New Lands by Geoff Rodkey

Author:Geoff Rodkey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781101603376
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-05-01T21:00:00+00:00

THE CLUTCH

It took us three more days to reach the foothills, and aside from the nagging sense of dread I could never quite shake, it turned out to be a wonderful trip. The weather was sunny but not too hot, the Flut croplands were easy on our feet, and we all did our best not to mention any subject that might get one of the others riled up.

That was a long list: military invasions, nervous twitches, slavery, murdered parents, evil parents, missing limbs, illiteracy, and people named Cyril were all off limits.

Partly because everyone was so careful not to bring up the more serious stuff, we wound up spending a lot of time teasing each other about little things—like Millicent’s bossiness, or my embarrassing inability to fart silently after meals, or Kira’s talent for spying cute little furry animals and killing them dead with her sling.

They were mostly gophers, and to be fair they were usually so far away it was hard to tell how cute they really were. Kira walked with her sling at the ready, collecting stones as she went, and she had such sharp eyes that the first glimpse we usually got of her prey was a puff of red mist, followed a second later by a distant, dark streak as the little corpse returned to earth.

Kira shrugged off our half-amused, half-horrified catcalls. “They eat the crops,” she said. “The Flut would thank me. So should you. If I have to hit something tomorrow, it’s better I practice today.”

Of the four of us, Guts was the easiest to wind up. I tried to avoid rattling his cage because I didn’t want to get a hook in the neck, but the girls were rightly confident he’d never attack them, and they thought his spluttering rages were so hilarious that they couldn’t resist. Kira kept a running tally of the number of words he could speak in a row without cursing (he broke ten a few times, but never reached twenty), and one night around the campfire, Millicent did an extended impression of Guts as the Governor-General, dispensing justice (“kill ’im, kill ’im, kill ’im, kill ’im…wot, already dead? Kill ’im again!”) that made Kira and me laugh until our sides hurt.

It sent Guts into such a fury that he threatened to kill us all, which only made the girls laugh harder. Then he jumped up and declared he was leaving us for good. But Kira reached up and grabbed him by his good hand.

“Oh, stay,” she said with a smile. “The sharpest knives are for the closest friends.”

“Wot’s that mean?”

“It means we laugh because we like you,” she said as she yanked him down off his feet. Then she wrapped him up in a hug and planted a kiss on his cheek.

His face glowed as red as the embers in the fire. He didn’t say a word for the rest of the night, but it wasn’t because he was angry. And the next morning, right after Kira teased

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