Tabitha (56 page)

‘Well that’s
disappointing,’ she mumbled, folding the bottle top back over and tossing it
down in the sand. ‘I wonder what this is,’ she said to the dragon, sitting down
by the box. She heard his big eye blink open; glimpsed the white glow off to
her left. It just felt good to have something there to talk to, to remind her
that she wasn’t alone in the world. Tabitha pulled a belt out of the box and
laid it on her lap, made of the same intricate grey metal as the harness on her
ship’s saddle. There were two pieces of equipment attached to it, one on either
side. She brought the belt around her waist to try it on. Just like the saddle
harness the belt closed itself and adjusted to fit her. She admired its design
in the sunlight, and her gaze went to the ribbon tied around her wrist. She paused
for a moment, and wondered what her mum would make of her now. The thought of
her was still raw in her mind; a wound that was never really going to heal. All
she could do was carry on and survive. That’s what Mum would have wanted; what
everyone would have wanted. Tabitha looked back down at her boxes of toys,
trying to take her mind off everyone. The belt was quite beautiful really, she
thought, for rubbery metal in murderous grey. She tried the object on the left
of her belt, and the sheath gave up its contents readily like a firm grip
loosening. It was a black combat knife; a thick handle and a cruel blade made
from a single piece of engraved metal. The object on the right of her belt
didn’t budge though; a solid block that wouldn’t open or detach despite her
struggling. Tabitha sighed with disappointment and sheathed her knife, picking
up her water bottle from the sand. The bottle stuck to the belt like a magnet,
all very handy and
survivalish
.

The next case
she opened revealed a collection of bright phials full of colourful liquids.
She took one from its leathery slot and contemplated trying it, but unlike the
water bottle these looked positively toxic. Having serious second thoughts,
Tabitha slid the phial back into its holder, closed the case and gently set it
aside. The last item in the first box was a tiny silver case with a white
spider symbol on it. They must have been seeds. Tabitha felt a cold creeping
dread and put the silver case back in the box. She really didn’t want to go
opening the lid on those. Disappointed with her finds, she grabbed the black
slab of padding to stuff it back into the box. It folded open in her hands as
she pulled it from the sand. What was it, a sheet? A tent? Intrigued, she
opened it out to see the full size of it.

‘It’s huge!’ she
told the dragon, drowned in ribbed scaly cloth. Immediately the fabric shrank
and jerked and wrapped itself around her body. Tabitha panicked as she felt it
moving, fitting itself to her shape. She struggled against it and fell back in
the sand, getting tailored against her will. The real shock came when a hood
popped up over her head and sealed itself over her face, and she was looking
around at the beach through fabric eye-scales that turned transparent. A
respirator hissed in her mask; cool clear air to feed her panicked breaths.
Claustrophobic, she felt around for a way to take the mask off. It felt tough,
like scaled stretchy leather. She couldn’t get a decent grip on it. She patted
her sides frantically, patted the suit, and the hood snapped back down into a
round collar. She sighed with relief and looked around her. The dragon hadn’t
bothered to look up from its sleep as she’d struggled. Tabitha looked down at
her new alien catsuit and stretched out her arms, admiring the matte fabric. It
was ribbed and scaled, raven-black. A good fit, like a second skin. She’d never
seen material like it; it looked almost living. She pulled the fabric back from
her hands and feet, and it shrank to fitted sleeves.

‘Magic flight
suits too, why not?’ she said to herself. Feeling a little more impressed with
her stash from the first box, Tabitha opened the second and found three sturdy
cases inside. Each one had a glowing icon on it, like different plants. She
opened them slowly to reveal loose seeds inside, large and alien-looking, but
harmless enough for now. She was wary of planting them, but the temptation was
overpowering. They could grow into anything for all she knew, good or bad. Or
very bad. There was only one way to find out though.

Tabitha carted
the box of seed cases across the beach and into the thick forest. She set it
down in the clearing by the waterfall, and opened up the lid with a biting
curiosity. She took a squishy white seed delicately from the first case and
pressed it into the sandy soil, and trickled some water on it from her bottle.
She did the same with a red seed and a black seed from the other cases,
planting them in a row. She sat herself down to keep an eye on them, and
inspected the box for some kind of alien instructions. A few minutes later,
nothing had happened. Tabitha sighed and got to her feet. She’d expected some
kind of rapid alien growth, like in a horror movie. She opened and closed the
box lid a few times, growing impatient. Bored, she turned in a slow circle to
watch a bright bird fluttering past. When she walked off she heard a little pop
under her foot, like bubble wrap. She raised her sole up and saw a cracked husk
in the soil. Another squishy white seed, oozing pearlescent fluid into the
dirt.

‘Sorry,’ she said
to the tiny white puddle. It must have fallen out of the case when she was
planting the first one. But still, she was half expecting something to happen
to it now; maybe cracking it open was the trick. A few minutes later though,
still nothing. Tabitha left in a huff, traipsing back to the beach with the box
in her hands. She’d never had any patience for keeping plants. Her dad had
always been green-fingered, but Tabitha had inherited her mum’s short attention
span. If only she’d made more time for green growing things when she was
little, she said to herself; maybe she would’ve seen more of her dad in their
short time together. If only she could have put up with the cobwebbed shed
where he used to potter, or the stuffy heat in their little greenhouse where
the sour smell of tomato plants clogged the air, maybe she might have known her
dad better before he died. But she couldn’t think like that now, she told
herself, lying back down beside her ship. There were too many people gone, and
too much grief and regret already. There were too many raw memories, and she
didn’t want to face them again so soon. They could wait, she told herself
coldly. They
had
to wait, for the sake of her sanity.

Tabitha kept to
the shade of the dragon’s wing to keep her pink sunburnt cheeks out of the sun.
She tried again with the mystery object on her belt, the unyielding solid
block, but still didn’t have any luck trying to move it. With the heat of the
sun making her drowsy, and the warmth of the dragon’s dark skin behind her not
helping a bit, Tabitha soon headed back off through the trees for a dip by the
waterfall.

Dipping her head
beneath the cold water in the pool, the tumbling waterfall above sounded like a
muffled rush on the surface. She thought about the lake that she’d dropped into
that night when she escaped, brown and murky and bitter, falling through the
sky from a dragon’s foot. It seemed ridiculous now, just thinking about it.
Escaping from the army and a tide of silver spiders; being chased across the
hills in the pitch black night, by a dragon that was also a ship. Even better,
hijacking a ship just like it after slaying a monster and then jetting off to
paradise. Tabitha wished she could look back on it all and laugh at the madness
of it, but it wasn’t funny. The syringes and scalpels and death-black terrors
in her nightmares, they weren’t funny. Burrowing claws and hollow skins;
burning flesh and screaming loved ones. They’d never leave her dreams. All she
could do now was throw herself into her new life in the sun, trying to form a
friendship with an alien creature just to take her mind off it all. Tabitha
switched her thoughts off and stood up from the water, waist-deep. Smoothed her
hair back, combing it with her claws, eyes closed against the rushing waterfall.
She shook her head to empty out the flashbacks as the cold waterfall smacked
down on her shoulders. Then she felt tentacles slide around her knees; resting
their rubbery weight on her shoulders and feeling at her face. She opened her
eyes, yelled at the thing in front of her and punched it away. It was a fleshy
balloon the size of a football, clear as glass, with a mass of black tentacles
hanging beneath it. The creature reeled away in shock, bobbing and floating off
over the water, hovering away above the ground as quickly as it could. Its
tentacles wiggled as it fled, dangling from a stump of a body that was
frantically puffing jets of air. Cautiously Tabitha stepped out of the water as
the creature retreated. She could see its distress.

‘God, I’m
sorry,’ she said, trying to understand where the hell it had come from. She
pulled her alien
catsuit
on slowly, so that her
movements didn’t spook it any more. Its slender tentacles anchored it to a tree
nearby, and the puffing holes on its vase of a body gasped and shut at a
panicked pace.

‘I don’t want to
hurt you,
er
, balloon-thing,’ Tabitha said softly.
‘You just shocked me, that’s all.’ She sat down on a rock by the edge of the
pool, studying the strange creature with a quiet fascination.

‘You must have
come from that seed, then,’ she said, as if she was making conversation with a
stranger. It had no eyes to see her, and no ears to hear as far as she could
tell. It just looked like someone had upturned a small fleshy goldfish bowl and
plonked it down on some octopus limbs, and told it to go floating around for no
apparent reason.

‘Guess you were
just saying hello,’ Tabitha said gently, stepping a little closer. ‘Do you want
some water, Fishbowl? Everything likes water. We all go mad crazy for the
water.’ Tabitha cupped her hands together in the pool, and crept towards the
creature with dripping fingers.

‘Water?’ she
asked it softly, still wary of its gasping gills. The water dripped steadily
from her hands while she waited, and slowly drained away. She had to try three
more times before the creature was calm enough to show any interest.

‘That’s it,’ she
said, stretching her arms out further towards it. Fishbowl waved a tentacle
slowly towards the water in her hands. The tentacle tapped delicately at her
fingers, and seemed satisfied with the metal skin it found there. It was
strange; she could actually feel it tapping on her hands. She thought she’d
lost all sensation there, until she felt the current in the dragon’s skin. Now
she could feel the tapping tentacle tips as well. Electric fingerprints.
She
watched a tentacle dip down into the water in her cupped palms, and with a
small draining sound it sucked every drop from her hands.

‘Someone’s
thirsty,’ she said softly, watching the tentacle play along her fingers. She
noticed how the creature drifted and swayed, like it was underwater. It was
calming to watch, part plant and part sea creature; surreal and otherworldly.
Before long Fishbowl had drifted past her back over the pool, and dipped its
tentacles into the water to drink. Tabitha settled down on a rock to watch it,
until it rose up and floated off through the trees towards the beach.

She didn’t know
how it knew, but when she followed Fishbowl to the shore she found it tapping
at the box of seeds from the ship. Obliging, Tabitha carefully opened up the
seed cases. She watched Fishbowl dip its tentacles gently into two of them. It
plucked three red seeds and three black, and then drifted off back through the
trees to the waterfall. To her astonishment the creature found the two seeds
she’d planted before and rooted them out from the soil, carrying them away to a
better spot.

Following
Fishbowl back to the ferny clearing, Tabitha saw it patting different patches
of soil close to the pool. Deciding where to plant. She watched closely as it
pushed the four red seeds into the ground in a neat row, each about two feet
apart. With the greatest care it bent a tentacle towards the seeds and watered
each one in turn, and patted the soil down around them with a feather’s touch.
Tabitha watched, fascinated. She’d never seen so much gentleness in a creature.
The four black seeds, Fishbowl planted all across the pool clearing. It pushed
one into the dirt by the rock wall beside the pool, and one in the soil on the
other side of the waterfall. The third seed it planted off by the forest to
Tabitha’s right. The fourth was pushed into the soil up on the small cliff
above, close to the rocky edge where the waterfall started.

‘You’re my
gardener, then,’ Tabitha said with a smile, reaching out to Fishbowl as it
drifted past. Its tentacles lifted up and gathered around her fingers as it
drew close; tapping at her alien hands and pale human arms. Satisfied with
Tabitha’s presence, Fishbowl drifted back through the trees towards the beach.

‘Whoa, let’s
leave those ones for now,’ Tabitha called to it across the sand, walking back
to her collection of toys on the beach. Fishbowl was tapping a tentacle on the
silver spider case, but Tabitha promptly brushed its arm aside and closed the
lid on the box.

‘Let’s wait and
see what grows out of the ones you planted, ok?’ she said, crouching down
beside Fishbowl where it hovered. ‘I’d sooner fight eight killer plants than
two boxes full. And spiders I could do without, to be honest. I’m on holiday.’

Nothing much happened after that.
Fishbowl just hovered there on the beach, content to do nothing. The dragon
slept, surprisingly, with the occasional basking session for variety. Tabitha
clipped the belt back around her waist with the knife and the water bottle
attached, and watched the belt shift a little to fit her. She put the two boxes
of equipment back in the dragon’s cockpit with her parka, and had to climb down
her lazy ship’s back
leg
onto the beach when it
didn’t bother to lift a wing up for her.