“You mean they’re…,” Maia caught herself before she finished that thought in front of the little ones.
“Dunno,” Chui said. “We’ve been afraid to go back there with the kids, you know, in case there’s any ETs left over there.”
Jake glowered at him, as if saying too much might bring their worst fears to pass. Maia picked her head up and looked at Noah. He nodded.
“We’re on our way down to Port Lucie to see if we can find a raft to take over to the big island. Or maybe build one out of whatever scrap we find down there.”
“You wanna come along?” Noah offered. “It just means building a bigger raft.”
“We only got a dozen bullets between us,” Jake moaned. “If we come across any ETs that won’t be hardly enough.”
“We got nine between us,” Noah said. “But most of ‘em are incendiary rounds. I think that’ll be enough for any ETs we run across. But, to tell the truth, I doubt there’s any left over there.”
“What makes you say that?” Chui asked.
“Because we haven’t heard anything in months. If they’d survived, we would’ve heard. Once the ships crashed, they were out of time.”
Chui glanced nervously at Jake, seemingly as frightened of the prospect of taking them up on their offer as of not doing it. When Jake finally nodded, Maia realized how young they were, hardly adults at all—little more than callow adolescents. “It’s so easy to misread people,” she thought.
“C’mon, guys,” she said, with a merry note in her voice. “Let’s go find your mom.”
The journey down the river felt like going home, even if she had no idea where, or even what, home was. But she had a large party to take care of—no longer just herself—and there were kids, too. All her ferocity, her ingenuity, and her alertness could be deployed once again, to protect her new “family” without any of the bedeviling reservations and paradoxes that had beset her since Nero.
And Noah didn’t fail to notice. One moonless night, under a rock ledge curtained with vines, while the others slept under a blanket of fronds around the embers of a dying fire, Maia kept watch. He crept over to her.
“You seem content,” he whispered.
“I feel better. The world doesn’t seem so empty.”
“What’s different? Is it finding the boys?”
“I dunno. Maybe. It’s just that I feel like I have a purpose again, something to live for.”
“What’s our purpose now,” he asked, genuinely curious.
“I haven’t a clue,” she laughed. “Whatever it is, at least it feels like it’s leading me somewhere.”
“To the big island, you mean?”
“Nah, bigger than that… way bigger.”
“Am I part of this bigger purpose?”
“Of course you are, dummy,” she said, and grabbed his head to push her face into his. With eyes wide, she nuzzled a nostril against his cheek, and then her lips brushed his hairy mouth and her eyes drifted shut as she dreamt of eternity, if only for an instant. When she let go of his face to look at him, he seemed all out of focus, like he’d forgotten everything except the sensation of her mouth touching his.
She patted his cheek and said “Your watch,” then darted for the nearest tree, which she scampered up almost as fast as her little brother. Other concerns would have to wait. At the top of the canopy, she poked her head through the last layer of foliage, gazed at the vastness of the starry heavens and said “Thanks, Mom.”
*
By day, Jacques Antoine is a professor at a small college in the southwest, by night he writes thrillers. At first, he wrote "kung fu" tales just for his daughter, when she was a little ninja studying karate. As she grew up, the tales evolved into full-length novels focusing on the dilemmas of young adults in extreme circumstances. His latest series, Taking Back Earth, follows Maia, a young woman burdened with the task of protecting humanity's last hope in the aftermath of an alien invasion.
When he's not writing or teaching, he enjoys walking his dogs in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains outside Santa Fe.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6433641.Jacques_Antoine
*
More Than a Couple of Camels
Suzy Stewart Dubot
Chapter 1
London, 1818
Bathsheba Baxter pushed her eyeglasses higher on her nose as she prepared to peer at the painting. Usually, she did not appear in public wearing the glasses as she felt that they were a sign of weakness and were certainly not flattering. Their use was normally reserved for reading in the privacy of her home, but today the picture had caught her attention the moment she had entered the room. Being in the museum's art gallery, she felt that if anyone were to see her, she with her glasses might be mistaken for the intelligentsia.
When she had reached that nearness which allowed her to bring the figure on the canvas into focus, she jumped back.
“Oh!” She said rather more loudly than she would have liked. She looked around to see if anyone had heard her exclamation due to the startling image of a naked woman. That in itself might have passed without too much ado if there hadn't been a satyr standing next to the woman with a hand on her bared buttock.
Bathsheba quickly removed the glasses, folded them and placed them in a case taken from her reticule, all as she eased away from the shocking painting.
“It is always a good idea to take a programme,” a man's voice spoke to her, “which should give you fair warning as to the picture's content.
“According to this,” he waved the programme for her benefit, “this one's entitled 'The Satyr's Seduction'.”
The man was standing with his back to the bright light of the windows and Bathsheba couldn't at first see him clearly. She had to look up, so knew he was fairly tall.
“Are you speaking to me, sir? Do I know you?”
He chuckled.