Unclaimed by Erin McCole Cupp

Author:Erin McCole Cupp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, cyberpunk, Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre retelling, Jane Eyre retold, retelling, classics retold
Publisher: Erin McCole Cupp
Published: 2016-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Aidann didn't need to touch the scroll to speak its words. The way she said them, with a whispered confidence, spoke of years of repetition. I could tell by the way her features lifted, almost in a smile, that this repetition was nothing like the blank-faced staring I imagined was generated by dorf-crash. This was something chosen, intentional.

“Is that—” I paused, pitched my voice to a murmur, “—is that a Catholic prayer?”

This new trance broke. She frowned again, as if answering required great effort. “It's part of what I believe.”

I kicked at the dust again. “I don't believe in anything I can't see.”

Her eyebrow lifted again, but so did her smile. “Can you see the wind? Can you see your heart or lungs?”

I snorted. “Yeah, if you open me up!”

“That's right,” she said, her voice metered, as if her vocal cords were humming over the wonder inspired by my derision. She repeated, “That's right. The more you open up, the more of yourself you see.”

“What does that mean?” I was getting irritable again.

“Open up,” she repeated, and she began to draw a character on the ground with her toe. I soon recognized it as the Chinese character feng, wind. “Be honest and see everything. See the wind's power to move things around. Fleuvbleu tells us not to be like stone. She's right. Stone might look strong, but it erodes.”

“That's why we're supposed to be like water,” I parroted.

“Water,” Aidann said, her voice verging on the shadows of disdain. She stood and reached for the rope, pulling the bucket up from the well.

I stood with her and watched. “What are you doing? Are you thirsty?”

She pulled, the bucket heavy within her grasp. “Watch.”

Then she carefully poured a trickle from the bucket lip onto the stones of the well wall. It cut a thin course down the rocks to pool in the dust below. Then she rested the bucket back on the ledge.

Squatting, she pointed at the dark mini-river along the wall. “See how it just goes any which way the rocks tell it to go? It has no mind of its own. Now, watch again.”

Once more, Aidann poured a few drops of water onto the same place she had before. “What do you see?” she asked.

“It went the same way as the first water you poured. Well, the stuff that didn't get absorbed by the rocks.”

“Have you ever seen a tornado?”

“On nature casts. DisasterNet.”

“So you know what I'm talking about. Water just follows water,” Aidann said, “but wind gets its power from the world around it, from the clash of cold and heat, and once it starts, nothing can stop it.”

I toddled my head back and forth, trying to grasp what she was saying. “Where did you learn all this stuff?”

With her elbow, Aidann knocked the bucket back into the well. It jerked the rope tightly as it fell. “Contract pickups,” she said. “We don't just weave and run transactions for our customers. We also run other info that customers don't want phreaked.

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