Sway's Demise Read Free

stairs all the way down to the bottom.
    Sojin tsked at them. “Always fooling around. You’re both so childish.”
    “So, what were you doing this morning with Sway?”
    Her head turned, as if annoyed he’d even asked. “Practicing.”
    Eli laughed. “Practicing to kill humans? Why would you ever need to do that? Priyon are the danger.”
    She grabbed him hard by the collar, “I’ll kill anything that puts my kind in harm’s way. Remember well.” Sojin shoved him to the dirt of the catacomb floor, and he knew not to retort. Sway retrieved him from the ground, patting his back to help quell his quivering lip.
    “Ignore her.”
    While Sojin had never let on any differently, Sway knew beneath the robot’s cold, rigid exterior lay a hard drive filled with compassion and love for them. Why else would Sojin stay when she could retreat to an all Mew community?
    The remainder of their duties were completed in silence, without horseplay, as Sojin called it. Returning to the surface, Sway was eager to get out of the parka, and off to the week’s elective time. They were carving figurines from fallen trees, as the Priyon demanded the humans not cut down anything more than was absolutely needed to survive.
    The scent of fresh sawdust brought pleasant daydreams of frolicking through the forest to her mind. Caressing the fist sized block of black walnut, she imagined it as it would be finished. Perhaps Sway was being girlish, something she would never admit to, but she thought a heart with their initials carved through it was a nice commemoration of their infatuation with one another.
    She had yet to see Reese that day, and assumed he must be busy with chores. All the better; he couldn’t see what she was working on. Before long, the free hour expired and she groaned at the lack of progress. Sway begged Christine to allow her to take the needed tools home, and as always, she refused.
    “What happens if you lose them? Or break them? Then no one gets to woodwork.” She snatched the chisel from Sway’s hand, locking it and the lathe away in the supply locker.
    Sway sighed indignantly, pushing the stolen exact-o knife deeper into her pocket. It could at least help her to work on cleaning up the edges of the heart, but she’d have to work on the initials again at the next electives class.
    She deposited the love project at home, then ran to find Reese. He should have been at the windmills, helping repair a damaged blade. Upon arriving, Sway saw the metal was fixed, beautiful welds all the way around. There was only one other place he would have gone when his chores were complete.
    Twigs and crisp weeds snapped underfoot as she ran to the training facility. He was the only other teen in the community with a desire to join Beacon that rivalled hers, and maybe Eli’s. He could always be found learning techniques for some sort of situation in his downtime.  That day it was trapping, but not for rabbits. He was learning to set traps for Priyon.
    With all of his focus on the knot, he appeared to be oblivious to the opening door. He looked back and forth from the book to his thin, metal wire. Sway eyed the Priyon dummy he worked on with annoyance. It wasn’t at all accurate to the true anatomy.
    Priyon had a hard exoskeletal structure, a remnant from their maturation cocoon. They took so long to mature in their cocoon, humans only saw the emergence of a few in almost a century. Sway felt certain the process was interesting to observe, but all that remained were a series of hand drawn pictures and text.
    The Priyon infant created a cocoon approximately one and a half times its size after stuffing itself to the brim with food. Then, when the time was right, it broke through the shell from the inside. It had to attack its own shell to expose the sensory organ on the top of its body, and the section on its abdomen for the mouth.
    In a book Sway once read, the artist wrote in the margin it took nearly three days for the Priyon to break