World Building of Mearth & of Earth

OTHERBORN: Preview Chapter: 2

EPISODE 2

We've hiked for miles, and the land is a scar. It's brittle and toasted and it gets in your pores when it flakes to a haze.

Dust coats my teeth. I bite down and there's a crunch. I spit, the saliva thick like wet cement. My fingers stretch out to brush the gray off my sleeve, but I snatch them back as some bird startles me with a chirp.

I gaze up at the tiny creature and smile. This life can't be all bad if we still have music. Our songs might not come from a stereo anymore, but their tradition endures in the trees where they originated. Birds were the first musicians, and now they're the last. How fascinatingly eerie the way that works, the way things begin in one place and miraculously end up there again. I could cry thinking about it. I could cry for many reasons.

But if I cried Fin would worry, so I must remain tough for him.

For days, I've been scavenging in the town rubble for anything resembling the slightest hope of survival or food still unopened.

"Hello!" I call into the vast gray world, a grimy world, an ashy world, and it answers me with myself, my echo bouncing across its coarse steel lumps, scraps of sheet metal hungry in the cracked sand, yes, starving for the heat of the raging fire winds.

Every day I think of that kid whose arm pushed me to safety—what was his name? He lived on one of the ranches, I reckon, if I'm not crazy. I shake my head. Jayden, don't infiltrate my thoughts again. I couldn't take that; too much guilt would be there. And Shonya, Mr. Meer's daughter Twazzle, and the four other kids who got out, I don't think they made it long after we dispersed. I've never seen them anywhere since then, I'm sure.

Dying for sleep, always exhausted, I can't help lifting my scratched swim goggles. I nearly blind myself with the sun, scanning the wastelands for Fox.

He'd correct me for endangering my vision. He's always correcting. He is "Mym-Fox," for reasons I can't yet comprehend. I didn't believe he was real before, but when I try to forget him, I just hear his voice in my psyche: Why have you come, oiko?

"I do not know!" I yelp like a madwoman into the gale. "Why do you call me that word?"

I do not know either, says Fox within me.

Fox was irritating right from the start.

I crawl across the scaly surface of what used to be Crestville. I've finally found myself at a point where I cannot go farther. Fin, who's five, now sleeps under a tattered awning forty yards back where I can see him. No one else in sight. I long to chance a skip through the trees, hunting for Fox, but there are no more trees, just rubble and drylands. And I am too tired.

Twisting out of the crumbling masonry, rebar jabs another hole in my already ripped backpack, as I scrape along the sideways slab of concrete that pulls at me kindly. I lay my head against it—just for a moment.

* * *

"Do you look for the fox?" A voice rouses me from slumber.

"Huh?" I yank my head up, trying to see through broken plastic in front of my eyes. I must have hit the lens of my goggles. Did I fall?

I peer up at the woman who bends too close to my face. She checks my pupils, her own bright yellow eyes searchlights in the pearly sea of her fur—no, not fur—Fox has fur—doesn't he?—Fox—fur—woman—jacket—hood—hooded jacket. Shoot, I may have brain damage . . .

The woman has no fur. She wears a hooded jacket.

"What—?" I yank free of her needling fingers. "What happened?"

"Hrrmmph!" The woman groans and stands, backing away. She resumes her hawk-like hunt for things among rocks, kicking now and again and generating puffs of poisonous dust in the open field.

I cough and turn my head away. "Wait!"

She's moving off.

"What did you tell me?" I persist.

She puts a piece of a fragmented steam iron against her hooded winter jacket, her slender body tied by too many layers of odd clothes. Rubbing the metal to see if it shines, she holds it up in the last rays of light and analyzes her reflection. "Not too good. Not too pretty for this life."

"What did you say?" I whimper, feeling like a voicemail on repeat.

Still bent and uncaring, she looks sideways at me and puts her metal treasure into her plastic grocery bag, then plucks a rock off the ground. "Nothin' special," she mumbles at the rock, but still keeps it as she shuffles on.

I drag myself up and, not getting too close, limp to outpace and get in front of her. Folks are firecracker jumpy, worse every day, and most of them armed with something at least, just as likely a knife as a hammer or screwdriver. I wouldn't want to feel the thwack! of that rock she scooped up either. I stay a ducking distance away, but I'm not quick enough and I take a charging karate chop to the shoulder. "Owww!" I rub it.

She humphs again.

"What did you say?" I demand, manic.

She points. I look.

"What?"

Laughing, her head shakes as if I'm absurd. She lumbers toward the slanted side of a twisted corrugated Quonset that had once been the back of the hardware store. I stop myself from trying to work out how recently or how not recently that was, but as the woman passes me I smell her foul breath and hear her whisper, "Your fox shall be there."

I am dismissed.

I look again to where she pointed.

I stare ferociously at the spot, just a boulder there. Wait! Not a boulder . . . the boulder! Fox, in the dream. His boulder. The "high rock."

"What do you mean?" I plead with the woman. "When will he be there?"

"Before you're too late," she says. I actually think she's being sarcastic, but I can't tell. They are all crazy, the folks in this rubble town. We are all crazy and somehow that makes it better for me: the least crazy of anyone I encounter round these parts. Relative sanity might have been the very thing that preserved and made me all right in my damned life.

Metropolis turned into wasteland and, for once, I've become the rational one. Not that it matters now, but because of how I was before the Crust consumed everything I loved, I have to find out if I am, truly, rational.

So in the dark I wait for Fox.