Fox Snare by Yoon Ha Lee

Author:Yoon Ha Lee [Lee, Yoon Ha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Disney Book Group
Published: 2023-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

I woke up on another planet.

Which was a shame because I’d been having such excellent dreams. At least, they started as excellent dreams. I was a tiger (why had I not taken on my tiger form for so long?), lying on my side in a sunbeam back at the Matriarch’s estate.

It was a great sunbeam, as sunbeams went. In the dream I could feel the caress of wind in my fur, which needed grooming—tigers are just as fussy about cleanliness as house cats, if not more so—and the fragrance of flowers tickled my nostrils. I felt warm and cozy, as though I were wrapped in a blanket. No self-respecting tiger would admit to wanting a blanket, though. Especially when I had a fine coat of orange-and-black striped fur.

Lazily, I pried open one of my eyes, at which point I noticed that there was something weird about the sunbeam. The Matriarch’s estate had been located on a beautifully terraformed planet, complete with white-gold sunshine and well-behaved weather, so that it never rained on the days she wanted to take a walk in the garden or hunt some deer.

The sunbeam here, on the other hand, had a green-purple hue, like that of vegetation gone putrid. I could almost smell the rot, a sickly sweetness that made my nose wrinkle. I couldn’t imagine why the Matriarch would have allowed her cosseted property, with its flowers and tall grasses, to reach such a state.

Also, I heard dripping water. The sound of droplets hitting a hard surface, rather than the friendly earth.

“Sebin! Wake up!” a voice was saying. A voice I should have recognized.

Someone else spoke, softer but no less worried. “Do you think they have a concussion?”

“I’m not concussed,” I protested, eyes still mostly closed. I wondered why everything smelled of water and sweat, sap and charred metal.

My eyes flew open at the sound of my own voice . . . and at the smell of blood, which I had managed not to notice before. Quite a feat, considering a tiger’s predatory nature. Blood didn’t automatically make me hungry—I wasn’t a beast—but normally I noticed it before anything else in the environment.

I struggled to sit up. I wasn’t a tiger, but in my human form. A rip in my spacesuit explained the odors coming in from the environment, which ordinarily should have been filtered out.

Panic gripped me. “Dak-Ho? Yui?” I was supposed to be watching over the younger cadets, wasn’t I?

“Stay down,” Haneul said as she fiddled with my suit. I recognized her voice now, even though her face was a blur. “Dak-Ho and Yui must be safe with the rest of the Haetae’s crew. They’ll be all right.” Her voice quavered slightly.

“We can’t hole up in here forever,” Min argued. Hers was the first voice I’d heard when I drifted back toward wakefulness.

“Did we land safely?” I asked. Memories of our crash landing slowly returned to me. I was worried about the state of my vision, but slowly the two others’ faces came into focus, and then a third, transparent one, belonging to Min’s ghostly brother, Jun.

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