The Perimeter Read Free

assigned Anatoly Keyes, along with an apprentice.”
    “ That’s it? ” Phillipa asked. The parasite swayed its head, warning Phillipa. She struggled to calm her voice. “Why isn’t a whole team working on it? Why isn’t everyone working on it?”
    Melba started to speak, stopped herself, shook her head. “I’m not sure what to tell you. They have their own priorities.”
    “They have their own priorities,” meaning Phillipa wasn’t one of them. She was low value, had no useful skills. All she did was teach the children about a place they would never see, that no one alive had ever seen. They were going to let her die out here.
    “We’ll figure this out, Phillipa,” Melba said. “I promise. We’re not giving up on you.”
    Her words sent a chill through Phillipa. Melba was acknowledging that giving up on her was a possibility. Maybe the Senate preferred her dead. She was nothing but a threat, carrying a hostile species that might lay eggs in her or spread disease. It smelled like something that might be a disease carrier, like it was made of rotten meat.
    “So when it’s finished with me, when it gets tired of me, it will just kill me,” Phillipa said.
    “No, it can’t do that. Stinging takes a toll on it. If it stings you enough times to kill you, it will die, too.”
    Like honeybees on Earth, Phillipa thought.
    Melba opened her mouth to say something further, then seemed to think better of it.
    “Tell me.”
    Melba nodded. “What I was going to say was, that’s what happened to the man on the advance team. As a last resort, the xeno team tried to anesthetize the parasite without killing it, and it stung until both of them were dead.”
    While Phillipa digested this, Melba tossed her the pack she’d been carrying. “Food and water, and a pistol. To defend yourself if something comes out of the rocks.”
    Or to shoot herself in the head. But Melba wouldn’t say that aloud. “Can someone please get my shoes?”
     
    * * *
     
    The parasite prodded her awake before sunrise. She jolted upright, every fiber of her screaming with exhaustion. It kept prodding until she set one raw, blistered foot on the floor of the hut.
    Phillipa groaned from the pain. It had forced her to walk the entire perimeter of the settlement—thirty-one miles. She was filthy, her chest and abdomen itched and throbbed under the parasite’s scaly grasp. The unpopped blisters on the pads of her feet felt like acid-filled pads; the popped ones were raw, open sores.
    It prodded her to stand. She grabbed the pack, stepped into her shoes as it forced her outside into the thick bluish Cyan fog. It pushed her to move, faster, faster.
    It made her run.
    Each step was excruciating but not as bad as the stings. The stings were worse than anything she’d ever experienced. She could feel the poison exploding in her flesh with each sting.
    She ran until she collapsed. The parasite allowed her to lie there, her face pressed to the harsh grass, for a minute or two; then it made her stand and run some more. There was nothing but pain and exhaustion—no other thoughts, no space to feel sad or scared.
     
    * * *
     
    Phillipa dreamed she was back in the starship and woke crying in the middle of the night. She missed the starship. Running in the huge open commons with her friends, dinners elbow to elbow at the long tables. For the first sixteen years of her life, she’d looked to Cyan as salvation from the tedium and certainty of the ship, a chance to feel real sunlight, and air that was too hot, and too cold. As soon as they landed, she’d realized how misguided her hope had been. Then she lost her parents to the ketamite plague after the disinfector system failed for the first time. She hated this backward world. If her grandparents had stayed on Earth, there would be no parasite on her. She’d be living in a clean, civilized world with advanced technology, with parents to watch out for her. At school on the ship she was taught how great