The Star Dwellers (2 page)

“We need to switch to a Star Realm map,” she
says. Fumbling through her pack, she selects a new map and unfolds
it. She turns the map clockwise until she sees an edge with a
tunnel going off the page that reads
To Moon Realm, subchapter
26
. When she pushes the new map against the old one, they match
perfectly. “I guess we’re done with this one for now,” she says,
folding the Moon Realm map and returning it to the pack.

I’ve officially left the Moon Realm for the
first time. It feels weird, like I’m in a foreign land, not on
earth anymore. As a little girl, I always dreamed of traveling the
Tri-Realms as part of my job as a famous novelist, seeking
inspiration for my books. Now I just wish I was at home, with my
family.

Turning her attention back to the new map,
Tawni continues tracing her finger along the straight blue line,
until she reaches a red intersecting line. She taps the key in the
bottom right-hand corner of the map. “Blue is for inter-Realm, red
is for intra-Realm.”

“Those sun dwellers were traveling within the
Moon Realm,” I say.

“Doing what?”

“Helping to squash the rebellion,” I
guess.

Tawni nods, goes back to the map. “So if
we’re here…”—she places her finger on the blue line just past the
red one—“…then we are at least two days’ march from the first
subchapter in the Star Realm—subchapter 30.”

“And the nearest hotel?” I joke.

“Probably an hour away,” she replies, “but it
pretty much looks exactly the same as where we’re standing right
now.”

I groan. I guess the builders of this tunnel
didn’t really consider comfort to be a top priority.

“Wait a minute,” Tawni murmurs, peering at
the map and once more consulting the key.

“What?”

“Eureka! There’s a blue dot not that far
away!”

“Thank god!” I exclaim. “That’s amazing,
wonderful! Uh…what’s a blue dot mean?”

Tawni laughs. “Watering hole.”

Yes!
Now I really am excited. Our
canteens are dry. We are filthy. A watering hole is just what we
need. “Perfect,” I say.

Tawni and I are both smiling when we start
walking again, our legs no longer sore, our steps bouncy and light.
Funny how a little good news can have a physical impact.

We float along for an hour, expecting any
second to hear the gentle slap of moving water against a rocky
shore. When the second hour passes, I am getting antsy. Perhaps the
map is wrong and there is no watering hole. Or maybe the
underground lake has dried up, no longer fed by one of the many
life-giving tributaries that flow in between and through the
Tri-Realms.

“Where is it?” I say when a few more minutes
pass without any change in the dull gray scenery.

“I’m not sure,” Tawni says.

“You said it was close.”

“It’s hard to judge distance on this map.
Everything looks so close when there are really miles between.”

“We’ve walked for at least eight miles,” I
point out.

Tawni shrugs and keeps walking. Having no
other choice, I do the same. That’s when I hear it.

At first a soft tinkle, the noise becomes
louder, a swishing—and then a gurgle. Water, has to be. Tawni looks
at me and we both smile. The map was right!

For only the second time since we entered
this godforsaken tunnel, the monotony is broken as the passage
opens up to our left. The right wall remains straight and solid,
but to the left there is an empty darkness. I feel cool air waft
against my face, ruffling my hair. At our feet is water, lapping
against the edge of the tunnel floor.

We go a little crazy. Or maybe just I do.
Letting out a
Whoop!
I sling down my pack and thrust my
cupped hands into the cool liquid. First I throw a handful into my
face. My breath catches as the icy water splashes over my skin. But
I don’t shiver—it feels wonderful. It’s like the water is healing
me, rejuvenating more than just my skin: refreshing my soul. The
wet drips off my chin and dribbles down my neck and beneath the
neckline of my tunic. It feels so good I can’t help myself.

With no room in my mind left for
embarrassment, or modesty, I pull my tunic over my head and toss it
aside, leaving just my undergarments. Oh, and my shoes, too, which
I pull off, along with my socks. I leave my flashlight angled on a
rock so I can see.

I splash into the knee-deep water, relishing
the soft caress of the cooling elixir. The lake bed is covered with
long, smooth rocks that massage my sore feet. As I scoop water onto
my arms, stomach, and legs, I remember a story my grandmother used
to tell me about the Fountain of Youth, a pool of water with
life-extending power. The cool touch of this pool feels equally
potent, and I half-expect to see myself growing shorter, shrinking
to reveal a younger me, the size of my half-pint sister
perhaps.

I don’t shrink, but I am cleansed. When I
turn around, Tawni is grinning. She tosses me a sliver of soap,
which I manage to juggle and then catch. As I use it to wash my
body, she methodically uncaps each canteen and fills them. She is
the responsible one.

Seeing her with the canteens reminds me of
the hungry thirst in my throat. I finish with the soap and hand it
to Tawni to use. She is already undressed and daintily steps into
the pool, looking as graceful as a dancer, particularly when
compared to my own clumsy entrance.

I turn around and splash some more water on
my face.

“Where’d you get that scar on your back?”
Tawni asks.

Looking over my shoulder, trying to gaze at
my back, I say, “What scar?”

She moves closer, places a hand on my back,
and I shiver, suddenly feeling cold. Her fingers linger somewhere
near the center of my back, where I can’t possibly see, just below
my undergarments. “Curious,” she says absently.

“What is it?”

“It’s a crescent-shaped scar, small, but
slightly raised off your skin. It looks like a recent scar…”

“Maybe I got it in the tunnels somewhere—or
from Rivet,” I say, but I know that’s not right—there would have
been blood, and someone would have noticed the wound seeping
through my tunic.

“No, it’s not
that
fresh. Just looks
like it’s from something that happened in the last few years. If I
didn’t know better, I’d say it looks just like…”

I turn to face my friend, taking in her
quizzical expression in an instant. “Like what?” I ask when she
doesn’t finish her statement.

“Nothing, I don’t know what I was thinking,”
she says unconvincingly.

“You were going to say ‘Tristan’s scar’,
weren’t you?” I laugh. “You’re nuts, you know that?”

She laughs high and musical. “And you’re
not?”

I grin at her and cup my hands, once more
using them as a scoop to lift a portion of water to my face. As I
open my mouth to receive the glorious liquid, I see Tawni’s face
change from mirthful to one of confusion. It looks like she’s
playing with something in her mouth, moving her tongue around, side
to side. Her eyebrows are lowered. I plunge the water into my
mouth, delighting in the slick feel as it slips over my tongue,
down my gullet.

“Ahh,” I murmur softly, just before Tawni
grabs my arm. Her eyes are wide—she is scared. “What?” I say.

“Spit it out!” Tawni shrieks. Now I am the
confused one. “Spit it out!” she says again, reaching around and
thumping me on the back.

“I can’t,” I say over her shoulder. “I’ve
already swallowed it.”

Tawni releases me and says, “No, no, no,
no…this is not good.”

That’s when I taste it. Something’s not right
about the water. Like Tawni, I make a face, swish some spit around
in my mouth. Overall, the water was refreshing, delicious even, but
the aftertaste is not good. The water is…. “Contaminated?” I
say.

Tawni nods slowly. “I think so.”

Not good.

As kids, all moon dwellers are taught to look
for the signs of contaminated water. Strange coloring, frothy film
on the top, a unique odor, strange taste: All are possible clues
that the water is not good to drink. At home we used a testing
agent every four hours to check our water. If the water turns blue
when combined with the agent, it is okay. If it turns green or
brown, your water is bad. Even if we had the stuff we needed to
test the water, it is too late. We’ve drunk it.

I peer into the water. It looks okay. No
film, no discoloring, no malodor. The nasty aftertaste might just
be a result of trace metals in the water, picked up somewhere along
its winding path through the depths. I doubt we’re that lucky.

“What do you think it is?” I ask. There are a
lot of dangers associated with drinking bad water. In mild cases,
you might just get a bad case of diarrhea or perhaps light
vomiting, but there are many worse diseases and viruses that can be
picked up, too. Like…

“Bat Flu,” Tawni says.

“What? No. I doubt it. Can’t be. Why do you
think that?” Bat Flu is the worst of the worst. Infected bats
release their infected droppings into a water source, which then
becomes infected. The symptoms of Bat Flu are numerous and awful:
severe stomach cramps; cold sweats and hot flashes in conjunction
with high fever; mind-numbing headaches; relentless muscle aches;
hallucinations; and in many cases, death. There was a mild outbreak
at my school in Year Three. Four kids, a dog, and one of their
parents got the Flu. The only one that survived was the dog.

Tawni steps out of the water, leaving a trail
of drips behind her. She picks up the flashlight and shines it
across the pool. I follow the yellow light until it stops on the
far wall, which is pockmarked with dozens of small caves. Bat
caves. “That’s why,” she says.

I feel a surge of bile in my throat as I see
piles of dark bat poo littered at the tunnel mouths. Each time the
bats emerge from the caves, they will knock the piles into the
water with the flap of their wings. Evidently, they’re sleeping
now—the caves are silent.

I choke down the bitter, acidic taste in my
mouth and say, “But this is a key watering hole for an inter-Realm
thoroughfare. It’s even on the map.” My words don’t change
anything. The water is likely contaminated. I don’t want to be in
denial. I just need to deal with what has happened as best I can.
My mother always told me to “face the truth with grim determination
and a smile on your face.” I’m not sure about the smile. “Okay,
let’s assume it’s contaminated. We need to vomit it out, Tawni.
Now!”

Without watching to see what Tawni does, I
stick two fingers down my throat, gagging immediately, the stomach
fire rising so fast I can barely get my hand out of my mouth before
I spew all over myself. I retch, gag, cough twice, spit as much of
the vile liquid from my mouth as possible. At my feet, my own vomit
is floating around my ankles. At my side, Tawni is throwing up,
too.

Clenching my abs, I say, “We’re both going to
get very sick. But we’ll get through it together.”

“What do we do?” Tawni asks, her voice rising
precariously high. Her lips are tight. I’m afraid she might lose
it. Since I met her, Tawni has always been strong, even when her
best friend was viciously murdered. But now she looks seriously
freaked out. She must’ve seen firsthand what the Bat Flu can do to
someone.

“Who do you know that had the Flu?” I ask,
stepping out of the bile-choked water, Tawni flitting out next to
me. We are still filthy, but there’s not much we can do about it
now.

Tawni’s eyes flick to mine and then back to
the water, to the bat droppings. “My cousin,” she says.

“What happened?”

“She passed.”

“That’s not going to happen to us.”

“It was awful.”

“Tawni.”

Her eyes dart back to mine and stick this
time.

“We’re going to be fine,” I say. “Stay with
me.”

Tawni’s steel-blue eyes get steelier, and
then, after reaching a hardness level I’d never seen in them
before, soften, returning to their soft blue. “Right. We’ll be
okay,” she says, almost to herself.

I take the soap from Tawni and chuck it,
along with the two canteens, across the pool. They clatter off the
far wall and plunk beneath the surface.

“We should dry off with our dirty tunics and
then chuck them away, too,” I say.

Although it’s kind of gross soaking up the
water with our filthy old clothes, we both do it because we have
to. It’s the nature of things in our world. Out of necessity you
have to do a lot of things you don’t want to do. I wonder if it was
the same in the old world, before Armageddon, before Year Zero.

When we are dry and our old clothes have been
thrown into the foul water, we each don one of the fresh tunics
from our packs. It feels good—the simple act of putting on clean
clothes. It’s like a rebirth, a second chance, a new beginning. At
least usually. This time neither of us wants to turn the page on
our story. But like so many things in life, we have no choice.

“How far to the Star Realm?” I ask.

“We’re in the Star Realm now,
technically.”

“But how far to the first subchapter?
Subchapter 30, right?”

Tawni consults the map. “Yeah, first we’ll
hit subchapter 30. I’d say at least a twelve-hour hike if we move
fast.”

“We’ve got to make it in eight,” I say. “Just
in case we have the Flu. First symptoms will come fast, perhaps in
three hours or so. Worse symptoms after six hours. The very worst
at around eight hours. So we have to move fast.”

“What about water?” Tawni asks. Water will be
a problem. We had to get rid of our contaminated canteens. We are
already dehydrated.

“Any more blue dots on that map of
yours?”

Tawni scans the page. “None in this section
of the tunnel. There are blue dots all over the place in subchapter
30, but nothing between here and there.”

“We’re just going to have to suck it up. Can
you make it?” I don’t know if I can, but I will do everything in my
power. I don’t want to die without at least trying to find my
mom.