one.
I march after the caveman out of the saucer. “We live here,” I state as firmly as I can with a voice that trembles a little too much. “You not. Not live here. Is our village. Is for us. Us tribe. Not you.”
He stops and turns, towering over me so much he blocks out the sun. “Your tribe is small. I see tracks of six. One warrior among them. The others are small. Small, like you. Where are they?”
“They hunt,” I make up on the spot. “Soon back. Many. Not six. Not small. Many warrior.”
“Hmm.” His gaze drags down my body, slow and deliberate. My pulse betrays me, a hot stutter under the skin.
And despite my terror at being this close to an alien who could snap me in half with one hand, his extremely male gaze sends a thrill down my spine. There’s something so raw about him, so masterful, as if the jungle is his private garden. And he doesn’t seem murderous.
“No sign of many warriors,” he finally goes on. “Only one. And he hasn’t been here for days. The tracks are easy to read. He’s not used to covering his tracks. Was it he that killed the rekh?”
I recognize the caveman word for the kind of dinosaur that Sprisk killed. “Yes. Easy for him. Very strong warrior.”
“Felling a rekh alone is a feat,” the intruder agrees. He speaks slowly and uses words so simple that even I can easily follow. I wonder if he does that for my benefit or if he is a little bit simple, like cavemen are portrayed on Earth.
Again, he takes me in, and the intensity of his gaze gives me an immediate impulse to stroke my hair. Damn my primal instincts.
“You go,” I repeat before a thought flashes through my mind. “You have girl?”
His blue gaze goes hard. “Perhaps.”
I knew it. My grip on the spear tightens. “You have girl, is tribe mine. You here her!” Even with my wild grammar, I think it’s understandable. I point to the ground, making sure he knows what I mean by “here.”
“She is not a part of your tribe,” he growls, massive jaw clenching and fangs flashing. “She is mine.”
I give him my best glare. And it’s not hard—I’ll freaking kill him if anything happens to Callie. “No. She tribe girl. Here her, or warriors will…” I jut the spear toward him, hoping I look threatening.
He glances at the saucer and at the improvements Sprisk and Cora helped us make to this little patch of jungle. “The girl is mine. I will keep her safe.”
“She safe here,” I insist. “Bring here.”
He gives me a final, invasive look before he turns and walks into the jungle without a word, climbing over the barricades and easily avoiding the various traps that Sprisk made.
He clearly has Callie, and I have to help her.
The jungle scares me like nothing else. My knees are weak from fear. But this may be my last and only chance to help her.
I follow him into the dark jungle.