Honor - Kevin Killiany [11]
There were a dozen things she could see that would have made short work of her prison. The closest was three meters out of reach.
“Since I can’t get myself out,” Pattie explained to a neighbor with reddish fur or feathers, she wasn’t sure which, “I’ll have to convince our host that I don’t belong here.”
The neighbor seemed to agree. At least it bobbed up and down several times, which seemed to indicate assent.
Thus encouraged, Pattie began cleaning out her cage. The neat piles of vegetation were transferred, still neatly arranged, outside her cage. She then improvised a shovel from a panel torn from the packing crate and scooped as much of the dirt as she could from the enclosure. It wasn’t as neat, shoving the dirt through the mesh, but she did her best to ensure it was clearly an organized effort and not the random behavior of an animal. What she couldn’t get out she swept into a neat pile in one corner of the cage.
By the time she was done the room full of cages had become almost dark. Though she could see no windows from where she was, Pattie suspected the illumination was natural. Either a storm was coming or night was falling. The gradual dimming and the lack of wind noises convinced her it was nightfall.
So did the falling temperature. It had been over twenty when she had awakened. Now it felt closer to ten. Not cold, but cooler than she liked.
Particularly in her exhausted state. Whatever her injuries from the tunnel’s collapse, not to mention the stress of events leading up to it, the toll on her system had been high. Pattie felt the stiffness in her joints and the ache in her muscles. She knew she had very little left in the way of reserves.
Though she hated to do anything that might be mistaken for animal behavior, Pattie decided to take advantage of the insulation the packing box offered. Curling up in her makeshift shelter, Pattie settled down for the night.
Chapter
6
Apparently having decided she was well enough to forgo being tightly bound in blankets, her three nurses let Corsi sleep unencumbered through the night. At least she assumed it was night. In a windowless room lit by a basket of glowing yarn, it was hard to tell. Sticking her head out the low doorway proved her nurses doubled as guards; all three of them were asleep across the only other exit from the next chamber.
In the morning Lefty presented her with a wooden bowl of water and a pack of survival rations. Predictably, the seal of the pack had been ignored and the foil sliced open.
“That had to be sharp,” Corsi said. “How many of these did you mangle before you figured out what it was?”
There were only four in the emergency jump harness’s survival kit. Two thousand calories of essential nutrients and vitamins each, along with a half-dozen water purification pills, good for a liter each.
The bowl was a bit more than half a liter, but she wasn’t going to try and split one of the tiny tablets. She dropped it in, accepting the metallic taste as fair trade for the knowledge she wasn’t ingesting any unwelcome microbes.
As she ate, she demonstrated the pouch’s unseal and reseal feature to the chiptaurs. This led to another round of left ear brushing. Corsi tentatively decided the gesture meant either wow! or arrgh!
After brunch, Head Nurse, Lefty, and Spot led Corsi through a series of small chambers that opened abruptly into a large indoor amphitheater. At least that was her first impression. Her second was that she was in the root system of a giant banyan tree.
Apparently realizing she needed time to take it all in, her nurses paused and made gestures that seemed to invite her to look around. Corsi did, turning in place as she surveyed her new surroundings.
Around three-quarters of the edges of a roughly oval clearing about two hundred meters across its long axis, columns of wood several meters thick rose from the ground to meet what appeared to be a network of even wider branches some thirty meters overhead. There was no sky, though the foliage above glowed with a diffuse green