Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully, including my struggles to maintain a balanced life, what I listen to, read, and watch for entertainment, and occasional bits of information I’ve gleaned from doing the research for my novels.
In addition, now and again I will provide some of my fiction to read, for free, on this newsletter. Everything is available to anyone who subscribes, but I am always pleased when someone shows their appreciation for the newsletter by upgrading to paid, and I particularly enjoy getting likes and comments at the bottom of posts.
Daily Diary, Day 1476:
Today I’ve included the third scene in Aelwyd: Home, the short story in the Caelestis series set in the Paradisi Chronicles universe. I am publishing a new scene every Tuesday and Thursday. If you haven’t read the first two introductory posts yet, I strongly suggest you do so before you start on the short story itself. To find the first of these two posts, or the earlier scenes, click HERE.)
Aelwyd: Home
By Louisa Locke, copyright 2016
Scene 3:
Kammie grabbed her shoulder pack and ran to where Stewart had been lying. The red lights at the top of each post were no longer flashing. Something was definitely wrong. Then she caught sight of something red to her right. It was Stewart on the other side of the fence, running with great leaps towards the trees, bare branches lifted against the sky. Without hesitation, she tossed her pack through where the electric charge should be if the fence was working. When there was no telltale spark or smell of ozone, she ran right between the fence posts, grabbed the pack up again, and ran after the boy.
The little brat! I only closed my eyes for a second. Where is he going? What am I going to tell his father if anything happens to him? The little brat!
Kammie shouted, but Stewart didn’t even turn his head. He probably thought this was just a game. The little out of control brat! Doesn’t he know what kind of trouble we’ll be in for going outside the perimeter?
She should have been able to gain on him with her longer legs, but she’d never been one for sustained physical exercise, and the overcrowded conditions on the SS Nightingale gave her a good excuse to avoid even going to the crew fitness center on the ship. Stewart always teased her that she “ran funny.”
Trying to keep Stewart in sight, she didn’t notice how steep the slope towards the forest had become until she accelerated at an uncontrollable pace, finally tripping. For a few seconds her fear of floating off the surface of the planet became reality as she flew through the air before slamming to the ground, the tough dead grass stinging her hands and face.
“Stewart,” she screamed angrily as she scrambled back up, “stop running this minute.”
He’d almost made it to the trees, and she tried to run even faster, ignoring the pain in her right knee. The line of white tree trunks that rose in front of her at least blocked out the sky and limitless horizon, so the nausea and dizziness she’d been fighting abated. She groaned when Stewart disappeared into the forest.
When she made it to the trees, she saw with relief that she could still see Stewart’s red jersey flitting in front of her. The trees seemed to have slowed him down. She shouted again, and this time he turned and gave her one of his cheeky grins, waved, and then bounded off again.
When I catch up to him, I am going to strangle him.
But catching up to him seemed less and less possible. A lifetime of living in space, where the floors remained flat and the openings in walls evenly distributed, simply didn’t prepare her for the nightmare of running on ground that rose and dipped and sprouted hard knobby things or through trees with branches that snatched at her hair and clothes. The second time she ran smack into a tree trunk that she could have sworn hadn’t been in her way a second before, Kammie began to question the wisdom of her decision to run after Stewart.
She should have called . . . no he had her mobile . . . she should have run into the first open door in the camp and asked for help.
The military would have sent out a hover cycle that could have tracked him down in minutes. Every human being who’d embarked on the trip to New Eden had a unique traceable ID implanted in their wrist, so even if he’d made it deep into the woods before they started to look for him, he’d be easy to find. And they had things like drones with infrared technology, in case the ID wasn’t enough.
But what if they didn’t mobilize the search right away? Thorndikes didn’t tend to take civilians very seriously. She could hear that soldier she’d met today wasting precious time telling her not to worry her pretty little head . . . the boy was playing catch me, catch me with her . . . or had just gone home.
What if this meant that it took hours for them to even start to look for him?
He was just a little boy. In biological years he was nine, but two of those years he’d been hibernating in cryosleep—delaying his physical growth and mental maturation––so he was really only seven. A seven-year-old who in his mind had been running free in a rural countryside less than a month ago. Of course he was fearless. He didn’t have a clue how dangerous New Eden could be. Predators, hostile natives, unknown microbes in the soil under his feet. And at some point he’d realize he was lost, and then he’d be scared.
No, better that she’d gone after him, kept following him, making sure that when he finally stopped running he wasn’t alone.
Then she could get him to hand over the mobile and they could call for help.
But why was the fence down?
Distracted by this thought, Kammie didn’t look before she scrambled over a fallen tree trunk, and she tumbled down a deep ravine, coming to a jarring stop at the bottom, her hair covered with twigs and her mouth smeared with leaves and dirt. She sat up, desperately trying to spit out the dirt, her fear suffocating her. It’s just dirt. Anything I get from it, my mother can take care of. I just need to get Stewart and call for help.
As she pushed herself up to a sitting position and used the end of her shirt to wipe her tongue, she looked around for the comforting sight of Stewart’s red jersey . . . and saw nothing but rows and rows of the ghostly white trees. She screamed out his name . . . and heard nothing but the sound of the wind rattling the dead leaves on the empty ground.
To be continued…
Brief check-in: Continuing to enjoy the cooler weather and slowly doing the last edits. We rewatched the first season of The Old Man, on Hulu, really enjoyed it, and it ends with a big cliff-hanger. The first two episodes of a second season have dropped, so we have to decide if we want to wait until they are all in, and binge. Here is another lovely rose.
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Cliff hanger! Love the rose!