Dark Eden

she wouldn’t have done a Tommy. Her place in Family and in Redlantern group was everything to her, which is how it should be for a leader in a family. She gave up her whole self to being a group leader and member of Council and she couldn’t go on without her job, because all it left of her was a shadow.
    The first few wakings after they told me,
I
felt like doing a Tommy a lot of the time. I’d never really have done it of course. That really
would
have been following my own feelings and not thinking about the future, and I’d made up my mind I’d never make decisions like that. But still, whenever I wasn’t busy dealing with something else, whenever there was a gap to be filled, it came back into my mind.
Wham!
Bella was dead, Bella did for herself, and it was all down to me.
    I made sure not to let the others see this, of course, and I made sure it didn’t stop me from getting on with what I needed to do. In fact what I decided was that Bella’s death made it even
more
important to carry on with my plan and see it through. The fact that my idea had done for her meant that I
had
to make it work or her death would have been for no purpose at all.
    I felt Gela’s ring in its little pocket on the edge of my wrap. It helped to remind me that bad things were bound to happen. People died, people lost things and couldn’t get them back, however much they wanted to. It happened to Gela, it happened to Tommy, it happened to everyone, not just to me. I mean, Angela didn’t just lose Earth, and her mum and dad and her friends. She didn’t just lose the ring. A couple of wombs after the ring, she lost her daughter Candice. A slinker bit the little girl on the lip when she was reaching for stumpcandy, and the bite turned bad and she died.
    And then Tommy lost
Gela
, and then . . . Well, it goes on. That’s just how it is.

    Me and Tina went up Cold Path Valley and towards the place where Cold Path itself comes down from Dark. I had my blackglass spear and my spiketip one, Tina had two spiketips, and we had a skin bag with us that I’d brought from Redlantern, plus a roll of thick wavyweed rope. I liked her being there. She was strong and quick and she wouldn’t let anything defeat her, not even me.
    I thought maybe we’d be too late for any woollybucks, seeing as the dip had been short short and had passed over while we were asleep. (Never do
that
again, I thought to myself: what’s the point of living up Cold Path way if you don’t go after woollybuck in a dip?) But bucks do sometimes stay down in forest for a waking or two after a dip and, sure enough, after we’d got a couple of little birds and bats, we found three good bucks by some rocks along the stream. I stayed in front of them, lying low, while Tina went in a big circle out round the rocky bit and back again behind them. There were three of them, two fully grown and one about three-quarters size. They weren’t just having a drink, they were eating wavyweed from the water, like bucks sometimes do. They were standing with their back legs on the bank and their middle legs splayed out at the edge of the stream, and they were using their front legs like arms, reaching into the water and yanking up the shiny weed. They were in no hurry to move on and the soft lanterns on their heads weren’t shining bright like they do up on Dark, but just softly glowing.
    Well, it couldn’t have been a better time to find them because the strong muddy smell of the fresh weed would prevent them from getting wind of us. They lifted their big heavy heads from time to time and stared out into forest with those round flat Eden eyes, but I kept myself down, just peeping over the edge of a ridge, and they didn’t see me.
    When she was ready behind them, Tina made a sound like a starbird:
Aaaah! Aaaah! Aaaah!
The bucks lifted their heads again and looked round, but after a few seconds they carried on gorging at the weed. I crept forward. I’d left the bag and the rope behind on a rock so that all I was carrying was my good spear ready in my right hand and the other spear in my left.
    I was about ten yards from the stream when they all looked up again. They knew something was up now, and they dropped the weed they were holding back into the water, so as to have all six legs ready for running.
    I made a starbird noise –
Hoom! Hoom! Hoom!
– to tell Tina to close up behind them. The bucks were sampling the air with those four feelers they had round their mouths, at the end