The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) by Peadar Ó Guilín

Author:Peadar Ó Guilín [Ó Guilín, Peadar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

PART TWO: UNDER THE SUN

CHAPTER 18: Making Enemies

The Warship ruin glittered in the light of the topmouth shaded his eyes with one hand while bouncing his daughter with the other. She was chewing the leather strap that held her firm against him, her drool running down his shoulder.

"You like that, little one?" Flamehair she was called, despite her dark colouring and the fact that it was unnatural to name a child before she could walk more than a few steps. Other children played near the wreckage and not all of them were human. A Fourlegger pounced in amongst them and that too, was wrong, or, as Indrani would have said, "new."

"Well, love?" His wife had arrived. He felt an arm snake around him from the far side and he smiled, couldn't help it. None of the strangeness mattered. He had everything a man could want.

"It's the hole," he said, nodding upwards. "The one you burned in the Roof."

"With the Warship's lasers. Yes, love."

"It's bigger," he said. "It's growing."

"That's just your imagination, Stopmouth. It was huge to begin with. As large as a city. But..." she sighed. "I keep thinking of all the people we must have killed when we did that. We—"

They'd had this conversation before. "Those people were dead already," he insisted. "You know that. Or dying. Look at the rest of the Roof! Look!" He pointed away from the sun-filled gap and out towards the hills beyond. Here and there, a few tracklights still worked or blinked on and off. But the rest of the world lay smothered under a thick blanket of darkness. The Roof was gone for good, along with all those who had remained in it.

But down on the surface, although Diggers waited just beyond the hills, down here there was a chance to survive. The sun dropped warmth and light through the massive gap Indrani had created. And the crashed Warship had brought with it little kernels of magic called "seeds" that could be tricked into making food. It would take time, apparently, despite the fact that the seeds had been altered in ways beyond his understanding to grow faster. There were rations too. Disgusting stuff, and not enough to feed everybody, but they would help a lot until the harvests came along.

It better work, he thought. There are too many of us now who don't know one end of a spear from another.

Toiling in the glare of the sun, hundreds of Newcomers, woken from the freezing boxes in which they had thought to sleep for generations, were clearing rocks away and pulling up plants. Another group, faces screwed up in disgust, raided latrine pits for excrement, while still others, cursed and wrestled with a thing called a pump that produced water out of nothing.

Indrani sniggered. "Oh, they're paying the price now! Look at them!"

He wished she wasn't so open with her distaste for these people, but he was finding it hard to care right now. The warmth and the strange new light had a lovely relaxing effect on him.

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