Sand Red

39

It was three days before Aida had recovered well enough to sit up and take food and another two before she could stand and walk and most importantly, think.

'So what is it you need help with?' she asked Lars as he worked on something minuscule at his table.

'What?' He turned around, taking his magnifying glass off his eye. We bunked together in a little white room, the three of us sleeping on the floor while Aida got the bed. It had been five uneventful days of recovery for Yul, Aida and me, when we ate and drank and cleaned up and dressed the numerous fresh wounds that En had inflicted upon us.

'What help do you need?' she repeated.

He pushed away from the table to reveal the little tinkling pieces he had been working on from dawn to dusk every day of our stay here.

Aida stepped delicately forward and picked the little toy pieces up. They were shiny metal cubes, joined by crude copper wires and twisted ends, each of the two cubes opening up to reveal an intricate interior of a miniature green board and a thick forest of wires, each carefully aligned to a particular point, Lars had said, though that seemed mighty impossible to me. He worked on them with tweezers all the time with nearly endless patience, sometimes hitting a wall or two in frustration. He had refused to tell us what they were, or what he needed from Aida, and very pertinently, what happened to us when Aida had finished helping him.

'Is this part of one?' she asked quietly.

He nodded. She looked at him in blank shock. 'You've done it?'

'Much more.'

I looked between the two of them sharply. I had a dreaded fear I would be killed to protect a secret.

'What do you mean? Is it done?' she asked in the same shocked voice.

He looked at the two of us hesitantly. 'Later. But I haven't been able to make it light up.'

Aida suddenly laughed and we jumped as the forgotten sound coursed through the room. 'Look at all these wires!' She had opened up one of the boxes. 'You can't seriously expect to get anywhere like this! They're all the same!'

Lars reddened a little at the ears. 'Nothing I can do. How can I colour code anything when the simplest equipment is missing?'

Aida peered up at him in barely concealed delight. 'You've done it from start to finish, but have a lack of equipment for colour coding your wires,' she stated.

I looked at her demeanor in dimly growing awareness. Was it just me, or did she know him?

Lars shrugged in something like embarrassment. 'Can you help?'

'I think so. What equipment do you have?'

'We are not colour coding them,' he said, his voice growing louder.

'Then I can't help you,' she threw back.

'I can't take it apart for painting.'

'That's why you're having trouble, lad,' she said sarcastically.

Lars' eyes bulged. 'I am at least a decade older than you,' he said haughtily.

She waves him away. 'We will die together.'

God we really are a sorry bunch, forever obsessed with death.

I got up slowly. I had grown immensely stronger since our escape and I felt like a teenager again these days, always hungry, uncomfortable in my own body and feeling more robust every day.

'I'm going to eat,' I announced. They stopped quarreling to look at me.

'We haven't so much food, Kun,' Lars said seriously. 'Three meals a day is unsustainable.'

'I'll hunt you the excess, I swear.' I couldn't deny my appetite.

'I don't eat human meat,' Lars said uncertainly.

'We'll pretend it's mutton,' I said somberly.

He seemed to think I was joking and laughed. I wasn't.'Alright, eat.'

I left with Yul in tow and we practised with blades out in the heat of the Earth when we were done eating.

Yul cracked his knuckles when I flung his blade out of his hand, and with a roar he raced into me like a wrestler and slammed into my middle with an unstoppable force. It was as unexpected as when we were children and I, small and light to begin with, had no traction. I was borne into the air, my hair swinging into my eyes, my belly tickling and my old wound groaning in the remnants of its pain.

'Stop! Stop!' I cried, half laughing from the tickling in my middle, half crying from the pain. I tapped his shoulder quickly, thrice, to signal surrender. Immediately, I was put down and Yul retreated a little ways from me, panting, wary in case I decided to launch a revenge attack. He collapsed onto the soil and I flopped down beside him, breathing heavily and wiped sweat from my brow.

'You-' I panted. '-cheater.'

He laughed into the sunlight, a good sound, and a crow rose squawking indignantly into the air from atop a nearby building.

It was times like these I loved Earth and didn't mind my two decades on its surface, carving out another story of loss and struggle.

'That was fair and square, you think an enemy gives up because they've lost their weapon?'

'You're not an enemy,' I groaned. 'You hurt my gunshot!

'Ah, I'm sorry,' he said, growing serious.

Sweat beaded my forehead and I wiped it away tiredly. I craved a good washing. I longed for the sea.

'You think Lars will kill us when he doesn't need Aida anymore?' Yul cut into my pleasant visions of breaking waves.

'I'm afraid of it, but he seems to like us enough.' I had grown to like Lars and his quiet ways and his politeness and occasional raving about the criminal astronauts.

'Not enough to tell us his secret,' Yul said darkly. 'And now that we're here in this camp, he might kill us to keep it secret.'

'But he hasn't told us his secret. That must mean he intends to let us go.' The gates were electrified inside and out, as we had discovered, and Yul and I had found no conceivable method to open the gates without a key to the lock. We were imprisoned within the compound, if you could call three meals a day imprisonment.

'Maybe,' was all Yul said.