Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 81280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 81280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
“What’s up there?”
“Those are the cities of the sky,” Seeker says. “Don’t ever stand beneath them. There’s one here, obviously. But there’s others. And the edge is more dangerous than the shadow. So you want to give them a really wide berth.”
“Why? Is it bad luck to be near them?” Feels like it is bad luck.
“No. They like to drop things off the edge.”
Whump!
Almost as if to prove the theory, something heavy lands a dozen or so feet away, kicking up a cloud of dirt and old wires as it displaces what was there.
“What the hell was that?”
“Refrigerator,” she says. “This is going to be very popular.”
I hear the sound of a dozen bare feet rushing down the path behind us. Tappety-tappety-tap.
A few people rush in to see if the refrigerator has anything in it. There’s a pack of cheese slices, which are cheerfully handed out among everyone. We don’t get processed food down here, but it seems that sometimes the city above sees fit to provide it.
A couple of guys start taking bits and pieces off the fridge too, just whipping off coolant lines and copper stuff and other electric… I’m not even going to pretend I know what they’re taking.
My amnesia seems to be not entirely, well, entire. I know how to speak. I know what a fridge is. But I don’t know fuck all about floating cities, or where I am, or who I am. It’s like someone’s gone through my brain and very carefully drawn lines around the parts of my mind where certain memories are stored. It’s creepy. But not as creepy as the void of land stretching out in front of us. I want to get away from the shadow place, back to the cute little cottage hut with the friendly ladies who have a kitten.
“We can go back home,” Seeker says. “I know how unsettling this place is the first time you’re near it. Some of the guys like to dare each other to go right into the shadows.”
“What happens to them when they do that?”
“They get cold. There’s no warmth there. So the core is kind of icy. I don’t know. I haven’t seen it. I get creeped out once it gets too dark to see.”
We are walking back now, and I feel much better for it.
“Is there anything else I need to know?” I ask the question conversationally, feeling much relieved.
“Stay out of the forest unless someone’s with you. If the birds stop singing, you need to run.”
“Why?”
“There’s demons in there, innit,” she says, stuffing an extra piece of cheese she must have snuck away in her clothes into her face. “Sometimes girls go missing. You’re young, and pretty. Just their type.”
“So stay away from falling refrigerators, and away from forest demons. Two very different kinds of threat,” I say.
She snorts a little. “There’s other threats too. Not much medicine down here. We’ve got what the trees and flowers give us, but it’s not like what’s up above. All we have is ourselves and each other down here.”
“Are you mad at the floating people?” The question just pops into my head, maybe because of the way her upper lip curls slightly when she mentions anyone or anything in the floating cities.
“Them up there think they’re above all this. They might be physically, but they’re the same kind of animals we are. But we down here? We know what life really is. And them up there? They suffer every breath they draw.”
“How do you know all of this?”
“Sometimes they throw people down. If we see them coming, we try to catch them. Sometimes we do. Sometimes we don’t. But the ones we do catch, they tell us what life is like up there, and it’s not worth living, I can tell you that. The ones that come here take years to be like us, if they ever fit in at all. It’s not the same up there. Everyone’s taught that nothing matters except themselves. But to survive here, you’ve got to care about each other.”
That’s the wisest thing anybody’s ever said to me, I think. It’s one of the few things I actually remember anybody saying, but there’s still a lot of truth in it.
Over the coming weeks, it’s what I live by. It’s easy too, because Seeker and Vani and Charger are all so nice to me. The fact that I don’t know who I am becomes pretty irrelevant as we are all meeting for the first time, and it’s what I do that counts.
I like to gather berries and mushrooms. I don’t always know which ones are edible, but Seeker does, and Charger is an excellent cook and hunter. The four of us girls live an idyllic life. We wake up when the sun wakes up, and we go to bed when the embers of the fire die down. Life is simple, repetitive, and satisfying.