Filaria - Brent Hayward [13]
Sam’s tiny device circled and circled, preceding Deidre from the grove and over the wheatgrass field, wanting her to move. Don’t get caught! Hurry! Hurry!
She thought she heard her name being called, faintly, in her father’s flat baritone.
A giant water filter, standing high over them, turned its head to watch the girl and the bird dash across fallow soil and through a tiny wood, to pause in the radish fields. Stretching to the north, and fading into the last of the morning mists: other plantations, jurisdictions of other Orchard Keepers. And two more lift shafts, mere guy wires from this distance. Beyond were lands unknown. Renegade settlements. Strange people, those the Orchard Keeper called barbarians. Civilized people, such as Deidre’s family, lived above, in estates, directly under the suns. This level was for farming. And below?
Deidre shivered.
Among the tubers hovered three workers, spraying fertilizer. Light glinted off their flanks. They bade Deidre good morning with nodding motions. Pressing on once more, she tried to ignore them. Drudges like these would never think to inform the Orchard Keeper they had seen Deidre passing, a bag clenched tight in her hands and one of the supervisor’s birds flying frenetically at her side. Certainly her father would never condescend to ask them if they’d seen anything.
Her sanctum was beyond the radish fields. She had discovered the place several summers ago, while exploring the plantations, shortly after her father had been elected to the position of Orchard Keeper. A narrow aperture between two boulders opened up into a crooked hall, the kind with hard, smooth walls, and a low ceiling, just like a hall inside a small house. From this budded five successively smaller rooms, an arrangement seemingly designed expressly for children or very tiny adults. When she had first found the sanctum, these rooms were devoid of anything except dust. Now she kept her moth collection in the last chamber, which was an area barely big enough for the short counter and knee-high cabinet she had dragged in. Deidre had to stand with the door forced open, stooped, her backside sticking out.
After gradually befriending the bizarre and lonely plantation supervisor that summer, Deidre had asked about the rooms. Sam, as the console had asked to be called, assured her that, to the best of his knowledge, no machines or people had been inside the area for as long as he had been aware. At least, not that he could remember. In fact, he had seemed surprised to learn of the rooms’ existence and had no good ideas as to what the area had been constructed for in the first place, nor even if he had ever been aware of them before Deidre’s inquiry. Unable to see within, he had bluebirds flutter inside and out for a full day, mapping and investigating, and reporting back.
Deidre moved in right away, bringing some light furniture, a few notebooks, a doll or two. Artefacts brought down from Elegia that made her feel more comfortable. She drew a mandala, her personal glyph — selected from an ancient printout — carefully over the walls, so that the chain of tiny rooms became a palace in the kingdom over which Deidre reigned, a place where she was princess, a home where she was the eldest sister.
Cramped inside, breathless from the run, but grinning, she put her satchel down on the small counter. Taking out the killing jar, rolling it slowly, so she could see the moth better: the body thumped softly against the glass. She placed the jar next to the satchel and carefully folded back the sleeves of her blouse. Catacola bianca would require her largest spreading board. She retrieved this, which she had made herself, from