CHAPTER 8 #2
“Be careful with their feathers. The flight feathers are still developing in the chicks.” Aglao demonstrated a technique to secure the feathers with minimal discomfort.
Eleri tried her best to follow the example, but Aglao’s limbs were much steadier than her own hands.
The chicks squirmed as Eleri worked through one soft feather at a time, but by the time Eleri had managed to rid their soft feathers of all the goo, the three of them were singing softly.
After they finished with the cleaning and were able to send the family home with strict instructions to avoid any future byglor encounters during their mating season, Eleri found herself cleaning the mess with Aglao in companionable silence.
As Eleri knelt to scrub a particularly resistant puddle of goo and solvent off the floor that had been too much for the cleaning bot to handle, Aglao came to stand beside her. “You are talented at this work. It is a pity your home world did not provide you more opportunities to learn.”
“It wasn’t my home world’s fault so much as other things in my life.” Eleri wrung her cleaning cloth into the bucket of suds. “I’m grateful for the chance to learn now.”
“Then these factors are no longer at play?”
“No. They are far beyond the stars.” After swabbing away the last of the goo, she removed her gloves and deposited them in the waste atomizer.
“Good. You are a quick learner; I anticipate you will be able to sit for your IA examinations by the time we reach flooding season.
" Aglao lifted the bucket with one of their limbs.
“This should be disposed of outside. The byglor emissions will block our plumbing if we try to pour it in our drains.”
“I’ll take it out.” Eleri accepted the heavy bucket and made her way to the exit.
Heat poured down on her brow, clashing with the blast of cool behind her from the clinic’s open door.
She set the bucket down on the entry steps and shielded her eyes from the radiance of the binary suns overhead as she searched for a good place to dispose of the goo water without making too much of a mess in the streets.
A few paces past the schoolhouse she noticed a copse of thorny bushes.
It was as good a place as any to dispose of the waste water.
With a heave, she lifted the bucket again and made her trek down toward the schoolhouse.
As she passed by, several of the children pressed their faces up against the window panes.
Eleri did her best to wave while still balancing the heavy bucket.
Eleri could hear the reverberation of their teacher’s voice as no doubt he tried to call them back to attention, but they were all rapt with attention as she dumped the bucket into the bushes.
She heard small voices and chortles of laughter from the window as the children watched her perform what she considered to be a mundane activity.
When she turned back, the window was cracked open, and more faces had piled in to watch her work.
Their teacher, a yellow-spotted urtazi female, glowered behind them as she tried to restore order.
Eleri flushed. It hadn’t been her intention to cause so much of a stir, but the children were still invested in what she was doing outside the window.
She had better hurry and get out of the way to not cause more disruption.
Feeling like a minor celebrity as she walked back past the window, she gave a slight wave to the apparent delight of her audience and made her way back toward the clinic.
When she crossed down the path back to the clinic, however, she noticed Pyo waiting at the entrance. From a quick glance, he didn’t seem unwell. The bucket thudded against her hip as she hurried her pace back to the clinic entrance.
“Are you looking for me?” she asked.
“Eleri, there you are. I was just about to go inside to look for you. There’s a call for you at the holocenter.”
Surprised, she dropped the bucket on the steps. “The holocenter?”
“Well, it’s not much of a center. More like a booth, but it’s private enough for any interplanetary call you have coming in.”
At the mention of interplanetary correspondence, Eleri’s stomach began churning horribly. “I should go let Aglao know that I’ll be gone for a bit.”
“Sure thing. Don’t be too long though—the calls are expensive.”
“I’ll be quick.” Eleri heeded his words as she rushed back inside to ask Aglao if she could leave to take the call.
“Are you well, Eleri?” Aglao hummed their concern. “Your vital signs indicate abnormal levels of gastrointestinal activity and elevated heartrate.”
“I wasn’t expecting a call from off-planet.
” She removed the monitor she’d been training with so Aglao could no longer see her distress reflected on the medical interface.
“I’m fine, but I better take this call.” She knew who was calling already.
Eleri hadn’t exactly left behind a whole group of friends who would be clamoring to pay interplanetary rates to place a call off-colony.
After leaving her tech behind at the clinic, she followed Pyo to the holocenter.
“It’s not far from here.” He swept out with one of his wings to usher her out of the clinic.
He wasn’t exaggerating when he said it was a booth.
He dropped her off in a dusty alleyway beside The Eon and she fumbled her way to a tiny door next to some waste disposal units.
The holoscreen was coated in a thick layer of dust that she scrubbed away with her sleeve before tapping her finger a few times on the blinking call waiting button.
Eleri held her breath as she waited for the connection to go through.
A familiar and unwelcome image swam into the interface.
“Eleri, dear there you are.” Her mother’s face blinked onto the screen, as weathered and worried as ever beneath the curtain of beads she wore in a band over her hair.
She’d joined some sort of new age cult promising a cure for her golden child’s affliction and had been a devoted follower ever since.
“Are you well? How was the travel? Is your new husband kind to you?”
Eleri pinched the bridge of her nose, steeling herself to have the conversation she knew was soon to follow. “What’s wrong, mum? Interstellar calls aren’t cheap.”
“You’re right, you’re right. We mustn’t waste time on chatter.
I assume you’re well enough. You look safe and healthy, so let’s thank the spirits for that.
” She made a familiar gesture with her fingers, something to do with invoking air spirits if Eleri remembered correctly from the years of patiently enduring her mother’s lecturing about her cult’s practices.
“Yes, let’s.” Eleri drummed her fingers on her thighs. It wouldn’t matter what the specific point was. The central purpose was always the same. “What do you need today?”
“Well don’t say it like that, Eleri. It sounds so cheap when you say it like that. You haven’t even asked after Rhys. He’s not well by the way. I’ve been absolutely beside myself with grief over your poor brother.”
Eleri bit her lower lip and tried to prevent herself from saying anything unkind. It would only send her mother spiraling, and the histrionics were nothing if not exhausting. “What happened to Rhys this time?”
“Oh, you know how he is. Your brother is so misunderstood. We were going to use the money from your IA contract to pay for another round of rehab for him, but he had to use the credits to pay to get one of his friends out of trouble. He’s a good boy under all that trouble.”
“Mum. You know he’s using the money for iridescence.
How can you not know he’s using the money for iridescence?
” Eleri wanted to shake some sense into her mother through the holoscreen, but it wouldn’t have the desired effect and more likely than not would just end up damaging the unit.
Instead, she practiced some breathing techniques she had learned to prescribe to patients with high levels of stress and anxiety.
The breathing helped, but it wasn’t going to solve the root of the problem.
Her mother’s face pinched with a predictable sourness. “Don’t say that, Eleri. This is a rough patch. We’ll get through it, we always do.”
“I don’t want to see him ruin your life too.” Eleri hung her head. “I’m just trying to help. You know Aunt Morgan will let you live with her if you go without him.”
“Enough, we’ve had this conversation before, and you know how I feel about it. Rhys isn’t a liar. He’s my son, and it’s my responsibility to help him.”
“Are you at least taking care of yourself?” Eleri asked.
This question finally made her mother pause.
She adjusted the curtain of beads to hide her eyes.
“It’s been difficult having him around lately, he rants and raves and breaks things.
I know if we can just scrape together the money to put him in rehab one last time, things will be different.
The spirits have told me it will work this time. ”
“He took all the credits from my contract?”
“It was very important to him to help his friend.”
“I don’t have anything else to give you.
” Eleri stared hard at her hands, willing herself to keep practicing the deep breathing.
At this point it felt more like she was trying to save herself from drowning than doing anything productive.
“If I had some, I would get it to you, but I won’t have any credits for several months at least.”
“What about your husband, dear?” Eleri’s mother pushed her glasses high on the bridge of her nose. “Surely you can ask him to help out your family?”
“I can’t.”