Perilous Waif (Alice Long #1)
E. William Brown
Chapter 1
My last day at the Benevolent Goddess orphanage started out full of promise. I greeted the dawn from a perch high atop the tallest housetree in the complex, happily enjoying the fruits of my latest hunt. As Felicity’s sun cleared the horizon I looked up into the warm yellow glow with the contentment that comes only from the prospect of a full belly.
My roommate, Dika, told me the other kids just saw a bright glare when they looked into the sun. Their loss. Having a giant ball of nuclear fire hanging in the sky was just too cool for words, and there was always something interesting going on up there. Today I could see an especially pretty solar prominence, a ghostly streamer of hot gas rising so high it looked like it might escape the sun entirely.
I smiled, and tore another bite out of the zango I’d caught in my little pre-dawn hunting expedition. I was supposed to be asleep in bed, of course. But sometimes my cravings got too strong to ignore, especially when I was going through a growth spurt. The matrons didn’t mean to starve anyone, but the house bots had never been programmed with a metabolism like mine in mind. So every now and then I’d sneak out to indulge my hunting instincts, and catch a little extra food with my own hands.
I would have felt bad about eating a squirrel, and monkeys would be too weird. I usually hunted zangos, a kind of vicious furry predator that hunted monkeys in the forest canopy. They had long limbs for jumping from tree to tree, and big hooked claws for catching things. The security bots mostly ignored them, since they were nocturnal and good little orphans weren’t supposed to be out of their beds at night anyway. Killing one without getting any scratches that might give me away was a challenge, but I’d managed it.
Yay me. The mighty huntress triumphs again.
I bit down on a rib, crunching it between my teeth and savoring the tangy flavor. Yum. So many things in there that I didn’t get from the vegetarian diet the matrons served. But was it enough?
I closed my eyes, and pulled up my internal management interface.
I had a lot of enhancements, but this was one of the fanciest ones I knew about. A rotating three-dimensional image of myself appeared in my mind’s eye, showing every detail of my physical condition.
I was getting awfully skinny. I’d been shooting up like a weed this past year, gaining a centimeter or more every month until I could easily pass for a teenager. I didn’t mind that so much, but growing so fast burned through a lot of calories. I’d ended up with a willowy, fragile-looking build that I wasn’t at all happy with. I was a predator, darn it. I wasn’t supposed to look completely harmless.
“At least I don’t look boring,” I mused.
The natives of Felicity were all the same morph type, a custom job the original colonists had commissioned to help make their weird little society work. The dryads were small and slender, with round faces and soft features. Most of the orphans here at Benevolent Goddess were that type, with the usual brown skin and dark green hair. They all blended together into a sea of bland sameness to me. A herd of pastel prey animals grazing contentedly under the trees.
No one would ever mistake me for one of them. My narrow face and high cheekbones would have stood out even without the bright violet eyes. My hair was a wild mop of jet black that fell well past my shoulders, instead of the natural pixie cut that was normal here. Even my skin stood out, a pale white with just the slightest hint of a tan despite a life spent mostly outdoors.
Well, I could have let myself tan if I’d wanted to. But my skin didn’t do it naturally, and by the time I’d grown up enough to use my morph interface I’d decided I liked standing out. I never wanted to be mistaken for a native.
Offworlders like me were a minority at the orphanage, but a surprisingly big one. Felicity didn’t normally allow immigrants, but there was a loophole for orphans that the Federation Navy apparently liked to take advantage of. There were about thirty of us here at Benevolent Goddess, and no two were alike. We had everything from spacer kids with zero-gee adaptations to full-on animal morphs. Too bad we had even less in common with each other than with the dryads, or we might have stuck together more.
Oh, who am I kidding? You can’t put that many kids in one place and not have them break up into a bunch of cliques.
I put that thought aside, and dug deeper into my interface. There was a whole thicket of yellow malnutrition warnings, complaining that my diet here wasn’t giving my body everything it needed to grow. From what I’d read that was one of the problems with extreme morph types like me. When you design a body that grows all kinds of exotic cyberwear as it develops, it ends up needing to eat things that a normal human wouldn’t.
I worked my way through the rest of the rib, and watched the calcium deficiency warning slowly fade away. Some of the other warnings were losing urgency too. So maybe I just needed to get more meat in my diet?
Well, no. There were a bunch of other warnings that weren’t budging. What the heck was ‘MGE feedstock’, anyway? Or ‘P-group supplements’? Sometimes I really wonder what mom was thinking when she decided to give me all this stuff.
My musings were interrupted by a familiar voice.
“Alice? Are you up there?”
I peeked over the edge of the branch I was sitting on, and found Dika’s exasperated face peering out the window of our dorm room twenty meters below.
“Um, hi?”
She leaned further out of the window to glare up at me. “What are you doing, you nut? Wait, is that blood on your face?”
“Oops.”
I licked my fingers clean, and rubbed ineffectually at my face. I should have had another thirty minutes or so to finish my kill and get cleaned up. What was my roommate doing awake already?
A moment later I heard the scrabble of claws on the housetree’s rough bark, and then Dika was pulling herself onto the branch beside me.
Thankfully, my roommate was another foreign kid instead of one of the locals. The other girls called her a data rat, and liked to make fun of her for having a tail. Me, I didn’t think there was anything raftlike about her.