Halley
“They’ve been a long time,” Rin whispers, and whether consciously or not, her hold of my hand tightens.
I return the squeeze, using my other hand to shield my eyes as I squint down at the cave’s entrance.
From our position at the top of the ravine, it doesn’t appear to be unmanageably large.
Eot and Keelo had to bow their heads when entering.
Surely that’s a good sign that the trikon can’t be dangerously huge.
“There!” I point at a flickering shadow, and a second later Tornado backs out.
Their axes are strapped across their backs, and they’re dragging something behind them, something long and flattish, with matted fur.
It leaves behind a trail of…yellow blood?
Is that what I’m seeing? More of the yellow stains Tornado’s skin, turning their usually golden coloring to a murky mustard.
They glance along the length of the ravine, searching…for more threats. When they look up at us, their shoulders visibly relax.
The sight of them whole and well has my heart stampeding. If I thought it’d been beating fast before, that’s nothing to now, when the urge to throw my arms around their neck with relief is strong enough to have me stumbling down the animal track, Rin following close behind.
“Finished already?” I shout, dropping to my ass and crab-crawling down the steep hill to save myself the horror of falling. Rin’s much more graceful, those long and sturdy legs of hers giving her an advantage I don’t have, despite us being the same height.
Tornado doesn’t answer, just drops the dead body on the ravine floor.
I clamber awkwardly to my feet, brushing sand and dust from the seat of my shorts, and almost slip straight over onto my ass again as my foot slides along a strip of animal shit.
Rin catches me, grabbing me under the arms. She might only be eight or so years old, but she’s more than strong enough to yank me upright.
“That’s…” I squint at the dead animal Tornado has pulled out of the cave.
The blood isn’t blood. It’s more like…rotten juice, leaking from the disintegrating corpse.
“Oh God!” I clap a hand over my mouth, but Rin steps around me, all the better to see. Her eyes are wide with the morbid fascination of a child who’s rarely seen death.
Hell, I’m at least twenty-five years older than her, and I’ve rarely seen anything deader.
“We found it like that,” Eot says, entirely unnecessarily. However it died, it happened long before we showed up.
The stench is sickening, threatening to turn my stomach, and I keep my hand over my mouth, speaking through the gaps in my fingers. “So, it was already dead.”
I watch as Rin crouches. Yesterday morning I’d have been shocked by the idea of her examining a putrid corpse.
But it’s funny how my perspective’s changed now that I know more about her.
Examining a predator for signs of natural causes doesn’t compare to the trauma of having your elders insisting on calling you by your dead name—or so I imagine.
She nudges it with the toe of her boot. Fur thick with sludge glues itself to the leather, and she winkles her nose in disgust. She’s lucky she’s young enough that her sense of smell hasn’t yet developed to be as sensitive as Keelo’s and Eot’s.
Tornado’s got their two neckerchiefs pulled over the lower half of their face, but the fabric is fraying and torn, stretched to its limits by their sudden increase in size.
When they shift back to their individual forms, the neckerchiefs give up on life and fall to the ground in pieces.
That’s when it becomes obvious that Keelo’s somehow suffered the worst of the mess, with both his hands stained with trikon juice and his bare chest and trousers splattered with far more of the foul-smelling stuff than Eot.
“How’d it die?” I ask.
“Do we look like pathologists?” Keelo growls.
“No.” I don’t bother taking offense. I’d be cranky too if I were him. I bet he’s craving a shower even more than I am, and I edge a step closer to Eot, trying to position myself upwind of both the trikon and Keelo.
He notices, because his eyes narrow, and he tries wiping his hands clean on the ground, as if that’ll make a difference.
Eot gestures at the body. “We still need to find the tracker. To make sure we’ve got the right one.”
“Akh, fek.” Keelo grabs his axe, and before I can look away, takes a swing at the corpse’s stomach.
Rin dives back, narrowly avoiding being splattered. Instead, Keelo takes the worst of the mess, made all the more disgusting by the fact he’s got to stick his arm into the trikon’s gut and rummage around for the tracker. Thankfully, it’s easily found.
There’s a grim look of triumph on his face, like he’s pleased with himself, regardless of how much he hated the job.
I’m not going to lie: it’s sexy, in a competent sort of way…which is probably a weird thought to be having when we’re gathered around a liquid corpse.
“If only it’d died out here,” I lament, remembering the way the desert suns mummify remains. I’d thought they’d been disgusting, but now I’m missing how neat and clean that sort of death is, to be forever immortalized as a dried husk.
Eot takes the tracker from Keelo, using two fingers and angling the rest of his relatively clean body as far away from the stench as possible. “And the skull, don’t you think?” he says with a wince. “That’s the usual practice.”
“Really?” I look down at the head. I think it used to be quite a bit larger, before most of the flesh rotted away. Now it's mainly soggy fur clinging to a skull, the eyes hollow and the mouth gaping open, displaying rows and rows of sharp teeth, some as long as my ring finger and twice as thick.
“Fine.” Sounding resigned, for once in his life, and accepting Eot’s suggestion without argument, Keelo kneels and aims the blade of his axe towards the trikon’s throat.
I stare for a second. It’s difficult to tell, considering the state of decay, but it doesn’t really look as if the neck’s been damaged, which is what I’d have expected had it been killed by another animal—even another trikon.
But then I clap a hand over Rin’s eyes, a moment before there’s the sickening sound of bone breaking.
Rin pulls away with an angry grunt, takes one look at the detached head clutched in Keelo’s hand and seems to decide that’s finally more than she’s prepared to see.
The color drains from her face, and I tug on one of her shoulders, using her own momentum to spin her around until her back is to the dead trikon.
“Why don’t we take a look at some of these other bones,” I suggest, nudging what appears to be a sun-bleached rib with my shoe. “See what we can find. Maybe there’s a clue here to how the trikon died.”
I don’t honestly believe that’ll be the case; it was just the first task that came to my mind that wasn’t us standing around and watching Keelo strip the last of the flesh from the trikon’s head.
But Rin accepts my suggestion with a hasty nod, turning her gaze ground-ward and picking through the bones.
A bit of a coincidence, really—that when the farmer hired someone to take care of his problem, the problem was already lying dead in a distant cave.
I follow idly behind Rin, picking my way through the bones and the shale.
Most are large, like cattle bones—ribs and femurs and vertebrae—but I guess that makes sense when you think about the size of the trikon’s teeth.
It’s difficult to judge exactly how large it was in life, but I’m guessing it's similar in size to a mammoth—a carnivorous mammoth with the teeth of a killer shark.
My foot sinks on a sticky substance, and I jerk backward, immediately imagining I’ve stepped on a piece of rotten flesh, but it’s actually mud. The surface had hardened, but when I put my weight on it, that surface cracked, exposing the mud underneath.
“So the ravine was a river.” I grin, pleased to be proven right.
In fact, now that I’m looking, I can see more mud ahead, in a narrow strip down the ravine’s center, as if, over the thousands and thousands of years it took for the water to wear the rock down, the river slowly shrunk, until all that’s left is a little mud.
In another few thousand years, that mud might solidify into more shale.
“That must be why the trikon lived all the way out here,” I tell Rin, sticking a finger into the mud to check the depth—a few inches. “I haven’t seen any other surface water, not for the entire month I’ve lived on Lyd. This is cool.”
“There are no clouds,” Rin says, her arms filled with bones she’s collected, and she glances up at the sky.
“No.” I feel a rush of excitement that she remembered our lesson on precipitation. I’ll make a meteorologist out of her yet. “Clouds are another thing I hadn’t seen since arriving on this planet.” And if there was anyone who’d notice clouds, it’d be me.
“However, clouds aren’t the only explanation for why there might’ve been water around here.
” Although clouds are always the simplest explanation and, in my personal opinion, the most interesting, they often have surprisingly little to do with the formation of permanent rivers, like the one that carved its way through the ravine.
“There could be groundwater. Hey, look. A dead plant.”
I pluck at the grey leaves, which are so far beyond being alive that they crumple to dust between my fingers.
The whole plant is ankle height, and it’s got thick branches, much like succulents back on Earth have, where they store water in their cells.
Clearly this fellow ran out of its rations a while ago, probably at the same time the last strip of river started drying into mud.
So maybe it wasn’t a coincidence after all that the trikon had to travel to the farmer’s property to hunt for food.
I doubt any of its usual prey stayed in the ravine when the water disappeared.
The different shapes, sizes and thicknesses of the bones scattered over the ground suggest there are more dead here than just the farmer’s three bimors.
So the trikon must have been living in its cave for a long time.
“Is there water underground here?” Rin asks.
“Oh. Umm…that’s definitely a possibility.”
Xile never liked me wandering too far from his stall, and in the evenings, when he returned home and left me to sleep under the counter, I was always too tired after the eighteen-hour shifts and too overwhelmed by the memory of my abduction to have the energy to explore much of the market.
I do remember, though, that when he wanted water for his icemaker, he’d buy it by the keg-load, which would be delivered to his stall at the crack of dawn.
Where had that water come from? I never thought to ask. A river, or had it been bore water?
“Done.” Triumphant, Keelo straightens. He looks shocking, with yellow splatters now through his tied-back hair.
But he’s clutching a clean skull. The bottom jaw is missing, and Keelo’s holding his half upside down, with the crown cupped in one hand and the top rows of the trikon’s teeth pointed toward the sky.
“Those are all canines,” I say. “He doesn’t have a single molar.” Even though I found evidence of plant life, apparently Mr. Trikon wasn’t one to partake of salad.
“You’re disgusting.” Eot tells Keelo, who merely shrugs, as if he’s accepted his fate. Maybe he’s even got used to the smell.
I haven’t.
“You have got to wash,” I tell him. “That stink’s going to get worse when we climb back out of the ravine and you’re in full sunlight.”
“Fek.” Eot winces.
Keelo looks down at himself. “We don’t have enough water for that.”
“You could use mud?” I suggest—not that being covered in mud would make Keelo any cleaner, but it might help to mute the stink a bit.
He doesn’t grace my comment with an answer, so I strip off my cardigan and toss it at him. It’s the only real solution I can think of. “Use that.”
Dropping the skull, he catches my cardigan in midair and scrubs his face. The fabric removes most of the muck, but it’s already looking filthy. I can’t imagine how he’ll clean the rest of his body.
“Akh…” Eot shuts his eyes, looking suddenly pained.
“What?” My imagination presents me with an entire shopping list of things that might be wrong.
Maybe some alien bug living in the cave bit him, and it was venomous.
Maybe he’s suffering from heatstroke or dehydration.
Maybe the trikon’s leaking poison. Maybe he got cut by a sharp piece of shale and it got infected.
Although…surely I’d have noticed that last one.
And if the trikon was leaking poison, it’d be Keelo looking pained, not Eot.
“What?” I ask again, glancing around the canyon for any hint of what’s hurt him.
“Keelo…” Eot swallows, and when he opens his eyes, his golden pupils are blown out, engulfing the whites. “He smells like you, Halley. And it’s almost more than I can bear.”