Lay of the Land by Seanan McGuire

Lay of the Land by Seanan McGuire

Author:Seanan McGuire [McGuire, Seanan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-10-22T04:00:00+00:00


They had been walking for no more than ten minutes when Thomas Price made his mind up about two very different, very important things. The first was that Alice was absolutely a Healy: she might look like her Carew forefathers, but she had the Healy smile, the Healy way of walking, and most of all, the Healy tendency to charge headlong into potential danger without pausing to look to either the right or left. The second was that it was a miracle she had lived as long as she had. Her mother—whoever that had been—must have brought something extra to the table, some indefinable degree of preternaturally good luck that she had then passed on to her daughter. It was honestly the only explanation for Alice still being among the living.

Case in point: she was standing some five feet away from him, a large stick in her hand, attempting to goad a boulder into attacking her. She was accomplishing this by poking the boulder briskly before dancing backward, almost losing her balance several times in the process. He was considering the relative merits of telling his local guide that he was tired of watching her taunt the rocks when the boulder had finally had enough. It split into several dozen palm-sized scorpions, all of them clacking their claws like castanets, and went scuttling off into the underbrush, leaving Alice laughing in its—their—in the boulder’s wake.

“See?” she said, sounding altogether too pleased with herself. “That’s what an igneous scorpion nest looks like. You gotta hit the rocks a few times before you sit down, or they’ll bite your butt right off.”

“I see,” he said faintly. He was going to have to get himself in Alexander’s good graces. If he didn’t obtain access to whatever field guides the elder Healy had composed since moving to Buckley, he wasn’t going to survive to falsify his first report back to the Covenant. “How were they, ah, discovered?”

“Some local kids didn’t hit the rocks before they sat down,” said Alice. “Closed casket funerals are pretty common among the families that live on the edge of the woods. Nobody talks about it. What good would it do?”

“If people are being killed by creatures—” he began, and stopped as Alice whirled on him, looking actively angry for the first time.

“You mean if people are going into the woods and bothering perfectly normal critters that are just trying to have normal lives?” she asked. “It’s one thing if the critters come into town and bother folks at home, but when you come into their habitat and make trouble, it’s your fault when bad stuff happens. The scorpions that killed those kids got killed right back, and you know what happened? Big explosion in the swamp hagfish population. Killed ten people. Everything’s connected. Until we understand those connections, we can’t just go around killing things!”

Thomas blinked slowly. “I was going to suggest posting signs warning people of quicksand and other believable hazards, but I appreciate your passion for conservation. I’m sure it will serve you well in your chosen profession.



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.