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I slung my arm around her waist. “You’ve got that right.” She smiled up at me with so much trust and affection it warmed me from the inside out.
It was a long hike, but Holly did astonishingly well in keeping up with us. She only faltered once, when twilight was setting in, and it was time to make camp. As she had predicted, besides a few birds, we hadn’t seen any animals she deemed domesticable.
Not much later, we sat around a small fire, roasted a bird Oredeon had brought down earlier, and waited for it to cook.
“Tell us about the future, Holly,” Oredeon encouraged.
“Oh, compared to the technology you have, we lived in the Stone Age.” She tried to laugh off the attention given to her. I had noticed that before; she didn’t like being the center of attention.
“You would be surprised,” Oredeon muttered. “We didn’t live much differently back on Jahrle from how we live here.”
“Oh, no?” Holly threw a questioning glance between Oredeon and me.
“No. I told you about the Manx conquering us; they were the ones with the technology. This”—I pointed at my blaster—“we liberated from them.”
“Oh.” Holly’s gaze moved up to the stars. “Do you ever think they might come back?”
All our eyes moved up to the beautiful moon that circled Earth. “We have considered that,” I admitted.
“Our main worry is the translators. We wondered if they might emit some kind of signal to them,” Oredeon added.
“What would we do if they came back?” Holly asked.
Her usingwein her question lifted my spirits despite the gloomy turn our conversation had taken. The concept of the Manx returning had tortured us for a long time, and there was only one answer to her question. “Fight.”
“Please don’t take this the wrong way, but they defeated you once,” Holly cautioned.
“We’re more spread out now,” Oredeon reasoned. “There are several groups like ours. We will not let the Manx take us again.”
“Have you ever considered moving away from this area?” This time, Holly’s gaze was directed only at me.
“We have,” I told her, “but the caves are the perfect spot. Warm, easy to defend. We took a vote once and decided the evil we know is better than the one we do not. Besides, if the Manx put transmitters in us, they would find us anywhere.”
“But they might not make such an effort if it’s only a few of you,” Holly argued.
That argument had been brought up before, but it always came back to the fact that we were strangers on this planet. We had explored as far as we dared travel from the cave, a few brave souls even had ventured out for weeks, but they all came back with the discouraging news that nothing was as safe as our caves. Even when they did find something, there wasn’t a great lure togo for it. The territory didn’t change much the farther out we went.
“Were you looking for something specific?” Holly asked.
“Ocean,” several of us said automatically. The land we had been taken from on Jahrle was a large island, surrounded by ocean. Whichever direction one walked, within two days, they would be by the ocean.
“The Gray Sea gave us life,” I explained. “Sailing on boats is the greatest pleasure one can have.” I gave her an apologetic grin and winked at her. “Besides…”
She smacked my arm but smiled back.
“What if I told you such places exist here, too?” Holly asked.
It felt as if even nature fell silent, not even a log in the fire crackled as all our eyes moved to her, this amazing female who had already done so much to change our lives for the better.
“Where?”
She closed her eyes for a moment to get her bearings, then she pointed in different directions, “I don’t know how far exactly these coasts are, but there and there”—she pointed in a direction—“you will find a rough, cold sea, called the North Sea. And there and there”—she pointed in another direction—“are warmer, milder ones, the Atlantic Ocean, the Tyrrhenian, and the Adriatic Sea . And there”—indicating a final time—“farther out, a completely tranquil sea called the Mediterranean Sea.”
We stared at each other in question, but the answer was the same. “Rough and cold!”
Holly nodded as if she had expected as much. “I can take you there,” she offered confidently.
More silence ensued as each one of us tried to wrap our mind around how much Holly’s arrival was changing our lives for the better. First she brought us hope that each of us would find the mate they so desperately craved, and now she was offering to take us to a place we had thought we would never see again. Itwas as if I could already smell the ocean, feel the cold, moist wind on my face, and the dance of a ship on high waves. .
