Girl on Fire by M.C.A. Hogarth

Author:M.C.A. Hogarth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, coming of age
Publisher: M.C.A. Hogarth
Published: 2018-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

But next week, school began, and Sediryl plunged into it with all the intrepidity the Chancellor had no doubt expected of a girl willing to cross the Eldritch continent in an alien vehicle and part herself from her world in search of adventure. She crossed to the agricultural dome via Pad, having found out how to pay for the transport, and sat in classrooms with enormous windows that opened on the cropfields. Her teachers were sun-bleached Pelted and sun-browned humans, and how that worked with this artificial sun she longed to ask but didn’t, because the lectures were consuming and she loved every word of them. The most stirring poetry ever declaimed at a court entertainment did not hold her as spellbound as the science that described a work she’d been doing all her adult life without having the language to explain it. And the more of that lexicon she learned, the more concepts it opened to her, and she found herself reading in her spare time just to gorge on them.

She did find time for dinner with Davor, twice—once at the Jovian restaurant again, and once at a new place that served noodles in broth hot enough to steam-cook the meat dropped into it, and the vegetables. They spoke of their respective days over the table, and she was gratified at his interest in her lessons. She tasked herself to similar attention to him as well, but it wasn’t hard to find Alliance medicine fascinating. To think she’d once resigned herself to the sort of meaningless pleasantries considered appropriate to mixed sexes of rank when mingling!

They kissed, as well. In the park, or at the door to her room… and such kisses. “I still want to have that talk,” he murmured to her, standing beneath the concealing shadows of a tree. “But you’re in the middle of settling in. It can wait until you’ve got your routine down.”

Which suited Sediryl, because she ­was distracted by school, and because kissing was so wondrous that she wanted time and repetition to explore the nuances.

It was Davor who pointed out that the college had a lecture series, and hosted visiting experts in its various disciplines to give special talks. “Look here,” he said, handing her his tablet over a dinner of rice pancakes with scallions; he was dipping his into a peanut sauce. “There’s one on solving some of the challenges of terraforming for crops by addressing the insect population. Pollinators, you know.”

“I do!” she exclaimed, thumbing down to the information. The Nuera bees were kept in a greenhouse because they died outside it. This speaker had apparently tested several methods for safeguarding non-native pollinators, including bringing in non-native predator insects.

“We should go,” Davor said.

Sediryl looked up from the tablet. “We?”

“It says it’s open to all. We could go together. Have dinner afterward.”

“And… you might come back with me, and stay a little while?” she suggested, because she’d been hoping he might tarry. Kissing beneath a tree was all very well. She wanted more, and the privacy that would make it possible.

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