The End of The World by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Author:Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: WMG Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2013-01-30T05:00:00+00:00

Then

She didn’t know what Jess Taylor meant by the humans getting to him, and he wouldn’t say. He paced around the front part of the cabin, poured some water from a pitcher into a glass, and drank.

Then he stared at her.

She wondered if he was sorry he’d helped her. Maybe he would turn her in.

Maybe she would scream.

She wanted to beg him to keep her, beg him to help her. But she didn’t. Daddy used to say that people who begged didn’t deserve help. They had to help themselves.

Only she couldn’t do that, not without knowing what had happened. The answers weren’t simple. Her home was gone—she knew that much. When the shanties burned, hers would’ve burned with it. Daddy always kept water near the candles. He used to say, This place is so primitive and so badly built that we’re going to die here in a stupid fire because we couldn’t get to it in time.

He’d been wrong about them dying. None of them had died in that cabin, although she wasn’t sure about the others, the people who lived in the shanties where the fires started.

She wished Daddy were here now. She wished he would talk to Jess Taylor, grown one to grown one. They would understand each other. They would know what had happened and what would happen next.

“Do you eat?” Jess Taylor asked. He swished the water around in his glass. He was still looking at her that funny way.

She had to form a mouth. She had lost it while he’d been pacing. Her body wasn’t sure what form to take so it was taking several at once, which made her dizzy.

“I eat,” she said.

“I mean, do you eat what we eat?”

“When I look like you,” she said. Her people’s food had gone away when she was really, really little. They had to become like the humans just so that they could take in human nourishment.

“When you look like me,” Jess Taylor repeated. “How about the way you look now?”

“I’m not anything now,” she said. “I need to be something to take in food.”

Something she understood. Something whose systems were somewhat compatible. Daddy and the other scientists had to work for a while to make their systems work like a human’s. They still had to make changes—changes she didn’t understand.

Daddy said she was lucky. She started changing into human form really young, so it would be ingrained. If she had to hide, she could hide as one of them forever because her body was used to their strangeness.

His never would be. Some of the older people got really sick in the first years.

Some of the older people died.

“How often do you have to eat?” Jess Taylor asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Whenever you do, I guess.”

Because she always ate when Momma did. She was too young to pick her own times to eat. Eating had to be trained like everything else.

“Wonderful,” he said in that low voice of his, the one no one else was supposed to hear.

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