Stone Seeds Read Free

quivering.
    Something is moving underneath Antek’s blanket, there’s a scratching, subtle but relentless tugging at the toe of his boot. It’s an ominously hunched shape, he sees it moving to and fro by the crack of light under the door, from the unshaded lightbulb in the corridor outside. A gnawing sound, he kicks out at it sharply. It’s a shock, feeling its small body against his boot. It bares its teeth, scowls and scatters. Back out into the light.
    Antek hears a tin cup clattering, rolling. The guard outside, cursing in a broadside, kicks Antek’s door. Just as if it wasAntek had sent the scurvet to knock over his stool.
    Scurvets were one of the general’s early experiments in tame and wild creatures, back when the general was a lowly lab assistant. Even Antek has heard the story about the scurvet, although he’s never clapped eyes on the creature before now. They say that the scurvet gave the general his ideas for Bavarnica.
    â€œQuiet.” The guard outside Antek’s door says. “Quiet down in there.”
    Tomax came to Antek in a dream that night, the field behind the village gem mines. The trees were burning, smoke rolling up from them in swathes. The wind just seemed to curl the smoke back on itself, so that it fell in strange, unnatural folds, and Antek wakes with a choking feeling.
    Long gasp for air. Swallows painfully. He closes his eyes. In the moment before he wakes, believes a cat is winding slowly round his leg. There’s a whirring sound, and when he opens his eyes it’s just a grey scurvet. This one seems tame. Tamer than the last one. Nice and Nasty he decides on the spot to call the two. He hears Nasty scatter in the corridor outside, hiss.
    Antek’s heart beat gently thrums against his rib cage.
    Antek notices that he has a cellmate, an organic. A slumped shape in the cell’s darkest corner. The cellmate’s trousers are ripped and bloodied but they’re officer’s trousers. Bare feet, small burn marks. The man’s floored and breathing strangely. He looks briefly at Antek. And then recognising that his cellmate is an Egg Boy, looks away.
    Antek guesses that the officer would rather not share a cell with an Egg Boy. A thing that isn’t human.
    Antek falls asleep again, waking in fits and starts all night long, but the dream he’s had these past weeks, the dream still finds Antek. Even here. Tomax again. Tomax is running from the Egg Men.
    It takes Antek a while, in the dream, to realise that he’s one of them, the Egg Men, and that Tomax is also running from him. Just a beat ahead of him, and at first Tomax sees only Antek and he is laughing, turning toward Antek the way he used to turn toward Antek. And Tomax’s smile. The one that’d make Antek feel weak suddenly. Weak on guard duty. Which has to be a feeling that’s against regulations. Antek would look down or away. But when he’d look up again, Tomax would always still be looking back. And Tomax’s smile then, like slow cloudburst. Soft rain.
    Tribes can’t mix.
    That’s the first and most important of the general’s rules.
    The running dream has lasted several weeks; it is never exactly the same dream twice but one thing never changes. The ending. Tomax eyes shift up, he sees something coming behind and then above Antek. Tomax’s smile slides slowly off his face, his eyes become wide and amazed. And then blank with horror. Antek sees a shadow move across the left side of Tomax’s face and then the dream ends. Blink, blink .
    Antek wakes to his cold cell.
    Scattering sound in the corridor outside. A squeal then nothing.
    Antek guesses correctly that Nasty killed Nice.
    Hears the sound of the small furry body, dragged unresisting along the cold tiles by two perhaps three sets of sharp jaws, scuttle of several clawed feet. Antek reflects that itmight have been a different story if the prisoners had only had a few crumbs to keep