Stone Seeds Read Free Page A

the Nice population of scurvet going. They wouldn’t have gotten so outnumbered in here. They would not have become food.
    Antek stretches his arm out softly in the dark. Feels the cold cell floor, damp underneath his left hand, his fingers splaying. Icy floor.
    Boots under the door.
    It’s time for Antek to be stained again. He’ll be rebooted after. He feels the nick in his chin. Remember, remember Tomax .
    The stain is in fact only a side effect of the tweaks the lab technicians regularly make to the Egg Boys’ DNA. But the stain also signifies how far an Egg Boy is along to becoming pure Egg Man.
    Antek knows he’ll get more Egg Man and less Antek every time he comes out of the lab. That his stain will spread out until it covers most of his body.
    There is no point resisting.
    â€“––––
    When Antek’s mind collapsed toward the end of the third month in the cell, something came to Antek. The past in a tilting, skewed light, and he saw something that he’d missed. And then that thin light falling on a dark scene, the streaming damp jail wall felt to him like the insides of a stomach or a soul.
    The floor is damp under Antek’s hand. There’s a crack in the ceiling. Water running in a long stream down the wall. Antek puts his mouth up to the filthy wall, he takes a deep drink of the cool, mottled water.
    There is a long crack along the cell wall. A seam that spills a gut of bricks in the middle. Antek kicks it with his foot. He has the sudden feeling that the cell itself could clatter down on his head at any moment. One swift kick to the cell door, or one too many, and the whole room would shake and split.
    There are branches running out from the crack in the middle of the wall, tendrils fingering all the corners. New seams criss and cross the ceiling. Was there a bomb above ground? It seems to Antek to be unlikely that the barracks gaol would be attacked.
    An accident then. That last bomb. Maybe. Antek tries to put it out of his mind. He’s trained himself since birth to put away these kinds of questions. To not accidentally show by some slow gaze, or brief shrewd glance, the little he knows, or has thought to ask himself.
    He puts a hand out. Feels the dark, wet wall behind him. It’s covered with a sheen of something. The damp gently tugs at his hair, pulls him stickily into it.
    There’s a long, deep crack in the ceiling over his head.
    His officer cellmate has started whimpering in his sleep. Thrashes and flails, dreaming. And then something scurrying across the floor. A yellow scurvet dips under the door and out into the light outside the cell. Antek raises his left hand to his chin, without realising that he does so. He feels the small groove there.
    Antek thinks he remembers sunshine. The old sun. It’s sudden. The crack of light under the door must have triggered memory. Tomax was standing with his tin cup. Standing at the mouth of the gem mine. The light was dappling Tomax’s skin then he’d shielded his eyes. Squinted up at Antek from underthe shade of his hand. The sun downed softly in an arc over Tomax’s head. But of course it couldn’t have been like that, Antek thinks. With the sun.
    And then Antek’s mind goes on without him, stirred and exhausted. He should never have smiled back at the edge farmer, Tomax.
    The tribes can’t mix.
    Antek’s gently butting at the cold stone wall ‘til he believes he seeps into it.
    His mind is spreading into the cold damp stones of his cell.
    When Antek wakes again there is a glistening seam of water, running fast down the wall. He guesses there’s a split pipe above him. Antek wonders if his cell will fill up like a rain barrel, drown him at the top.
    He looks down.
    He notices that his cellmate’s trembling. Antek reaches out a hand to rearrange the officer’s blanket. He thinks for a moment. Then he gives the man his own.
    Antek leans into the black cell