Daylight dappled through thickly needled pine branches, small sparkling rays of yellowed light refracting off tear drops of hardened sap. Fresh earth scented with mold and organic decay cloyed the air where Lily’s nose lay an inch away. The sun reached down into the dense corpse to warm the women’s bodies chilled by a long, cool night huddled in sweat drenched clothes.

A fly buzzed Lily’s face before following the faint, rotty smell of her exhale up her nose. She jerked from sleep with a shriek, jackknifing up and snorting wildly. An orange insect with telltale black dots shot from her nostril. She pinched the other and continued to blow, the creepies skittering along her body, knowing what had been inside her. Nose flies plant their eggs deep in the sinus where they hatched and eat their way out, turning life into a living hell for the unwilling incubator. There was no way to tell if eggs were laid until the larva start wriggling. Removal involved cutting and scraping, leading to disfigurement, but must be done lest the maggots eat through the eyes or brain on their journey out.

Lily rubbed at her face convulsively, ready to cry. Why couldn’t anything ever go right? She screwed her eyes shut and hissed out her breath, steeling her bent frame. There would be plenty of time to feel sorry later. Now, she had more pressing concerns, like had her freak-out drawn attention?

She stilled and listened. Workers could be heard nearby. Too nearby. She rolled to her hands and knees, twisting to check on the supine form that had not moved during the night. Delya was a mess. Blood and bruises decorated her face in macabre technicolor. Swollen purpled flesh, an eye lost in puff, lumps. Blood smeared, dried, and still oozing. Hair a snarled mop of collected twigs and leaves cemented with a gruesome clay made of blood and dirt.

But the girl’s thin chest rose and fell. She was alive.

Alive. Would that be their only takeaway from this misadventure?

And Ett? Did he live?

Lily crept closer to cover and inched her head to where the bush thinned at the top, but still hid her.

Cripes. She had camped closer than she thought. Last night it felt like miles had been trudged seeking escape, but the clear shock of day revealed she had delivered them to the tail end of the crash, like they were just more treasure to be found.

Alphas. Right there. One not more than 20 yards away. Salvaging her family’s future right out from under them. Pieces of ship led to where they lay. A torn panel wedged into the churned ground fronting the bush she peered through. Instead of being lost in forest expanse, she and Delya were in the thick of the find.

But still unfound.

They had to move. But dragging Delya was out of the question. Too heavy. Too noisy.

Lily slithered to her daughter, crouching inches from her face and planting a soft kiss on the ruin of her cheek. “Delya,” whispered to her ear. “Wake up. Delya.” She rocked the inert body.

Eyelids fluttered. Lips moved. Stuttered moans through a glass-shard throat brought a slapped hand across Delya’s mouth. “Shh. Be quiet.” Alert for the sounds of approaching alphas, Lily heard only wreckage recovery competing with the rustling of forest and rattling cicados.

Eyes to single bloodshot eye, breaths warm and sour in each other’s faces, Lily whispered, “Can you get up? Come on. Get up. The alphas are only steps away. Don’t make any noise.”

Delya lay dazed, her bearings lost. Only pain kept her from falling back into slumberous oblivion. Her lassitude brought more shaking from her mother, more pain.

Delya’s unfocused gaze dialed in, seeing trees, seeing Lily’s strained face. Hands flattened against crumbly earth before lifting to the aching terror of her head.

Memories surfaced. Ship. Crash. Work. Dreams.

Dream killing alphas.

“Delya, we have to move. There’s no time.” Lily grasped a thin shoulder and pulled.

Grimacing from bruised flesh as soft as marshland, Delya rolled to the side to plant her hands and pushed up to sit on her hip with quavering arms. Mouth sealed tight against the exclamations wanting to spill.

Lily slipped her arm around Delya’s shoulders and delivered a tender embrace, murmuring. “You’re doing good. You’ve got this. Follow me, okay? Quietly. They are right there.” She urged the trembling girl onto her hands and knees.

Lily set off with careful lifting and placement of hands and knees to not make a sound. Delya stepped high with her hands, but drug her lower legs, never raising her feet from the ground. The swoosh swoosh against the ground and the crunch of forest refuse under her ponderous knees drove needles of fear into each of Lily’s nerves. It was too loud, too consistent. Not of nature.

How could enhanced alpha hearing miss it? How could someone not notice?

They made their slow escape creeping over obstacles and around bristling foliage. And no one noticed.

They made it ten scuffle filled meters, and there were no shouts of discovery behind them.

They rounded a large bramble where Delya’s shirt and trousers became caught in barbed thorns and only released after vigorous tugs that shook the entire straggle and tore cloth, and still, there was no footfalls of coming hell.

They crawled to a rocky outcrop within shouting distance of searching alphas, slinking behind a craggy boulder, and no booted feet had swung to kicked them off their hands and knees.

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Delya collapsed against the rock, eyes closing. She murmured on a groan, “No further.”

Lily nodded. “I didn’t see any ship pieces around here, so they probably won’t come out this far. I think we’ll be okay.” Running a sympathetic eye over her slumped girl, “How are you holding up?”

“Everything hurts.”

“Try to get some sleep, nothing else can be done,” Lily said with a weary sigh as she settled herself. “I just hope your Dad’s okay.”

Morning sun drifted toward afternoon sky, beating down on the women and stealing away the shadows they rested in. Delya slept in fitful spurts, waking to moan for water, to moan for home.

Lily was thirsty, too. Parched-mouth thirst dominated her rumbling stomach which cried for filling. Neither woman had eaten or drunk anything since leaving home the day before. Salty liquid leeched from their bodies, the sweat rehydrating the dried blood on Delya’s face and turning it into red stained rivulets.

There was a small lake in the forest but damned if Lily knew where it was, and she was not thirst-crazy enough to search for it.

In the near distance, Alpha scavengers were dismantling the ship into portable loads. Lily was afraid to look and didn’t really need to; the grind of moving scrap and straining men reaching her ears told the story. No eyes needed to know they weren’t out of the forest, yet.

At one point, there had been sounds of arguments and fighting, then screams and crows of dominance. Lily got the impression that others had come to get their share of the ship but had been routed. She didn’t risk looking because she wasn’t even curious.

Afternoon bleed into dusk. Lily lay close to Delya feeling no better than a wrung-out rag, straddling the twilight between sleep and listlessness. The roaring putter of an engine roused her, and she moved her forearm from her eyes. A flyer lifted off and flew past. Then another, and finally a third.

There had been three search lights last night. Three arrivals. Three departures.

Gone at last.

Lily dared a peek. Nothing but trees and bushes around. No noises not of nature.

“I think they’re gone. I’m going to check and look for your Dad. I’ll be back.”

There was no response and she wasn’t sure if Delya heard her. Lily set out on hands and knees toward the hauler. She listened, and hearing nothing, gained her feet, traveling as silently as she could on unsteady legs.

She emerged from the tree line. The hauler a rescue beacon several 100 yards away. Lily’s steps came faster.

Careless to consequences she called out. “Ett. Ett.”

A figure separated from the forest some ways in front of her, still partially hidden in the shadows. She paused, ready to streak back into the coverage of the woods On squinting examination, it was a bent person, staggering on akimbo legs into the light. She recognized his head shape, his clothes; she had made them.

“Ett.” Summoning energy she shouldn’t have had, Lily ran to him. Catching him in her arms caused them both to fall.

“Ett. Oh Fates. I’m so glad to see you.” Kissing the side of his face, relieved tears trying to squeeze out of the desert of her eyes.

He sagged into her, head hanging. “You, too,” gruff with emotion.

His head was a mangled wreck. Far worse than Delya’s although both his blackened eyes were open above his flattened nose. Half his ear hung torn. His right arm bent wrong below the elbow, the joint swollen to double in size. From the way he had been moving, his blood soaked clothes concealed something wrong with either his back or legs.

“Fekking alphas,” Ett muttered in resigned bitterness, too beat for anger. Then his body stiffened, voice worried, “Where’s Delya?”

“Knocked out. Hidden. Those bastards beat her. She’ll be okay. Got off easier than you, you tough old bastard.”

“Yeah, tough,” he mumbled. “Will you be able to get her on your own? I can’t help you. Go get the hauler. Take it closer to where she is, but stop back here first with some water, will ya? The keys are in my pants pocket, on your side.” A probing hand gently wormed inside the tight pocket and withdrew the keys.

She moved to ease his back to the ground. “Lie down.”

He grunted her away. “If I lie down, I won’t get back up. Hurry. The alphas are gone but…”

But someone else may come. Lily nodded and hurried off.

An unpleasant surprise greeted Lily at the hauler, but she was too battered to care about this latest beating. She would save the angst for some other time, choosing instead to guzzle stale water as hot as the air but which her great thirst transformed into the sweetest elixir. It ran out the sides of her mouth, a decadent and not-too-smart waste; there was only one jug for the three of them.

She powered up and set the hauler down near him and grabbed the water jug before helping him take a long pull. “Let’s get you on the bed. It’ll be more comfortable.”

“There’s no room. Help me to the cab.”

Lily gave Ett a look of crushed spirit, feeling some of that delayed angst a little earlier than prudent under the circumstances, her disappointment almost audible. “There’s plenty of room, Ett. Because they took it all. Stole it from us. Everything. Every-fekking-thing.”

His head swiveled to look at the empty flat bed. It must have been very painful for him to move so quickly because what was left of his face crumbled and choked noises sounding almost like sobs came from him.

“Lily, no,” whispered devastation. He turned back, unfocused gaze lost to the ground, body sagging as if key bones had been removed and gravity was taking full advantage. He looked like hell from his beating, but now he was truly broken. Defeated in a way that more than two decades of homesteading F-moon had not wrought. A congenital loser in a bag of skin.

“Yeah,” Lily said, expelling the word on an exhale. Her hand went to his, lightly caressing the knuckles that had corrected her failings so many times over the years. “I’ll take care of you. We’ll survive. Because we’re tough old bastards.” Under her breath, so quiet it was scattered in the breeze and barely heard, “Survival, what more could we want?”

He gave an infinitesimal nod. “Give me a drink of that before you take it.”

****

Lily drove to where she thought she had exited the trees, parked, and forged in. Dead tired on worn legs, she stepped with care, not prepared to suffer further injury to hurry. Both Delya and Ett were going to live. There was no emergency that warranted reckless rushing, even though Ett needed some serious attention, maybe even an Outback “doctor”.

After a few wrong trajectories and over corrections she found the outcrop that had been their sanctuary. As she neared, she heard a woman say, “I know where to get water. But I have nothing to carry it in. I’ll take you to it. Let me help you up.”

Lily slowed her approach, not sure whether she would run or fight if the situation turned dire. Skirting around the boulder in a crouch, as quiet as an arthritic elephant, she saw Delya sitting slump against a rock. In front of Delya knelt a child whose face was turned toward Lily, looking tense and ready to bolt.

Lily starred at the strangest being she had ever seen. Long, cyan hair framed a pale face of ethereal pixie-ish beauty from which the scratches, bruising, and dirt she wore could not detract. The thing was all eyes and pouty lips. Thin blue brows gently arched over wide-set violet gemstone-eyes slightly too big for the space. Her cherry-pink mouth was full top to bottom and narrow from side to side in a permanent cupid’s bow, with a bottom lip as plump as a new pillow. Sitting high on her torso were a rather prominent pair of breasts that all the mud dirtying the creature’s skin-hugging bodysuit could not hide.

This was no child; it was a small female... something. A tiny, delicate one. Something out of a wonder tale.

A crayon-colored sylph.

Lily was no longer afraid of it. “What are you?” she croaked.