“Decision time,” Yirella said as she inspected the strips of a-skin on his arm. “We can’t hang around here if we’re going to make it to the foot of the mountain before nightfall. We either set off now, or we don’t do it at all. If the satellites didn’t see the fire last night, then they never will. And if we leave it another day, we’ll be a lot weaker.”
“And an easier target for the moroxes,” Dellian said. “We won’t have the fuselage to shelter us, either.”
Her face crumpled into a puzzled frown. “That’s another thing wrong. They should never have ventured so close to the fire.”
“But they did,” Xante said. “Wishing they did what they’re supposed to isn’t going to help us.”
Yirella gave him a long, disappointed look and shrugged.
For a moment, he thought she was going to say something else. “So what do you think we should do?” she asked.
“You tell me,” Dellian said urgently. “I’ll back you up.”
“I don’t know. In situations like this, you’re normally supposed to stay at the crash site and wait for the rescue teams. But this isn’t normal, is it?”
“Let’s take a look outside,” Dellian said reluctantly.
The fire had died down to a mound of embers that was barely warmer than the sand. Thick rose-gold sunlight was pouring over the tops of the hills, casting long, sharp shadows from the boulders.
Dellian carried the axe, scanning around cautiously. “I can’t hear the moroxes.”
“It’s daytime,” Xante said. “They’ll be back in their lair.”
Dellian saw Yirella shaking her head, but she didn’t say anything. He looked at the three dead moroxes. The first one, which he’d caught with the axe, had crawled fifty meters away before collapsing from blood loss. The other two were closer.
“We could eat them,” Ellici said.
“Can we?” Dellian asked. “They’re alien. Doesn’t that make them enati-…enty-…enamo—”
“Enantimorphic? No. We can eat them if we have to. Their biochemistry is different, but not by much. Their flesh contains nutrients we can use. I’m not so sure about the taste, though.”
“We’ll hold off for now,” Dellian said with as much authority as he could summon. “First we need to build a bigger fire. Maybe burn a whole tree and then add more. Yeah.” He nodded, staring at the biggest sleeper tree, standing a hundred meters away. “We’ll light that one, and chop down others, add them to it. We can do it, all of us. A fire that’s going to overload the skyfort sensors, it’s so big.”
He had them. He knew that. They were all gathering courage and hope from his determination. Even Yirella agreed.
“No walk down the hill then,” she mumbled as he divided them up into three teams, each with a weapon.
“It makes no sense, exposing ourselves to more unknowns. The clan know we’ve been alone overnight now. Alexandre will bring back the Saints themselves to help find us. Sie will. We all know that.”
“I suppose so.” She stared at the closest morox corpse. “I need to know something,” she said, and picked up a rock half the size of her own head.
“What?” he asked, then recoiled as she brought the sharp edge of the rock smashing down on the morox’s head. Two more blows and she’d cracked the skull open. She shoved the edge of the rock through the fissure and began to prise it farther apart.
“Yirella!”
He had to fight back nausea as she began examining segments of the gore that was its brain.
“Why didn’t it get eaten?” she asked.
“Huh?”
“They were so ravenously hungry they ignored a fire to try and kill us. Yet here they have three fresh corpses of their own kind, and they ignored them to carry on attacking us.”
“Do they eat their own?” he asked, trying not to look at the way her carrion-slicked fingers were probing the brain tissue so enthusiastically. Yet there was something horribly fascinating about the scene.
“I don’t know. I don’t suppose we should judge them like they’re terrestrial animals. Although you’d think basic instincts would be almost identical.”
“I guess,” he said. “So what are you hoping to find?”
“Don’t know till I find it,” she answered grimly.
“Okay.” He knew that tone; she wasn’t going to be stopped by anything he could say.
Cheering broke out around the sleeper tree. His clanmates had piled scrub bushes up around the trunk, which were now burning hot and fierce, their smokeless flames shooting vertically into the tree’s boughs above, which were starting to smolder.
Dellian was glad of the excuse to look away from Yirella’s gory task. Despite the fresh air gusting across the slope, he was feeling sluggish. Lack of sleep and his throbbing arm seemed to be making his body intolerably heavy. Which was strange, given he was very aware of his empty stomach. With growing dismay, he knew it wouldn’t be long before they’d have to start using the hand pump filter…