Dark Eden

hard smooth shiny stuff that comes from Earth. (It was said you could find it in Eden too, hidden in the rocks,
mixed up
with the rock in some way, but no one knew where to look.) And if it was made of metal, it must have belonged to one of the First Five, to Angela or Tommy or one of the Three Companions.
    And then I had a thought that sent a chill going right through me and made my head spin.
    Tom’s dick! This could be
the
ring, the Lost Ring, Angela’s ring that they sometimes do that play about! It could be that actual one.
    Anyway, whether it was that ring or another one, it was a Memento, and if I told anyone about it, they’d make me hand it over to Oldest to keep with the other Mementoes – the Boots, the Belt, the Backpack, the Sky-Boat Models, the Earth Models, the plastic Kee Board with its rows of squares with letters, and the blank square that once showed pictures that could move and talk . . .
    Bam!
The stonebuck bowled straight into me, knocking all the wind out of me and sending me flying, back onto a big ant’s nest.
    All the others laughed.
    ‘He kills a bloody leopard,’ Janny teased me, ‘and then he doesn’t notice a stonebuck when it comes right at him.’
    ‘You idiot, John,’ said Candice. ‘That would have been a good waking’s kill for us. What in Harry’s name did you think you were doing?’
    I stood up, hastily brushing off angry ants with their bodies flashing red in warning that they planned to sting. I felt a fool, but I could have completely explained myself and satisfied all of them – even miserable Candice – if I’d only shown them the ring. It was a find that Family would value more highly than
ten
stonebucks, and any one of the others would have admitted straight away that they’d have been just as distracted from the hunt as I’d been if they’d been the one that found it.
    I would have
liked
to show it to them too. I didn’t want them to think of me as a wake-dreamer, or as someone that didn’t pay attention in a hunt: it wasn’t the idea of me I wanted people to have, and it wasn’t true either. But you’ve got to think about where you are trying to
get
to in the future, that was my rule, that was my leopard rule, not just try and make things easy and comfortable right now, and I decided in that moment that it would be better not to show the ring to anyone just now. So I closed my hand around it – it had a lovely smooth cool feeling – and I smiled and shrugged and said nothing. I had sewed a little pocket on the edge of my waistwrap as a place to put small useful things like bits of blackglass and stumpcandy and whitelantern seeds, and I slipped the ring in there when no one was watching me, and kept quiet, and we carried on hunting and scavenging.
    ‘You’ve gone all weird since that leopard, I reckon,’ Candice said. ‘I mean, speaking out in Any Virsry, talking about going across Snowy Dark, what was that really all about? Don’t give me all that about not enough food, and Exit Falls and all that. That’s not for us to sort out, and you know it. I reckon you just like the attention.’
    ‘He’s been weird since he’s been slipping that Tina Spiketree, you ask me,’ Janny said.
    Met looked at me. Gerry looked at me. Was I really going to let these two girls take the piss out of me like this? But I didn’t say anything. We walked on. Pretty soon we came across David, who was out with Fox. He had just killed a stonebuck with his long blackglass-tipped spear and was looking mighty pleased about it.
    ‘Hey, that was my buck!’ exclaimed Candice. ‘I spotted that and we would have killed it too if John had just been paying attention.’
    David gave a bark of laughter and repeated the old saying: ‘It’s not your buck unless your spear’s in it.’
    He looked at me.
    ‘Not paying attention, eh, John? Too much slip if you ask me. Slip with Martha London, slip with Tina Spiketree, slip with bloody Bella Redlantern herself. This boy must think that’s all he’s here for, making juice for women. Juicy John, that’s what we should call him. Juice is all he’s bloody good for.’
    There was so much hate and envy in his ugly bitter batface. I remembered how he’d looked when I crawled out of Bella’s shelter and I thought to myself that, if he could have driven his spear into me now as he’d just driven it into that stonebuck, if he could have done it without being blamed for it, well, he could have done. He would have done it