Page 3 of Mates for the Raskarrans #1-6

CHAPTER THREE

Liv

I t’s a fucking rain forest. Or, at least, what I assume a rainforest looks like from the tiny, faded pictures of them I’ve seen in my sister’s liberated contraband stash.

She didn’t just steal romance novels for her long, lonely nights.

Sometimes she’d smuggle out old encyclopaedias and textbooks.

The kind of things kids used to read back when they went to school.

She taught me my letters from paragraph long entries about pigs, platypuses and polar bears, and I learned that the world used to be an infinitely less sucky place.

Not going to lie, I kind of hated that knowledge at the time. When my world was the only one I knew, it was easier to accept. Being worked to the bone to do menial jobs for Mercenia Corp so the upper tiers of society can do whatever it is they do? That’s just my lot. Nothing more to it.

But there was more to it. Once upon a time there was such a thing as free education. And rainforests. Although, if they were as sticky and sweaty as this one, maybe I’ve not been missing out all that much on that front.

We’ve landed on a beach. I don’t know if we’re damn lucky we didn’t land in the ocean, or if the escape pod had some sort of programming to head for the nearest big open space.

Because the land here literally goes sand - trees.

There is no gradation, no transition. It’s sandy beach and then boom.

Ancient, gnarly looking tree trunks that stretch up, up, up into the sky above.

The air is alive with bird calls and animal noises and I am freaking the hell out, because I’ve never seen so much open space, so much wildness before.

“Think you could climb one of those?” I say to Khadija.

“It’s not quite the same as crate stacks,” she replies.

Not a no. Maybe there are fruits at the top of them, and Khadija could fetch them down for us. Fruit grows on trees, right? That’s how this nature shit works. Food doesn’t come in prepackaged boxes, perfectly proportioned with your daily dose of vitamins, minerals, birth control and tranquillisers.

I’m not a hundred percent sure about the tranquillisers, but I’ve always had my suspicions.

Why have an angry, dissatisfied workforce when one little ‘supplement’ can take all that troublesome rage right out of the equation?

I have no concrete evidence, but I’ve been off bottom tier rations for two weeks now, and I’m feeling pretty rage-y.

I have to wonder if it’s all the stress of the emergency landing, or if this is just the real me coming out to play.

Khadija heads over to where the rest of the girls are gathered in a sort of circle, huddling together as if round a fire.

Except there is no fire, because why would we need one?

It’s really, really hot. The sun overhead beats down, the air above the sand shimmering.

And worse, the air is so thick with moisture that I’m sweating profusely within seconds, trickles of it running down my neck and back, beads gathering on my forehead.

“Liv, are you okay?”

I look over and see Grace rising from where she’d been crouched next to Lorna. Lorna looks the kind of pale and sweaty that suggests she’s in pain. Her wrist is bound with someone’s ripped up sleeve, and her fingers look swollen.

“I’m fine. Stick with Lorna,” I say, waving her off.

Sure, my shoulders and chest hurt like hell after dangling in my restraints, but it’s just bruising. My scratches and scrapes can wait, too.

Grace nods. She’s not like the rest of us.

Slightly older - approaching thirty rather than early twenties.

Unlike bottom tier women, she looks youthful still, not craggy and weathered by chemicals, or overwork or underfeeding.

Her family were just high enough up the tiers that she could train in a field.

Not high enough to get a proper education - Grace probably can’t read anything except medicine bottles - but she can diagnose and treat most common illnesses.

She’s the person bottom tier workers go to see when they’ve turned ankles or snapped fingers, or been kept up several nights by the wracking cough you get from breathing in bad air all day every day.

Thinking about this makes me take a deep lungful of air and really pay attention as I do so.

It might be hot and humid, but it tastes nothing like the air back home - rancid and damp, tainted with chemicals and rotten trash.

Even recycled space ship air was better than that, though it had a strange, flat quality to it after a while that made the back of your throat sore.

Here, the air is abundant with scents and flavours. It smells like… like… Green.

It smells like green.

And we might be stranded on some jungle planet on the edge of a goddamned rainforest that’s probably full of monstrous predators just waiting for a little human snack, but for a moment, I really don’t care.

I don’t care if I drop dead. Because that green smell - it’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever experienced.

I drop to my knees and put my hands on the sand.

It’s almost scorching hot, but I scoop up a big handful of it, let the grains play through my fingers.

It tickles over my skin, so fine it feels soft.

I look round, and further down the beach, the sand goes darker, saturated with water from the gently lapping waves.

I scramble towards it, sinking my fingers into it.

“Is she alright?” someone says, not even trying to be discreet about it.

But fuck them, whoever they are.

“Are you quite done rolling round on the floor?” Khadija says, squatting down next to me.

“Khadija, we’re on the beach,” I say, grinning like a madwoman.

I knew we were the moment I left the escape pod, but the wonder of it is only just hitting me.

“If you say so,” she says, nudging at the ground with a look of distrust. “Are they always so… unstable?”

I glance back at the other women. They all look terrified - perfectly reasonable - but none of them are gazing round with any sort of wonder.

“The beach, Khadija,” I say again. “Did you never dream of going to the beach as a little kid?”

She just stares at me, as if I’ve lost my mind, then shuffles backwards as a wave rushes up the beach towards us. The cold water sluices over my hands, reminding me of how very hot I am.

I sit back, not minding how the water soaks through the seat of my jumpsuit and into my underwear, and start undoing my shoes, tugging them off and tossing them back up the beach. I lose the regulation socks, too, then scramble to my feet, running out towards the water.

Khadija grabs me by the arm and drags me back.

“What are you doing?” she says, voice sharp with a hint of fear.

“Cooling down,” I say, closing my eyes as the water laps over my toes.

God, it feels amazing. The water is cold, bubbling and frothing over my skin.

As the wave retreats, it takes the sand with it, the little grains grazing past my feet.

I sink a little, not enough to be alarming, just moving downward as the sand is sucked out from around me.

I wiggle my toes, the dark brown sand squelching upward between them.

In all my stolen moments of looking at pictures in my encyclopaedias, or reading about summer romances at the beach, I never imagined being on a beach could feel this good.

“Have you gone completely mad?” Khadija says, speaking straight into my ear.

I just laugh. “If I have, I don’t care. I never thought I’d see anything like this.”

I spread my arms, gesturing to the open ocean ahead of us.

It stretches all the way to the horizon, and the enormity of it is overwhelming.

If Khadija sees what I’m seeing, though, it’s not inspiring the same emotions.

She just grabs me even harder and drags me back up the beach.

I stumble, scalding my feet on the hot sand.

I skip back to grab my socks, pulling the cold, wet fabric over my burned skin.

It soothes it immediately, though the thought of putting my sodden feet in my boots doesn’t fill me with joy.

“We have no idea where we are,” Khadija says. “We have no idea what planet this even is. We’re lucky we can breathe the air. Who knows what might be living in that….”

She gestures at the waves.

“The ocean,” I say. “It’s the ocean.”

One of the other girls looks up.

“I’ve heard of the ocean,” she says. “My boss used to tell me stories about the ocean after we…”

She trails off, blushing. I can fill in the end of that sentence without her assistance. I only hope if he’s been filling her head with tales of the ocean that he was at least kind to her.

“Nothing dangerous is going to be living in this extremely shallow bit,” I say, but even as the words come out, my mind supplies encyclopaedia entries for poisonous fish and stinging jellies and sharp little urchins that could pierce skin.

I drop to the floor again, reaching for my boots. Getting them on over the damp socks isn’t easy, but the girls are right. Maybe I should be more cautious, maybe I shouldn’t let the smell of green and the feel of sand between my toes go straight to my head.

“Okay,” I say, getting to my feet. “I’ll behave from now on, I promise.”

“We need to think about supplies,” Khadija says.

“Mercenia will know the ship malfunctioned. They’ll know they need to go to their aid.

But if none of the crew survived, there won’t be anyone to tell them where they sent the escape pod.

It might be recorded on the systems, but we don’t know what the malfunction was.

If it was something to do with the computer systems… ”

“There might not be any trace,” I finish.

“But surely there will be some sort of tracker on the pod?” One of the other girls says.

“We better hope so,” Khadija says, “or we’re stuck here.”

I suspect there could be worse places to be stuck. At least it’s warm - a little too warm for my taste, but better that than freezing cold. Or somewhere with an atmosphere too thin for breathing, or a desert with no source of food or water available.

“We have plenty of water at least,” someone says.

“No,” I say. “You can’t drink sea water. It’s full of salt.”

Which is a cruelty, I realise. To be this close to such a large body of water and not be able to use it for sustenance.

“It’s really hot,” I say. “Humid. I think this is a rainforest, which means it will probably rain frequently. We can collect the rain to drink. Use some of the broken bits off the pod. Containers the supplies are in… What supplies do we even have? There must be some emergency provisions on an escape pod?”

If anyone has an answer to my question, they don’t give it. Their eyes focus on something behind me, fear making them go wide. I turn just as Ellie - one of our little troop of women who I hadn’t noticed was missing - drops the carcass of a large spiky looking thing at my feet.

“What the fuck is that?” I bark out.

Ellie just grins, a wildness in her eyes as she looks up at me.

“Dinner,” she says.