Seed by Bri Lee

Author:Bri Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
Published: 2025-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

When the hour was up we walked outside to the centre of the helipad. The calm air was mocking us. The continent was dancing out of our grasp.

We began the trip back. It felt strange to be driving towards the vault without the usual fresh excitement. We rounded the seal, and a few seconds later Frances’s bike jerked to a stop in front of me. I pulled up alongside her.

‘What’s up?’ I yelled over the engines.

She was stock-still, looking straight ahead of us. Where the white gave way to the brown ground of the valley a lone figure was moving. Nothing should have been moving here. Only us. Could Kate have gone straight to the facility somehow? How could a chopper have come anywhere near without us seeing and hearing it, especially on such a clear day? Or was it someone else? The person Frances had imagined she saw? And if it was someone else, had he heard our bikes coming?

I pushed through the terror and slowly raised the binos from around my neck to my eyes. As my vision adjusted the figure became clear. I laughed out loud in relief. It boomed around us. Frances yelled something at me, and I handed her the binos and laughed on and on, leaning over the front of my handlebars. The sudden twin tide of optimism and terror was banished. It was an Adélie. A single fucking Adélie penguin. All this way inland. Hopelessly lost, waddling around. Absurdity embodied. Frances groaned and put her hand on her hip, laughing and shaking her head too.

We looked at each other and drove on, slowing down as we approached. It didn’t like the noise of the bikes, but they were naturally curious creatures.

‘I’ve got to get Nansen back inside,’ I called out. ‘Let’s dump our stuff and the bikes and we can come back down and watch it.’

Back in the garage I picked up the cat carrier and remembered the click on the shortwave. Frances must have thought of it too.

‘I’ll just check the comms desk with you,’ she said.

We went through the doors, silent. Nothing moved around us. Nothing seemed different. It was still warm. Nansen leaped out of the carrier with an angry hiss when I opened the cover and bolted away into her hydroponics room. Frances was standing in front of the comms desk, looking down at it. She hadn’t touched anything.

‘You heard those clicks,’ she said.

‘Come on.’ I nudged her. ‘Let’s go see the penguin.’

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.