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Stories from the Verse
Con Verse Lea
Chapter 17: Hastings 237
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Beam 125
The next morning Lauren summoned her section leaders and explained that she wanted to move everyone to the opposite side of the warehouse, where there was still fresh food available. She and Tommy would go now and set up their site on the other side, and everyone else should come as soon as Varlax and the others could get them organized to do so in an orderly fashion.
Lauren had no illusions that this would actually be an orderly move, but at least, she thought, she and Tommy should be there first so they could mark their space.
The warehouse had only the one overhead door, on the south wall, and thus the roads all led to that side of the building; there were roads along the east and west walls, but none paralleling the north side. Lauren debated whether they should camp near the center of the wall, which would put them closer to the middle of the camp, or near a corner of the warehouse, which would have them alongside a road. She opted for the latter. If harvesters came through, she wanted to be able to get off the fields as quickly as possible.
Gathering such scrap as she could find in the picked fields, Lauren built a fire that night. It was still green, and little of it was woody, so she got more smoke than flame, but she was nervous about the scouting teams. As it turned out, she was right. Sylwi’s group returned in the middle of the night, the female ner and her five male traveling companions clearly terrified from their journey, and the more so when the camp was not where they expected.
“So,” Lauren asked once she had them calm and sitting in her camp; Varlax, Gram, and Torin joined them. “What happened? What did you find?”
Sylwi was shaking despite the blanket Tommy had draped over her. “The world,” she said, “the world just kept going, always the same, vast open spaces with greens on it. Then it got dark, and I tried to call for the lights but they wouldn’t come on. So we tried to trace our way back along the road, to get home. And then you weren’t there--but I could smell something burning, and so we found you.”
Lauren nodded. Scouting parties, she realized, had not been a great idea. Well, maybe they were necessary--maybe she had to have these people learn about their world, and they were only going to be able to do that by learning to explore. Sylwi would be all right. Hopefully she will learn that she did not need to be so afraid.
Hopefully the other two teams would also return safely soon.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with twenty other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #460: Versers Reorganize. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
