1
HARLOW
One of the first mornings at the beach, I wake up to something scuttling over my foot.
It hasn't been the most comfortable night's sleep already. Sand is everywhere, and the cave we're bunking in is tiny and cold. Those things don't matter the moment I look up at the sunlight streaming in from the cave and see one of the scorpion-things perched on my boot. I kick it off, sliding backward in the cave in horror. Everywhere I look, there's more of the damn things. They're on the furs, at the mouth of the cave, and I swear there's one on the wall. I make a noise of distress at the sight.
My mate, Rukh, is instantly awake at my terrified sound. He sits up, growling and ready to protect me, a question in his eyes. I point at one of the things. They're horrid looking, a cross between a crab and a scorpion with lots of legs and a segmented tail. Rukh plucks the nearest one off the wall and promptly bites the head off.
I squeal in horror again.
He holds the limp thing out to me, an offering. "Har-loh?"
"I'm not eating that," I cry. "Not on your life!" The defunct vegetarian in me is appalled at the thought. I've had to make a lot of changes since coming to this icy planet, not the least of them being a change in my dietary habits. And so far eating meat hasn't been too bad, even if I do randomly get cravings for a hamburger, of all things. But seeing Rukh holding that awful-looking thing out to me to eat? I can't do it. My throat clenched tight, I shake my head.
He stares at it, and the look in his eyes is uneasy. "Har-loh…no?"
"No," I manage. "My seafood has to be cooked."
"Cookt?" he echoes, shaking the floppy thing at me. "Rukh cookt?"
Rukh doesn't know a lot of language—any at all—because he's been feral for so long. He's picking up some of my words, though, desperate to talk to me. And “cook” is one of them he knows.
I stare at the thing, trying to get over my initial disgust. It's food, I remind myself. It's food it's food it's food.
"Cook it, sure," I manage. "Thank you."
Rukh grunts, the sound full of pleasure, and tosses the dead thing down on the ground. Then he grabs another one of the things. He lifts it to his mouth, ready to bite the head off, and then glances over at me. As if recalling the horror on my face, he changes tactics at the last moment and snaps the head off instead. It makes an awful crunching sound, followed by a splat of liquid, and then tosses it down onto the other. Within moments, we have a neat, tidy little pile. He doesn't care that they pinch at him with their stinger-pincher things, or that they scuttle away fast when they see his hand descending. Rukh is faster than them, and something tells me he's done this plenty of times before.
I can't begrudge the man for surviving, even if it is a little rough on my sensibilities.
I curl up in the back of the small cave and watch Rukh as he chases the smaller ones out of the cave with a flick of his hand and beheads the larger ones. It hasn't been very long at all since Rukh and I resonated. Not very long since he hit me over the head and stole me, and I'm still adjusting. It's a lot to take in all at once—leaving behind the sa-khui tribe that's welcomed me since I got to this planet to go out into the wild alone with Rukh, but he's made it clear that to him, they're the enemy.
Since he's my person, I'm not leaving his side. We'll just have to figure out how to manage with just the two of us.
It's one reason we're at this beach, I think. From what I can tell from our (admittedly short and mostly inferred) conversations, the weather will be warmer here throughout the wintry brutal season, and we're much farther away from the tribe that he wants so desperately to avoid. His father's grave is here, too, and I suspect he just likes the beach. It's pretty, even if it's nothing like the beaches back home. It's cold and rocky and a little violent, but the tide still rolls in to hit the sands, and there's a comforting familiarity with that, even if the sands are greenish and the tide is slushy with ice.
Rukh piles up all the dead scorpion-crabs and then begins to make a fire near the entrance to the cave. It's a small one, and I inwardly wince when he tosses the dead things directly onto the flames. I have to remind myself that Rukh's used to eating his food cold and raw, and the fire's for me. I can't really complain that he's not skilled at grilling his food if he's never grilled before, can I?