As Blue Speck scuttled through the forest, Keddi leaped over roots and rocks to follow. Fungus, she thought, when the scrabbler halted near a tree with broad leaves and turned over the greenish earth faster than a shovel. The creature stepped aside to reveal a trove of pink whorls, which she lifted out, leaving behind a few tendrils to grow into a new cluster. Together they pushed the earth back into the hole before stopping to divide the spoils.
She’d once asked her father why people didn’t behave as fairly as the scrabblers. A flash of anger had passed over his face before he answered through a clenched jaw, “We can’t afford to be generous—the settlement wouldn’t survive. Anyway, they don’t have a moral code, just the instincts of a communal species.”
When Blue Speck slid the clumps into two equal piles, she wondered how her father could be so sure, as he hadn’t gotten within thirty meters of a living scrabbler since he was sixteen. Keddi stowed half the fungus in her rucksack and carried the rest to the place where the scrabblers gathered at the end of the day. After leaving it on a pile of foraged food, she exchanged a dip and raise of the head with Blue Speck and the others before walking away.
The late day sun shone painfully bright on the cleared ring around the settlement. She pressed her hand to the lockplate to unlatch a door in the wooden stockade, then shut it behind her and took her sack to the food lab.
Dane was sorting fruit and fungus at the intake table. “You’re last in—I hope you closed the gate.”
“Yes, ‘Papa’,” she answered, emptying her haul into a bin. He’d often forgotten when they were younger, and her reminders had kept him out of trouble more than once.
“It won’t be funny if the scrabblers attack while we’re asleep.”
“You do remember they’re diurnal?”
Dane sneered. “Go ahead, be a smartass. It’s not as if you have any adult responsibilities.”
“Everyone knows they’ll never come within thirty meters of the enclosure.”
He flushed an ugly red, and Keddi walked away before he could recover enough to reply. She’d had enough of being treated like a toddler by someone six months younger, not that lashing back made her feel better for more than a moment.
After changing clothes in her sleep space, she came out to find her mother had returned to the family’s rooms. “You’re going to have to do it sometime, Keddi. You can’t stay a child forever, and the settlement needs your skills.”
“I’ll work anywhere the supervisors assign me.”
“A knife through the central eye, that’s all it takes,” her mother continued, repeating what she’d said hundreds of times that year, “then drag the carcass back to the enclosure. It feels horrible—I won’t lie to you—but it’s over in an instant. And you’ll be an adult afterwards.”
She knew the litany by heart: she’d turned eighteen five months earlier, people were beginning to blame her parents, everyone had to obey the rules, her younger brother might one day follow her poor example . . . .
Keddi’s family sat with those who still had children under sixteen, while she ate by herself, shunned by the young adults. The settlement’s biologist was the only other person sitting alone, just as she always did. Three of Keddi’s friends huddled together at the end of one table, not quite belonging anywhere themselves yet. A few weeks after her eighteenth birthday, the supervisors had asked her not to sit or talk with them anymore.
Stab Blue Speck or stay a child in the eyes of the settlement—it made no sense. The scrabblers never threatened anyone, and without the food they helped the children find, the settlement would fail.
By what twisted logic did people consider it perfectly safe for children as young as six to wander the forest with the scrabblers for several hours every day, while the gate to the enclosure had to remain shut at all times to keep those same scrabblers from getting in and hurting the settlers in some unspecified way? The three-meter wall and palmprint locks struck Keddi as equally ridiculous. Scrabblers could be kept out with a barrier half as a high and a latch designed for human hands.
“What would they do to us?” she’d asked a supervisor once, when Dane had been punished for forgetting to close the gate.
“You’ll understand when you’re older.”
Keddi still didn’t, although she now knew that “when you’re older” had always really meant “once you’ve killed a scrabbler.”
How did anyone live with that?
The next morning, Keddi palmed the screen in her family’s small gathering room to call up a few documents she hadn’t read among those she was allowed to access. Several hours later, she’d learned nothing that mattered. What she really wanted were logs from the early days of the settlement, but she was locked out until recognized as an adult.
She headed for the forest as soon as the midday meal was over. The first goldfruit would be ripening in an enormous patch she and Blue Speck had found at an hour’s walk from the enclosure. The large berries contained so little copper they didn’t have to be processed, and everyone welcomed fresh fruit, since they couldn’t spare much room for it in the hydroponic sheds. Well before she reached the bushes, Blue Speck scuttled to her side. Keddi had begun to suspect scrabblers located humans and told them apart by scent, and she wondered if that was why none would come within thirty meters of a human who’d killed one. The biologist’s closed face had discouraged her from asking about it.
With Blue Speck’s help in shaking the low branches to dislodge ripened fruit, she filled two sacks and walked back to the glade. A few scrabblers clustered around one somewhat younger than Blue Speck. It was very small and had never foraged well or paired with any of the settlement’s children, but now it seemed to have grown even weaker, resting on its belly rather than its legs. Keddi wished there were something she could do. As she prepared to empty one of the sacks, an adult began clicking and scuttled to a spot near the frail one, so she walked over and waited. When it remained still, she poured some berries onto the ground, and Blue Speck pushed them toward the sick scrabbler.
As she carried her share to the settlement, she met the three other tweeners not far from the forest’s edge. They’d once done everything together, along with Dane and several others who’d already become adults.
“We’ve been wanting to talk to you,” said Frelin. “We hope you can find a way not to . . . .” Nel and Sorvi nodded.
“I don’t want to kill Fuzzi,” Sorvi blurted, as he blushed and ducked his head. “Stupid name.”
“Blue Speck’s not much better.”
“Or Shovel Foot,” added Nel.
“At least they’re based on something real.”
“Six-year-olds shouldn’t be allowed to name anything,” said Frelin with a laugh. “Spot Leg? It’s like the names we called our plushies. Someone should make us wait until we have sense enough to do it properly.”
For a moment, being together was almost like it had always been, except for what none of them could ignore. Keddi still felt sick when she remembered her sixteenth birthday. “But people hardly ever mention the scrabblers, unless they’re punishing someone for not closing the gate—or when we turn sixteen. They act like we should be able to do this as easily as giving up our plushies. What’s the point of it?”
“We’ve talked about that a lot,” said Sorvi, “since you started holding out.”
“It doesn’t make sense. All the anthro files I’ve read describe people on other worlds taking care of species who help them or transport them or provide food. I wish I knew how this started. But I can’t see the logs until . . . .” Keddi shrugged.
Sorvi looked at Frelin. “Can you worm your way in?”
“No. There are things I can get to that I’m not technically allowed to see, but not handprint-protected docs. Someone really doesn’t want us to read them.”
“Dane,” said Nel.
They turned toward Frelin. “You must have noticed the way he stares at you. He has access now,” said Sorvi.
“And he’s always been a little absent-minded,” added Keddi. “You could probably get his help without making him suspicious.”
Frelin pressed her lips together. “I’m better at getting what I want from computers and equipment printers than from people. Also, using him that way feels wrong.”
“For Spot Leg?” asked Sorvi.
Nel smiled. “And the rest of us?”
The moments after breakfast had become the bleakest of Keddi’s day, as everyone else headed off to classrooms or work areas. With nowhere to go, no place she belonged, she sat until the hall emptied.
When she left, Frelin was waiting outside. She slipped a thin chip into Keddi’s palm. “The logs.”
“You did it! How?”
“Invited Dane to our rooms last night to show me some home planet vids he’s been going on about and got his palm on the screen.” Her mouth twitched. “He forgot to clear it, of course, so when he left, I accessed the docs, copied them to the chip, and erased any traces. I didn’t have a chance to l—”
“Frelin!” Her father strode across the quadrangle. “Aren’t you supposed to be in the processing shed?”
“Papa—”
“Go to your rotation.” As Frelin walked away, he said to Keddi, “I’m reporting this to the supervisors. We can’t have you corrupting the others.”
“I’m not—”
“Frelin will be eighteen in a few weeks and still hasn’t . . . . Stay away from her until you’re willing to act like an adult.” He spoke quietly, but his face darkened to purple before he stalked off.
What under the canopy was this about? Her parents’ shame, other adults’ anger—all because she wouldn’t kill her friend? She raced back to her family’s rooms. When she slid the chip into a port, an index of docs stretching back to the settlement’s earliest days filled the screen. Her glance at entries from the most recent years showed announcements of births, deaths, or work assignments next to reports on hydroponic yields and experiments in processing more of the copper out of native fungi, with occasional notes that the perimeter wall had been extended to accommodate another hydroponic shed or a new quadrangle of living space as the settlement grew. Keddi took a deep breath and opened the log with the oldest date, hoping to find something more than bare notes.
An hour later she sat back in her chair, feeling almost as shocked as if Blue Speck had stood up on two legs and explained the construction of a hydroponic tank. All her life she’d been taught that her great-great-grandparents had come in search of freedom, bravely overcoming challenges to build a precarious life on a new planet, but the journals told a different story: It was a forced resettlement. The earliest entries rang with outrage that scientists and skilled technicians would be transported to a penal colony like street thieves merely for speaking out against those in power.
Before she could read more, the door clicked. She blanked the screen as her father walked in. “Hi, Papa. Did you forget something?”
“Keddi, the supervisors want to talk to you.”
“I figured. I’ll stay after the evening meal.”
“They want to see you now.”
Her stomach clenched. Supervisors never interrupted the workday to deal with minor matters. Could Dane have realized he’d given Frelin access? She wished she could remove the chip and hide it.
“They’re waiting in the hall,” he said, as she sat. His face softened a little. “I’ll go with you.”
They crossed the sunlit quadrangle in silence. When they reached the hall door, her father put his hands on her shoulders. “Your mother and I just want you to do the right thing. We’re concerned about you.”
They approached the table at the end of the room. Frelin and her father waited in chairs nearby, while Keddi’s mother rushed in a few moments later. With her parents on either side, she faced the supervisors.
“Anil tells us he caught you speaking with Frelin this morning in direct contradiction of our order that you have no contact with her and the other tweeners. Is this true?” asked one of the men.
“Yes.”
Frelin jumped up. “It was my fault. I waited for her and—”
“Sit down.” He turned back to Keddi. “So you don’t deny it.”
“No.”
The woman bit her lip before she spoke. “This is a step we don’t wish to take, but your actions have left us little choice. Unless you’re willing to do what everyone else has done, we can no longer allow you to remain in the settlement. You may join your family and friends for the midday meal, but afterwards you will leave the enclosure and may not return until you bring proof you’re prepared to take on adult responsibilities.”
Her parents and Frelin talked over each other in protest. Even Frelin’s father looked shocked. When the supervisors silenced the others, he spoke up. “Look, I’m concerned about Keddi’s influence on my daughter, but there must be some sanction short of banishment.”
The oldest supervisor stood. He spoke slowly, and Keddi noticed his irises were ringed with the red-brown tinge of copper poisoning. “This is entirely under Keddi’s control. It’s her choice not to live by the settlement’s rules, her choice whether she stays in the forest or returns to take her place as an adult.”
“May I be excused from the rest of the morning shift,” asked her mother, “to help Keddi pack bedding and supplies?”
“I’m sorry,” said the woman. “We can’t allow resources to be taken from the community. She may wear a set of foraging clothes, but everything else stays in the enclosure—except her belt knife, of course.”
Of course.
“We expect you to return to your work for the rest of the morning. You’ll see your daughter at midday, and, if she cares about you and the settlement, we’ll celebrate her choice to become an adult tomorrow evening.”
Her parents stayed silent as they walked out, anger and sorrow plain on their faces. Why did her refusal to kill a scrabbler distress everyone so much?
Once she returned to her family’s quarters, she raced through as many logs as she could, scanning for clues during the few hours she had left. In a coerced exchange for renouncing all property and future claims on their homeworld, her ancestors had been dropped fully kitted out for settlement. They found good air, a mild climate, but tests of soil and water showed high levels of copper. By the end of the second year, it was clear none of their seeds would grow in the earth of the new world—and the only potentially edible native sources of protein were the copper-rich fungi.
“A slow death sentence” wrote one engineer who set up water filters along with a system to catch rain for drinking and for the hydroponic tanks. When the five-year packs of rations ran out and hydroponics still couldn’t supply enough food, names and death dates began to appear in the official log. A last journal entry from one settler ended, “They must have known. No choice now but starvation or organ failure.” After a long gap in entries, an engineer wrote, “We’ve done it—the copper in the latest protein extract is minimal. With Min’s chelation regimen and the expansion of the hydroponic sheds, we just might make it.” A year later the official log recorded the first births.
Most settlers spent hours searching the forest for fungi to supply enough protein for the settlement. One entry told of the day a large foraging party ended up surrounded by twenty or more forest crabs. It looked like an ambush, so they panicked and attacked the animals with their utility knives, slaughtering almost all of them.
The embedded image showed a dead scrabbler with green oozing from its central eye.
Keddi breathed as if she’d been running; the warning bell for the midday meal made her jump. Not yet, she thought, but slipped the chip into a pocket and grabbed her knife.
Her family and friends all sat with her, silent as if at a funeral meal. After those under sixteen were dismissed to change for foraging or relieve those who watched the smallest children so they could eat, the woman supervisor spoke.
“Because Keddi has as yet refused to do what she must, we’ve made a difficult decision: she will leave the enclosure until she chooses to become an adult. Moreover, we can no longer permit anyone else to remain who is not an adult as of their eighteenth birthday.”
Frelin’s father winced.
“We don’t like having to take such harsh measures, but the continued survival of our settlement requires that all of us follow the rules.” She looked at Keddi. “I wish you well and hope to see you return tomorrow so we can celebrate your adulthood.”
Her parents blinked back tears as they hugged her, and she wondered what they’d say to her brother, who wouldn’t be sixteen for several months. Or what the supervisors would tell the other children about her disappearance. When she said goodbye to her friends, Frelin whispered, “See you in a few weeks.”
Keddi walked out, palmed the gate lock, and crossed the clearing without looking back. She wandered the forest until Blue Speck joined her. They dug up a few clusters of fungus and dropped them at the gathering glade, where two adult scrabblers huddled on either side of the one who was ill. Later in the afternoon they hiked to the goldfruit bushes. Lacking rucksack and bags, she tied up her jacket to catch berries as she and Blue Speck shook them off the branches. The ailing scrabbler didn’t even raise its head when they went back. She poured a small pile of berries onto the ground and pushed them toward it. When it opened its mouth but made no other move, Keddi sat down and lifted its head as gently as she could, then gave it a berry, which it swallowed weakly. The others remained silent, heads up. She fed the scrabbler as many berries as it had strength to eat.
When she finished, Blue Speck pushed a large chunk of fungus toward her. Keddi smiled as she dipped her head and slid the piece back. She ate goldfruit to quench her thirst, since she didn’t want to drink the copper-laced water from a stream that ran by the clearing. As the greenish light under the trees faded to grey, more scrabblers scuttled in and added to the small pile of food the settlement’s children had left before Keddi and Blue Speck arrived.
Scrabblers soon filled the space, some eating fungus from the pile. Keddi supposed the others had gotten enough while foraging. None took goldfruit, and a few clicked loudly at any juveniles who approached the berries. It looked as though they were being left for her and the ill scrabbler. She managed to get a few more berries into its mouth, then ate some herself. When the light went, she lay down, still somewhat thirsty and hungry, knowing she would only feel worse the next day. Blue Speck settled next to her, and she found herself ringed by scrabblers. She folded her jacket under her head and slept.
She awoke with a dry throat. As the day brightened to green under the canopy, scrabblers began to move about the small clearing and disappear between the trees, while juveniles ate the remaining fungus before leaving to forage. A few adults stood near the ill scrabbler, but none touched the goldfruit. Thirsty as Keddi was, she first fed the scrabbler, who ate fewer berries than the evening before. She finished the rest before heading into the forest with Blue Speck.
By midday they’d dug up as much fungus as Blue Speck could eat or Keddi could haul. Not long after they returned to the glade, a pair of juveniles appeared, one dripping blue from its mouth. For a moment she feared it might be injured, but it moved carefully over to the sick one and dropped a mouthful of bruised berries in front of it. Blue Speck and the other adults raised their heads in approval, then looked at her. She got two berries in before it stopped chewing. An adult nudged the remaining fruit toward her. Nagging thirst tempted her to ignore the copper in it, but she lowered her head, and the juvenile who brought them finished what remained.
While she rested with the scrabblers, she wondered how much water she could drink from the stream without doing permanent damage to her liver and decided to gather goldfruit instead. Dehydration made the distance seem longer, and Blue Speck slowed so she could keep up. When she saw a gleam of gold ahead, she ran to eat berries as fast as her parched throat could swallow them. So many had ripened that they managed to collect most of a jacketful more. When they returned to the glade, Keddi found her friends waiting at its edge.
“It’s late. Shouldn’t you have gone back by now?”
“Have some water,” said Frelin, offering her bottle, still almost full.
Keddi drank all of it in a few swallows; nothing had ever tasted better.
“Here’s mine,” said Nel. “We brought gifts.”
“Nel and Sorvi staged a daring raid on the supply sheds.”
“Not that daring,” said Sorvi, “not when someone walks away without closing the door.”
“Maybe the biologist is beginning to slip. Has anyone noticed her eyes lately?” Nel took two large filter bottles and a bundle of filters out of her rucksack. “Lucky for us the open shed had everything we wanted.”
“If the supervisors caught you—” Keddi began.
“And lucky for us Frelin’s father wanted to lecture her before we foraged, so we happened to be hanging about the quad with our bags.” Sorvi pulled out a worn rucksack, two boxes of chelation tablets, and a few stacks of protein cakes. “These should last for a bit. And keep my water bottle. I’ll say I must have dropped it, very careless of me.”
Frelin handed Keddi a blanket.
“Is this from your bed?”
“You can share it with me after my birthday.”
Once they left, she filled the tops of the filter bottles from the stream and had a protein cake with the rest of Sorvi’s water. The sick scrabbler took only one berry, so she sat with its head in her lap while she ate goldfruit, feeling much stronger. She pushed some berries toward Blue Speck and her friends’ scrabblers, who’d settled around her along with a few hopeful-looking juveniles.
At full dark, Keddi wrapped herself in Frelin’s blanket and lay down to sleep, feeling safe and warm. Why didn’t the settlement keep the hydroponics in the sunlit field but shelter under the trees? It would be cooler in the growing season and more protected during the winter rains.
The next day, the ill scrabbler opened its mouth a little but didn’t seem able to eat even a single berry. She had no idea what else to do for it, so she foraged with Blue Speck and tried again at midday. At the end of the afternoon, when it couldn’t swallow any of the fresh goldfruit, she trickled drops of water from her bottle into its mouth. Again that night the scrabblers surrounded her and huddled close to the frail one.
In the grey light of early morning, Keddi opened her eyes to find all the scrabblers on their feet, heads raised and still, looking toward the small one. She lifted its head to her lap, held a goldfruit berry near its mouth, but it didn’t move. Blue Speck walked a few steps nearer and stood very close on her left, while Spot Leg came up on her right.
A few of the scrabblers began clicking at each other, and Shovel Foot scuttled off into the forest with the younger one who’d brought the berries—she recognized it by the blue stains lingering around its mouth. Except for some of the juveniles eating the remains of the last day’s foraging, the scrabblers stood almost perfectly still until the other two returned and dropped blue berries within reach of her hand. An older scrabbler began nudging her belt knife.
Shovel Foot tried to push a berry against the dead one’s carapace, leaving a faint mark, so Keddi picked one up and touched it to the same place. Every adult raised its head and looked at her. She crushed it against the spot, but when she tried to smear the color further, they clicked and lowered their heads, only raising them again once she dropped the berry. Was this a death ritual, like those she’d read about in the anthro files on other cultures?
The closest adult nudged her knife more insistently, so she drew it from the sheath. Now what? It then moved its face toward the dead scrabbler’s third eye, and every head went up.
What did they want? She looked over at Blue Speck and noticed the spot in the same place where they’d had her mark the dead one. “No,” she said aloud, “You can’t mean—” She moved her knife over its third eye. Every head stayed raised, even when she lowered the point to within a centimeter of it.
Tears ran down her face. Blue Speck and some of the others huddled close to her, as they’d done to comfort the dying scrabbler. She hesitated—it seemed so wrong. Spot Leg nudged her knife arm, and the others raised their heads.
Her mother had told the truth—even with the scrabbler already dead, it felt horrible, the hole leaking a little greenish liquid after she pulled out the blade. She dropped the knife, put her arms across her still-living friend, and sobbed.
After a while she felt something cool and solid against her leg. Fuzzi had nudged the water bottle towards her, so she drank a little to calm herself. She packed the rucksack and left it at the edge of the glade to retrieve later, then knelt by the dead scrabbler and grabbed its front legs. Heads lifted and stayed raised as she began to drag the scrabbler toward the settlement. Blue Speck, her friends’ pals, and some of the juveniles scuttled along with her until she came almost to the edge of the clearing, where they stopped and lifted their heads as she went on.
Her palm still unlocked the gate, as if the supervisors had expected her return. She towed the scrabbler across the main quadrangle and through an archway to a smaller quad surrounded by workshops. Frelin’s father came out of the engineering building and called to her, keeping his distance, “Welcome back, Keddi! I’ll get your parents and send Frelin for your friends.”
Leaving the body within a few meters of the bio lab’s door, she walked away from it and waited. Her parents arrived first and hugged her hard, then the supervisors clapped her on the shoulder, joined by Frelin’s father and others who worked nearby. Someone handed her water. As she escaped the cluster of people congratulating her, she saw her friends staring in horror.
When Nel glanced over at the scrabbler, her expression became a puzzled frown, and she nudged the others. A supervisor was saying something about the celebration that evening, but Keddi saw the biologist look at the body and wondered if anything would give her away. Her friends walked toward it.
“Give me a hand with this,” said the biologist to the tweeners. The adults hung back.
Keddi ran over. “I’ll help!” She lifted the body with the others and carried it inside. After they hoisted it to a table, the three looked confused. They knew it wasn’t Blue Speck.
“I want to stay for the dissection.”
The biologist gave her a hard look. “It’s fine with me, if it’s all right with the supervisors.”
Her friends followed her out and walked away. The woman replied, “If you wish to observe the . . . procedure, go ahead. Then you can go to the kitchen to get some breakfast and rest for today. We’ll talk briefly after the midday meal about any preferences you’d like taken into account so we can announce your first assignment at the celebration this evening.”
When she returned to the lab, she found the biologist laying out instruments. “Are you sure about this, Keddi?”
She nodded, and the woman gave the slightest of smiles.
“You’re allowed to call me Esti now that you’re an adult.” Then she turned her attention to the scrabbler, examining it for several minutes without saying a word. Keddi felt uneasy when she kept returning to the central eye.
“You didn’t kill this scrabbler. It was dead before you stabbed it.”
She went numb all over. Her breath came in ragged gasps, and she sought desperately for a way to persuade the biologist not to tell the supervisors. As she explained what had happened, how the scrabblers had urged her to do it, the woman’s face seemed to contort with rage, making Keddi’s heart race even faster, until she noticed tears pouring down her cheeks.
“Good for you!” Esti sobbed. Several minutes passed before she could speak. “I’m sorry,” she said as she wiped her eyes. “You mean they realized what you needed? They’re even more intelligent than I suspected.”
“But . . . .” The floor seemed suddenly to feel less solid under Keddi’s feet. “Are you saying you’re . . . glad . . . I didn’t kill a scrabbler?”
“I’ve been hoping ever since—” She broke off and wiped her eyes. “The supervisors sent me from the enclosure a few months after my eighteenth birthday because I refused, as you did. My friends filched supplies for me, and I held out for weeks, but I never had enough to drink or eat, and I feared copper poisoning so much, I did what I had to so I could come back. The whole time in the forest, I kept thinking, if only I could find a scrabbler already dead . . . .” She looked away. “I’ve never forgiven myself for what I did to Digger.”
“You left that shed open for Nel and Sorvi, didn’t you?”
“Nel doesn’t miss much—I’ve had an eye on her to train as my assistant—and I thought she’d notice.”
Keddi’s head spun. Everyone else had seemed so distressed at her holding out that it had never occurred to her any of the adults might be pulling for her. “But . . . why?”
“It will make more sense after you’ve had a chance to read the history of the settlement.”
She decided to trust the woman, who surprised her by laughing at her admission that she already knew some of it.
“Clever of Frelin. How far did you get?”
“Up to when they first killed the scrabblers.”
“After a few more groups encountered ‘forest crabs’ and killed them, the settlers stopped seeing them, so they assumed any remaining had left the area. More births meant they needed more food, so they started sending out groups of children to search—eventually without their parents, once they were old enough to be trusted not to lose their way or eat what they gathered before it was processed.”
“It puzzled everyone that they brought back so much more food—especially fungus—than the adults had ever found, and it took a while before someone realized the scrabblers the children talked about weren’t imaginary friends. When the settlers finally made the connection to the forest crabs, they sent some parents out with the groups—to ‘protect’ them.” Esti shook her head slowly. “In the end, the need for protein forced the settlement to let the children go by themselves so the scrabblers would help them.”
“But that doesn’t explain why we’re supposed to kill one to become an adult. Wouldn’t it make more sense to help them and let them keep helping us?”
“Keddi, our ancestors found themselves trapped on a toxic planet, enraged at how they’d been treated, grieving for friends and family they’d never see again. By the time they encountered the scrabblers, the threat of starvation or copper poisoning had left them so desperate they slaughtered them in a panic. A decade later, and probably feeling guilty about what they’d done, they had no choice but to let these same creatures help their children find food. But once they grew up, the first generation born here began to talk about moving the settlement into the woods and living among the scrabblers.”
“So . . . they feared losing their children along with everything else, since the scrabblers wouldn’t come near them?”
“They couldn’t bear to risk another loss, so they decided to make their children kill scrabblers as they came of age, to keep them in the enclosure. Some held out for a while and were banished. Hunger and thirst, loneliness and fear brought them back, as they have in every generation since.” Esti wiped away a few more tears.
Keddi almost couldn’t see straight at the stupidity of it all. “Why hasn’t anyone stopped this?”
“Because almost everyone who kills a scrabbler justifies it in order to make it hurt less. And those of us who can’t come to terms . . . .” Esti winced. “We end up outsiders, with little influence.”
“And I will, too, won’t I, because I haven’t . . . Isn’t there anything we can do?”
“I’ve thought about that. It’s why I’ve been hoping a holdout would have the luck you did—though you may not feel so lucky in a few years.”
“Why not?”
“Think about who you might partner with. Keddi, can you imagine living with someone who has killed a scrabbler and expects your children to do the same? Your secret will create a wall between you and almost every other adult.”
Keddi thought about having to hide the knowledge from her parents, her friends, her partner, maybe even her own children someday, and saw lonely years ahead of her, but the image of Blue Speck still foraging rather than dead on the table shone through it all. “If that’s what it takes so a scrabbler doesn’t die for me.”
“I think we can arrange matters so you’re not completely alone right from the beginning—and keep Frelin from being banished. What does her scrabbler look like?”
“It has brown spots on its front legs.”
“Good—brown pigment’s easy enough. I’m assuming there’s berry juice on this one because yours has a blue patch? It should come off with alcohol.” Esti smiled.
“So Frelin pretends to kill this one again? Won’t people be suspicious that she did it immediately after me? And brings back the same carcass?”
“They won’t notice it’s the same one. You saw how everyone hung back; they don’t like being reminded of what they did. And when holdouts finally cave, their friends often give in soon after, so it’s exactly what people are hoping will happen.” She paused. “I don’t think we can risk using the same one for Nel or Sorvi, but they have a little more time.”
“How will we get it back to the woods without anyone knowing?”
“What sort of work did you want to do?”
“Hydroponics, but—”
“Good. Tell the supervisors that, but also that you’d like to be trained as my assistant. No one wants this work, so they’ll jump at the chance to assign you here part of the time. I can send you to the forest early tomorrow to get samples for me. Everyone will assume I’m just glad not to have to go myself anymore.” She looked away and spoke more softly. “Which is partly true.”
Keddi remembered the question she’d been wanting to ask. “How is it the scrabblers all know who’s killed one of them?”
“Scent, I think. The ‘third eye’ is an olfactory organ—their sense of smell is what lets them find fungus so much more easily than we can—but I suspect it may also have the ability to duplicate scents, and that’s partly how they teach their young what’s safe to eat. Although they tolerate copper well, there are likely plants poisonous to them and diseases they can get, and they may learn to avoid anything unusual they smell near the scent of a dead scrabbler. Dragging the body back to the enclosure leaves a trail of both the scrabbler’s and the person’s scent.”
She smiled with sad eyes. “You’ll be the first to have the chance to find out more.”
At dawn the next morning, Keddi hauled the dead scrabbler a little way into the forest and daubed brown on its forelegs. Blue Speck, Spot Leg, and a few of the others appeared through the trees and watched her. Frelin’s father had looked so pleased when Keddi pulled her aside at the feast, it seemed Esti was right in thinking no one would suspect.
“Frelin will be here soon. Stay for her, all right?”
She dipped and raised her head to them, then walked back toward the enclosure with Blue Speck scuttling at her side. Sorvi and Nel would know they’d have help, and her brother, too, once he turned sixteen. They could hold out. The scrabblers might even lead them to other dead bodies now they understood the need. If the plan worked as she hoped, Dane would be the last of the settlement to have killed a scrabbler. She felt pity for him and everyone else on the wrong side of the secret.
Blue Speck turned back when Keddi reached the edge of the clearing. Even the slanting rays of morning felt too hot and bright after the cool green light under the trees. They should leave the hydroponics and solar arrays in the open, she thought, but rebuild the rest of the settlement a little way into the woods. She knew that could only happen after most adults hadn’t killed a scrabbler, so probably not until her own children were grown.
As she palmed the lock on the gate, for the first time she thought it strange they still called where they lived a settlement. Perhaps one day they’d see this world as home.