Filaria - Brent Hayward [63]
“What do they want with us?” Deidre breathed. “Why did they bring us here?” She sobbed. “Why?”
“Don’t know why they brought you here.”
The dark-eyed girl spoke calmly, looking over Deidre’s shoulder, into the middle distance. She had an unusual accent and her skin smelled of spices. For an instant, Deidre recalled the gram’s unusual accent (was that just yesterday?!), from back in her sanctum, but the inflections, the harshness of this girl’s voice, made it very different from that one. Covered by little more than dirty rags, her body was toned, muscular, tanned. Deidre wondered if she might be a barbarian.
Now those dark eyes turned. The girl said, “I don’t know if they brought you here to be my companion, my lover, or my dinner.”
Deidre recoiled.
“A joke, sister. Relax.” Still, no smile. “I’m not going to eat you, chickie. I don’t think they — ” gesturing towards the group of angels, who stood, still watching quietly, “ — know what makes us tick. They don’t know what they’re getting into. Maybe they want us to reproduce.” And, finally, the girl laughed, as if they were exchanging pleasantries up here. But her laugh was without mirth.
“Re . . .? But . . .?” Surely, to joke up here like this, to say these horrible things, this girl was crazy. “How long, how long have you been here?”
“Days.” A noise of disgust. “You know, I don’t think they wanna hurt us, if that’s what you’re worried about. They haven’t hurt me yet.” Turning away again.
Deidre whispered, “How do you know they won’t?” Over the girl’s shoulder, another dizzy view of miniatures: a threadlike road, houses no bigger than breadcrumbs. The sky, arcing down in a great slow curve to meet the horizon.
Thin clouds scudded beneath the nest.
“I know men,” the girl said, under her breath.
As confounded by this as she was by everything about the stranger, Deidre peeked down again, through a gap in the nest, at a sliver of sun-yellowed land. She said, “My name is Deidre. What’s yours?”
For a long time Deidre thought she would get no answer except the wind and the angel’s muted chatter but at last the girl said, “Mingh straw. Though that’s not my real name. It’s my stage name.”
She really was pretty, Deidre decided. And with the wind playing through her hair, and light on her plump face, it was as though Mingh straw believed they were sitting in a courtyard together, relaxing, a glass of powdered orangeade in one hand.
“Did they set fire to the world? Did the angels do that to us?”
“Us? To us? You live down there, on that level?”
Deidre thought: maybe the girl isn’t crazy; maybe she’s just simple. “Yes. Elegia is there. At least, it was. My father is an Orchard Keeper.” Seeking some sign of softness, of compassion. “Look, my mother and my sisters . . .”
Pride made her fight the emotion coiling inside her. She angrily wiped at her eyes. Still the girl stared, unreadable, and Deidre felt another dimension of fear opening up inside her. Was she alone, despite this strange company? Because of this strange company? Was she all the more alone up here? “I don’t think my family is dead,” Deidre said, unprompted, wiping snot from her lip. “They’re not dead.”
“What’s Elegia?”
“Our estate. Our family home.”
“Estate?” Mingh straw snorted. “You live on an estate? I’m from Hoffmann City. Know where that is?”
“No.”
“Seven levels down. Where the water’s stored.”
“Seven?” Deidre had never taken a lift below the plantations. Just one level. Below that was forbidden, dangerous.
“I’d never seen that place before, up under the suns. Never seen the suns. Not until these miserable things lifted me out of the shaft opening. I had never seen the suns.” Mingh straw indicated the nearby celestial furnace, burning out to the left, shining daylight down over the land below. The air was certainly hot here, yet surprisingly they had not been