Astra (25 page)

Two tears had appeared on Yoki’s long eyelashes, shining like dewdrops on a spider’s web. ‘But that’s not
here
,’ he objected. ‘There’s no hunting allowed in Is-Land. Never
ever
. That’s why Gaia killed Lil’s dad.’

‘Now, now, Yoki.’ Nimma pulled the boy to her side. ‘Gaia didn’t kill Lil’s father. He just got sick, that’s all.’

‘They could have eaten nuts, like squirrels!’ Yoki shouted, the tears flowing freely now. ‘I
hate
her. I don’t want her here.’

Everyone looked at him in concern then. Even though Yoki was one of the more sensitive Sec Gens, it was still rare for him to cry. His distress was contagious: Meem was trembling too, and she reached out for Klor, who bundled her close.

‘Hush, children,’ Klor said soothingly as Nimma wiped Yoki’s tears away. ‘Even if Lil’s father broke the law, that’s not her fault, is it?’

This was all nonsense. And if Yoki was going to throw a tantrum, she could risk an outburst too. Astra jabbed her knitting needles into the ball of yarn. ‘How do we know he was a Gaian?’ she interjected. ‘He left his community and he killed birds and mammals. I think he was an
infiltrator
.’

‘Of course we are concerned about Security, Astra,’ Klor said. ‘IMBOD will be thoroughly investigating Lil’s story. But whatever her father was, she’s just a young girl and she needs our help right now.’

‘We know he was a Gaian, Astra,’ Nimma added, ‘because he gave Lil the book of hymns.’ Nimma’s own eyes welled up now.

Typical
.

‘He built his own pyre with her and taught her how to perform a Return to Gaia ceremony for him.’

‘Don’t cry, Nimma,’ Meem pleaded as Klor reached over and stroked their Shelter mother’s hand.

‘I’m sorry, children. It’s just very moving. Imagine performing a Return to Gaia ceremony by yourself – and then her Gaia-blood began. I think that must be why Elpis sheltered her in the Birth House.’

‘I don’t want to help her,’ Yoki sulked. ‘Not if she ate
rabbits
.’

‘I know it’s hard to accept, Yoki,’ Klor said. ‘But she didn’t have a choice. She was obeying her father, wasn’t she?’

‘We all have to obey our parents, Yoki,’ Meem said, sitting up and holding Klor’s hand.

‘She’s a minor. She’s not legally responsible for what her father made her do,’ Peat chipped in decisively. He and Meem looked composed again now. The crisis had rippled through them and subsided without leaving a trace of anxiety. Tomorrow, Astra knew, Yoki too would have come to terms with the news and none of them would question the adults’ decision to believe Lil’s absurd story.

‘You don’t have to help her, Yoki,’ Nimma reassured him. ‘She’s not used to playing with other children – and she won’t be here for long. We’re just telling you about her now so that you don’t believe any wild rumours that might go around later.’

Then Nimma had revealed the plan, which had been decided on at the meeting, with the full approval of the IMBOD officer. Lil had been registered as an IMBOD Shelter child and the state was going to pay for her upkeep while they looked for her community. In the meantime, the Or Parents’ Committee had volunteered to be her other temporary Shelter parent. Lil was going to stay at Wise House while investigations proceeded.

Nothing could have prepared Astra for this. ‘Wise House?’ As if it belonged to someone else, she heard her voice slide out of range and crack like a glass. ‘But that’s
my
Shelter home.’

‘Yes, it’s a Shelter home,’ Nimma said patiently. ‘It shelters children. Sometimes a new child comes along. That’s what being in a family is all about.’

‘But no one else has to make room! Why do
I
have to?’ Astra cast around for support but her Or-siblings were as useless as ever: Peat was checking his Tablette, Yoki was hugging Klor’s leg and Meem was sucking her thumb until Nimma gently removed it from her mouth.

‘Astra,’ she said firmly, ‘there is plenty of room for both you and Lil in Hokma’s heart, just like there’s room for all of you and Sheba in mine.’

Sheba was the final word in any argument, invoked rarely but with the dire threat of Nimma’s silent tears should Astra continue to pester. She shut up, but she was fuming. Sheba was supposed to be her
big sister
but Astra knew barely anything about her. Nimma dusted Sheba’s photo on
the mantelpiece every day, but she and Klor still hadn’t shared her album. The photos weren’t in Libby, not even under child-lock; she had looked. She had once asked Klor, on his own, if she could see them on his Tablette, but he had said Nimma wouldn’t like it.

‘We remember Sheba all the time and we don’t want you children to feel sad about her too,’ he’d said. Four or five years ago, when Meem was old enough, they’d all gone to Sheba’s Fountain together. Those photos
were
on Libby, but when they had slideshows at birthdays, Nimma and Klor never included them. Why was she supposed to care so much about Sheba if she wasn’t allowed to know a thing about her?

‘Astra. Or-child,’ Klor cajoled. ‘Hokma thought it would be good for you to have some company up there. You’re so busy with the Owleons, you’re missing out on play time, aren’t you?’

Play time?
Who
were
these people? She was nearly
thirteen
. She didn’t need to muck about in a frigging playground with anyone, let alone an unwashed, meat-eating, Non-Lander
spy
. Her face was blazing hot and she wanted to jump up, stamp and yell and throw her knitting across the room. But she couldn’t. She saw Nimma give Klor that sharp, warning glance again, the one that meant:
See, I told you so, Astra’s behaving badly again
. And Klor’s tufty eyebrows gathered together, his kind face silently replying,
Come, darling, I’m sure Astra will calm down soon
. She had to stop resisting now or Nimma might one day win this recurring mimed argument and take her to the doctor, ask for tests to be run. She might lose Hokma, the Owleons, everything.

She forced herself to wilt. ‘I guess,’ she whispered.

‘We know it’s a big change, darling,’ Nimma said, magnanimous in victory. ‘But we’re sure it will be interesting, and it won’t be for long. Hokma says she’ll feed the Owleons today, and you can come tomorrow as normal, as long as you promise to be nice to Lil.’

* * *

She’d had no choice. She had promised, and now she was approaching the flying-field perches where Lil was flinging Helium into the air and he was beating his enormous broad wings above her head as she gasped and jumped, and as he soared into the bright blue sky, briefly blotting out the sun, Hokma was laughing and Lil was turning to Astra with a big sparkling grin, saying exultantly, ‘His wings made a breeze on my face!’

Then Lil looked at Silver for the first time and said, her voice quiet with awe, ‘He’s so pretty. Can I stroke him, please?’ And Hokma looked
at Astra and Astra heard herself say, ‘Okay – but not near his face, or he might bite you.’ Then Lil ran a fingertip over Silver’s lacy mantle and said, in the same hushed tone, ‘I always wanted to stroke an owl, but an Owleon’s even better.’

For a moment Astra wondered if Lil had ever eaten an owl, but then Silver strained again to fly and it was time to say, ‘Stand back’, then let go of his jesses, release him into the air and watch him rising, rising on an invisible current until he was gliding silently across the forest meadow, past the flying field’s solitary twisted juniper and towards the far set of perches, while beside her Lil whispered, ‘My dad liked owls,’ then, standing ramrod-still, with a terrible sawing sound from her throat, erupted into a desolate, choking upheaval of sobs, crying as if no comfort could ever reach her, until Hokma was hugging her and Astra was somehow gently, helplessly stroking her back, saying, ‘Don’t cry, Lil, don’t cry. You can help me fly Silver. It’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.’

She hadn’t wanted to become friends with Lil – she had
hated
Lil. But the girl swooped into her life and plucked out her resistance like a vulture disembowelling a lamb. First she was so unutterably grief-stricken – no one could hate someone so sad. Once she’d started crying she couldn’t stop. For a week Hokma gave Lil bowls of stew and mugs of warm oatmilk and let her lie on the sofa for hours, wrapped in a sheet. Astra came to Wise House after school, bringing wildflower bouquets from the path, and tried to entice Lil outdoors to the aviary to help with Silver and Helium. Lil trailed behind her to the field and watched the birds fly through swollen eyes. When at last, on the Sabbaday afternoon, she climbed up to the roof with Astra, she just sat there hunched over, plucking at stems of grass. Astra searched for crickets and carried one over on her wrist to show Lil its bright green legs and twitching antennae.

Lil looked at it dully. ‘You have to cook it first,’ she said.

Astra whipped her wrist away and released the cricket back into the meadow. ‘It’s not to
eat
! We don’t kill Gaia’s creatures here.’

Lil shrugged, a lopsided twitch involving just her right shoulder. ‘You kill worms. They’re nice fried.’

‘We
have
to kill them or the Owleons would die,’ Astra retorted. But beneath her indignation, a strange sensation was stirring.
Eat worms?
Even though Hokma had long ago dropped the charade of medical euthanasia she had used Astra’s first time at Wise House, the thought of eating them herself had never occurred to her. As she considered it, she began to feel uncomfortably aware of the inside of her mouth. No, a worm didn’t belong in there. It would be gristly and sour and slimy, wouldn’t it?

‘My dad called it wild spaghetti,’ Lil continued. ‘You have to add garlic.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Astra announced.

Lil tugged at a clump of grass, pulling it out of the turf, and Astra snapped, ‘Don’t do that. You’ve killed it.’

‘It’s just grass,’ Lil scoffed. ‘It seeds itself back. We used long grass for our beds.’

Again, reactions wrestled inside her. The girl’s nonchalant contempt for Gaia was outrageous, but at the same time, she was like a horrible Old World story: even though it disgusted you, you wanted to find out what happened. ‘Well,
this
grass helps keep Wise House cool. So don’t destroy it,’ she ordered.

Lil looked bored, but she patted the rootball back into the roof and brushed the earth from her hands. Then she sat back, stretched out her legs and idly scratched her Gaia mound. She had far more hair there than Astra: a curly black thicket.

Astra fingered the tip of her dread. Two could play at that game.

‘Hokma said you haven’t got your Gaia-blood yet,’ Lil announced.

‘
So?
’ Astra sneered, but there was a pang in her chest. Was there no end to Hokma’s betrayal? Lil had used three or four pads a day in her blood panties when she arrived at Wise House, washing them out in the sink with Hokma and hanging them to dry across the lawn. Hokma had said Astra’s turn would come soon, and Nimma was already making her hipbeads for the Blood & Seed ceremony next month. There was no need for Lil to know
any
of that.

‘It only hurts sometimes,’ Lil informed her. ‘But when it does you feel like you’re going to
die
. You’ll probably get it when you’re thirteen.’

Astra tossed her head, flipping her dread back behind her ear. ‘How do you know? I might get it sooner.’ Of course she wanted to get it during the ceremony, but Nimma had said that Gaia-bleeding wasn’t a competition: girls naturally started at different ages, just as boys produced seed at different ages, and the Blood & Seed ceremony welcomed all Year Seven graduates to adulthood together. She wasn’t going to talk to Lil about the ceremony, though. What if Lil said she wanted to come and Hokma let her, even though she was fourteen? Astra was the only Year Seven girl in Or, and as Nimma had been saying all year, she and Yoki would soon have the honour of representing their community at the Bioregional Congregation Site with girls and boys from all over the dry forest. She
definitely didn’t want to have to share that honour with Lil – whom no one had yet, after all, proved was not a Non-Lander.

Lil shrugged that minimalist shrug again. ‘You’re still quite undeveloped.’

What? Just because Lil’s breasts were a fraction bigger than hers didn’t make Astra
undeveloped
. ‘We don’t make remarks like that here in Or,’ she announced icily. ‘Everyone develops in their own time.’

For a moment, what looked suspiciously like a sneer distorted Lil’s mouth. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I meant, you’re young still.’

Astra felt like leaving, but she knew she shouldn’t let Lil needle her. This was
her
turf, and she had to take control of this situation – now.

‘Why don’t you remember where your community was?’ she demanded.

Lil picked a piece of grass out of her Gaia hair and twirled it between her fingers. ‘My dad said the forest was our home now.’

‘So your community wasn’t in this bioregion?’ Astra persisted.

Lil wrinkled her nose. ‘There were some trees. But the land was flat, I think. I used to dream about it, but then I stopped.’ Her lip trembled and she looked so woeful again that Astra had to stop her interrogation. You couldn’t push a subject too far, she knew. You had to take her just past her limit, and let her recover before you started again.

‘
Girls
. I’ve made berry biscuits,’ Hokma called up from the verandah, and Lil jumped to her feet and headed to the ladder. Astra followed her down carefully, a worm of some uncertain emotion knotting in her stomach. She couldn’t remember the last time Hokma had baked anything. Normally she just sprinkled berries straight from the jar onto her cereal, but there they were: berry biscuits arranged in a crescent on a plate, beside three glasses of iced apricot nectar.

Lil ate her first biscuit in two mouthfuls, then drank her nectar all in one go. ‘Thank you, Hokma,’ she said, for the first time in Astra’s hearing.

‘Good?’ Hokma asked Astra.

Astra took another biscuit. ‘Yeah,’ she begrudgingly conceded. They were
okay
, but not nearly as thin and crispy as Nimma’s.