The Faarian Chronicles: Exile (19 page)

“Yeah, I guess it does,” he replied.

Dear Andi,

You probably only just received yesterday’s email,
but I miss you so much already! I think the best we can hope for is a two-day
turnaround on email, but I guess it’ll be more like four on the weekend. The
weekend here, I mean. The days of the week don’t mesh up very well.

Now for today’s craziness: they’ve never heard of
gymnastics here, can you believe it? I don’t know how I’m going to stay in
shape if I’m stuck here. I can only do so much Pilates and plyometrics. They
don’t have any equipment and I can’t even run outside here, cuz the air sucks.
I can’t believe I’m missing
air.
So
pathetic. Dad had better come to his senses and bring me home, or my gymnastics
career is over!

I know, I know. I just got here, focus on something
positive.

So, that guy John was here today. You know, Russ’s
cousin? He was on my flight here too, but I actually talked to him at this flea
market thing they had today, and I don’t think I made a complete jerk of myself
either! Yay me! There aren’t that many guys here - it’s mostly women - and I’m
either related to them or they married in from other places. I guess that’s how
it works here, which is bizarro. You remember Teague? Well, her husband is from
Glass City, and I guess they’re all super metro-sexual there. I totally thought
he was a woman yesterday. So embarrassing.

Anyway, John is from across the mountains, like a
different country I think, so maybe they’re a little more normal there. I
haven’t seen any women from there yet, but I’ll keep you posted. Maybe they’re
more normal too, instead of all huge and hairy. Maybe I can defect. Ha!

They have market here a couple times a week and I’m
keeping my eyes open for a good, used spaceship. The only problem is I have no
money. Like, literally zero. I don’t even know what their money looks like.
People seem to trade stuff a lot and maybe use their phones to pay. What do you
think, should I ask my mother for an allowance?

Anyway, back to the twin terrors, I was unpacking
and found my capsaicin self-heat gel that I use after workouts sometimes. Thal
helped me sneak into their room today at lunch and put it in their sports bras.
Ha! We’re going to take video tomorrow morning and put it up on the Kindred’s
electronic message board. Should be epic! Hopefully I can send it to you, too.

TTFN, Sunny

Chapter 21: The Earth-Girl Is With Us

Thal followed Lyta and Otrere from their room, videoing them
surreptitiously on their way to breakfast the next morning. At first when I
caught up to them, nothing had happened and I thought it was all a big letdown,
that neither of them had taken the top sports bra in their drawer. But then, as
we walked into the great hall, they both started scratching a little, and then
sort of shimmying around in circles, all confused before they ran out of there
tearing at their clothes. We followed, videoing all the way back to their room,
which they found locked courtesy of my hastily reinstalled padlock kit.

They yanked at the lock and cursed as Thal and I broke up
laughing.

“What? That rub is supposed to relax your muscles. It’s just
hot peppers. Don’t you feel relaxed?” I asked, leaning against a wall for
support.

“Haha! Maybe that will teach you to stop picking on Sunny,”
Thal crowed, giving me the high five I’d taught him.

"Okay, okay, we give! Now unlock the door,” Lyta cried.

I finally gave in and let them in when they promised to be
nice, not that I really believed them.

“Did you get it?” I asked, peering over Thal’s shoulder at
the video on his link.

“Yeah, this is great,” he laughed. “People are going to love
this video. I’ll edit it at breakfast and put it up.

My link buzzed for about the fifth time on my belt where I
had so far been ignoring it.

“Say, you’d better get that,” he said. “It could be your
mother.”

 “Mmm.” I made a face and picked up my link to find an
email from Dad. “Yes!” Finally! Everything was falling into place. Dad would
have me home before…. “Noooo!” I wailed as I skimmed his message.

“What? What is it?”

“I can’t go home,” I mumbled.

“What, ever?” he gasped.

“No, now,” I replied, barely noticing the strange look he
gave me as he turned and walked away. I put my head in my hands and read the
message again.

Sunny,

We miss you too, munchkin. I’m sorry meeting your
mother wasn’t everything you’d hoped for, but you cannot just give up and come
home. I want you to work on being more positive about your mother. You need to
give her and the other people there a chance. They may seem weird to you at
first, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong, just different.

Sweetheart, you may not be able to continue
practicing gymnastics like you’re used to. It’s a very specific sport and most
places wouldn’t have the type of equipment needed. You need to accept that.
It’s not worth risking your neck doing something stupid to practice. And stay
with your patrol group! Those bird things are dangerous.

Remember, you’re there to learn about your heritage
and your mother’s culture. Try to keep an open mind. This will be an amazing
experience for you if you let it. Make an effort to understand and participate,
and I’m sure most people will make an effort with you. You have to meet them,
and your mother, halfway. I know you can do it.

You have an amazing opportunity here, kiddo. Give
it a chance and have some fun! You might surprise yourself.

Love,

Dad

I couldn’t believe it. He didn’t get it, like at all! I’d
been counting on Dad to understand and bring me home, but worse, he was on her
side! I took deep breaths and tried not to cry… or scream. I saw another message
waiting, this one from Andi, and I slapped at the button to bring it up.

Hey Sunny!

Wow! It sounds crazy there. Mean girls suck! I
don’t blame you one bit for wanting to come home. I wish you could. As for
getting those girls back, I don’t know what you have available there. Can you
get to them while they’re sleeping? Cuz there’s always putting their hands in
warm water, or putting whipped cream or something in their hands – if you have
any – and tickling their faces. What about booby trapping their room? Think:
Parent Trap. Other than that, the best I can come up with is to shrug it off
and pretend it doesn’t matter – they don’t matter. If you’re not fun for them,
they’ll stop… eventually.

I hope your bird bite is doing better, and you have
to find a way to keep practicing gymnastics. You’re amazing at it. Be creative
and don’t give up!

Gotta go, play tryouts start today. We’re doing The
Wizard of Oz and I’m going for the Wicked Witch. Dorothy’s such a goody-goody.
I convinced Tristain to try out, can you believe it? Keep your fingers crossed!

Your BFF,

Andi

I wiped moisture from my eyes and found myself smiling as I
pictured Andi with green skin and a giant nose and Tristain, her on-again,
off-again boyfriend, as her flying monkey. Andi could always cheer me up.

Thal sat back down with his breakfast and started eating,
not looking at me. I got my own food and when we were through eating in
silence, he looked up at me.

“You know, this is our home, and most of us happen to like
it here. I get that this is really different from Earth, that it wasn’t your
choice to come here, and you’re sad that you had to give up your life there for
a few years. But this is your home now too, and you can either be happy or
miserable. It’s your choice.” He got up, cleared his dishes, and turned to
leave.

“Thal, I-” I started.

“No,” he said. “Just think about it.”

***

The next few days were pretty uneventful. I went down to the
train station as often as possible to practice gymnastics as best I could,
using the edge of the station platform next to the tracks as my balance beam,
and learning to get quickly out of the way when I felt the wind from the
near-silent trains. I was able to score an old mattress in case of falls, and
to land “beam” and floor dismounts. I used the ladders in the tower additions
to work on upper body strength, and did handstand pushups, and even some flares
on the floor (usually only men did those) but I couldn’t find anything to
substitute for uneven bars. And trying to vault over the armchair in the
apartment proved disastrous. I got new aches and pains from the stone floors,
new blisters, calluses, and bruises – lots of bruises.

I apologized to Thal and made an effort not to complain
about being stuck here, but this wasn’t my home and I couldn’t think of it that
way. On the plus side, I didn’t see much of Lyta or Otrere for a few days. That
is until my mother recruited them, Thal, and me to go with her to the “big”
town of Inmar one morning to sell extra supplies from the Earth shipment. Our
job was to unload the supplies from the plane into the dusty warehouse while my
mother haggled with the chew-spitting owner.

As usual, I had put sun block on that morning, but hadn’t
realized the twins had somehow switched it with plain lotion. After an hour in
the suns, they pointed out what a nice shade of petal pink I was turning. I was
well on my way toward a scorching, double-sunburn. Thal, with his darker skin
tone and lifelong exposure to the suns, escaped relatively unscathed.

“Yes!” the twins crowed, linking arms and doing a crazy jig.
“Haha! We win, we win!”

And my mother dragged us all back onto the plane to chew us
out.

“I brought you four along today to see for myself how you
interact, and I see the reports I’ve been hearing are true. I’m very
disappointed in all of you. You will stop this joke war now, before anyone gets
seriously hurt,” she’d ordered. “Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, Aunt Vaeda,” the twins and Thal had replied, looking
cowed. She looked at me.

“What? It’s not
my
fault. They started it for no
reason the minute I arrived.” I glared at the twins who had the grace to look
ashamed, if only because my mother was there.

She looked pointedly at my tight-feeling, pink skin. “And
how’s that working out for you?”

I scowled in response.

“If this continues in any way, I don’t care who does it, I
will punish all four of you myself. Understood?”

“Yes, Aunt Vaeda,” they chorused.

“Yes,” I grumbled.

“Good,” she snapped. “Now get this stuff unloaded so we can
get out of here,” she said over her shoulder as she stalked out the door.

Thal found me an old, dried out bottle of sun block from
under a seat, but all I got out of it were hard, chalky bits. My mother ordered
me inside to buy some from the supplies counter. What she didn’t say was how
long the wait was likely to be.

The supply hut next to the warehouse looked like it might
have been a food stand at some point, its large, open-air window festively
draped with old fishing nets and Christmas lights to draw attention from the
dirt road outside.

I got quite a few curious looks when I walked in and stood
at the counter. It took me several minutes to figure out that I needed a
number, and how to get one on my link before sitting down in the dusty shadows.
Apparently, haratchi had destroyed the supply hut several years back and the
owner had decided it wasn’t necessary to replace the furniture. Thankfully, I
was only waiting out of the suns for either some sun block or my mother and
cousins to finish up out back.

There was only one worker, and I’d seen him fill all of one
order in the twenty minutes I’d been there. The clerk and lucky customer
exchanged something on their links, perhaps a list of supplies and payment, and
the clerk disappeared into the maze of supply shelves behind the counter. A
while later he returned to signal the customer that his order was done, and I
saw the customer pull a hover cart overflowing with supplies from the back of
the building down the dirt track outside.

Amazingly, no one lost their temper at the long wait. I got
the feeling that people only came here when they had to, and got everything
they could afford and could cart home at once. Having nothing to do but wait, I
found myself listening through the open window to a man and a woman arguing
quietly outside.

“We shouldn’t have to waste a whole day coming here to pick
up your meds. Just look at your face, Drazen! You never should have let this go
so long. What were you thinking?” the woman chastised.

“I told you, I couldn’t afford it. I had to pay rent or get
kicked out into the desert. Which would you have chosen?” the man replied,
sounding young and defensive.

“It’s dangerous. If you’d let it go much longer, you’d have
gone rogue. And if that happens, you’ll lose everything: your job, your sanity.
Is that what you want?” I didn’t hear a response. Go rogue? Lose his sanity? I
looked around, but no one else seemed to be hearing this. The old woman next to
me had leaned her head back against the wall and appeared to be sleeping.

“How have you been living anyway?” the woman asked.

“The Facility has always been overrun with rats in the
tunnels, you know,” he grunted. Ew, rats?

“That’s disgusting,” the woman echoed my thoughts. “Besides,
you have a job, Drazen; you should be able to afford the basics and your
medicine.”

Wait, was she saying rats were medicine? What? That’s what
you get, Sunny, when you listen in on other people’s conversations. They must
have meant something else.

“Get real,” he replied. “On what they pay me? We’re in a
depression, or haven’t you heard? They keep cutting my hours and I’m supposed
to be grateful to still have a job.”

“Well then, you need to get another job!” The only reply I
heard was a snort of disdain. “And until then,” the woman continued, “there are
government programs….”

“They’ve all been cut,” he interrupted angrily. “I’m not the
only one in this situation, believe me. The National Council thought they were
saving money. We’ll see if they like what they get as a result. They’ll have
rogues knocking down their precious domed cities by the end of the month.” I
couldn’t help but look up as a dirty, angry young man stomped in, effectively
cutting off the argument.

My eyes automatically flew to his face, remembering the
woman’s comment about it. He was probably only a few years older than me, but
he looked much older, like life had not been kind. He had one eye that was the
washed out blue of the high-summer Colorado sky, while its mate was dull and
muted on the other side of his face. Together they flicked around the room like
a pair of horseflies, settling on me and skittering away when our eyes met.

 “Why are you even here?” I heard this Drazen say to
his companion, a non-descript thirty-something woman who’d followed him. They
both sat down by the wall on the other side of the room. His eyes lit on me
again and flicked away. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I don’t need a
babysitter.”

“You do while you’re in Katje territory,” she replied.

They sat in silence for a while. His blue eye seemed to
spark in the dim light and highlight the peeling patch of scar tissue under it,
completely overshadowing his other facial features. Part of me wondered what
had happened to him. The other part was wary. Something about this guy made me
really uncomfortable.

As the minutes passed, he kept glancing my way and
fidgeting, getting more and more agitated.

“Don’t be stupid,” the woman hissed at him suddenly,
glancing at me and back to glare at him even though he hadn’t said anything.
His growing agitation was beginning to draw attention, and not only mine. Other
people seemed to take notice of them and were now looking warily back and forth
across the room between the man, woman, and me. The old woman next to me opened
her eyes, not napping after all, and leaned close.

“That Anakharu over there seems to have taken a shine to
you,” she said. I glanced over at the strange young man she was talking about
before shaking my head at her. He wasn’t even pretending not to stare at me
now. Ru-ude.

“Anakharu?” I asked. That was the word I’d heard on my first
patrol. So, this was one of the Afflicted. The old woman’s eyes took in my hair
and she sighed as if in resignation.