(eng) Martha Wells - Emilie 02 by Emilie & the Sky World

Author:Emilie & the Sky World [Emilie & World, the Sky]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

She squinted up at the tree canopy overhead. The light hadn’t changed at all. Or she had slept through a whole day… She dragged the pack open and got the portable aether-compass out. The clock on it showed that only a few hours had passed. She let her breath out in relief and shook Efrain’s foot.

He groaned. Hyacinth flinched, then popped upright, waving its arms wildly. “It’s all right,” Emilie told it. “You fell asleep.”

The blossoms’ wild motion slowed, and it sank down again and drooped. Emilie wondered what had happened to it, if the other flower people crew members were trapped here somewhere, too. If they were, surely it would be looking for them, not following us around. It was acting as if it was stuck and staying with them was its only option.

She wondered how long it had been trapped alone on the aether-sailer.

Efrain was sitting up and scrubbing his hands through his hair. Emilie told him, “Come on; we need to go.”

“Go where?” Efrain said, still groggy. “We don’t know how to find them.”

“We know they went in this direction.” Emilie stood, shouldering the professor’s pack along with her own. She had marked the direction on the aether-compass before they had left the clearing. Without a smoke beacon to follow, keeping to a straight course through the forest would have been difficult. At least this way they knew they were heading in the same direction that Miss Marlende and the professor had been taken away in, and not just going in circles.

After a few minutes of trudging after her, Efrain said, “Who could have taken them? If this place has been just put together from chunks of other places that got picked up in the aether currents like we think, there wouldn’t be any people still alive here. They would have run out of food and water pretty quickly. Unless a whole lake got taken with them.”

It showed the sleep had made Efrain’s brain start working again. That was a relief. “Unless they were taken recently, like we were.”

Efrain frowned down at his boots. “But you don’t think they’re friendly, because they didn’t let Miss Marlende leave us a note, and the professor left her pack behind.”

Emilie nodded. To give them both something else to think about, she said, “Maybe they’re pirates.” Pirate adventure stories had been Efrain’s favorite when he was younger. Emilie had thought that if there were really that many pirates, there wouldn’t be any shipping at all, since the stories implied hundreds more ships than the Menaen navy had ever needed. But then she remembered how much Efrain had changed in the past year. She didn’t even know if he still read those stories.

But Efrain said, with relish, “Or ghosts.”

“Ghost pirates,” Emilie suggested. Impulsively, she smiled at Efrain, and he smiled back. Hyacinth waved its blossoms at them, as if it felt it should participate but had no idea how.

Then Emilie blinked and looked back at the compass. It had been a long time since she and Efrain had smiled at each other.

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