Death Cultivator by eden Hudson (best books to read .TXT) 📕

both piled high with tools and parts and grease rags. Shelves stacked high with scrap lined the back wall, while the wall opposite the workbenches had hooks and pegs on top, hung with engine belts, and the bottom half was a pigeonhole shelf on steroids, one hundred percent full.

I let out a low whistle.

Kest was bent over by the pigeonhole shelf, offloading stuff from her bag. When I whistled, she straightened up suddenly and glared at me.

My face got hot. “I was whistling at your shop. It’s impressive.”

“Oh.” The black lace spread out from her eyes and patterned her cheeks.

“Whoa,” I blurted out.

“What?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to—it’s just, where I’m from, no one’s eyes can—” I made myself shut up for a second and think about what I was trying to say. “The black stuff in your eyes was all over your face, too. At first, I assumed it was some kind of special pupil, but if that was the case, it couldn’t spread to your skin, could it? Is it some kind of camouflage response?”

Kest frowned for a second like she had no idea what I was talking about, then she caught on.

“You mean the capillaries?” she said, pointing to her eyes. “Yeah, the network in our eyes is always visible, but the network across the rest of our skin comes and goes.” She held out her arms. After a second, black lace flowed down them in a wave, appearing, then fading. “It gets easier to control as Selkens get older. My mom used to be able to wear hers like clothes and change the patterns every day.”

That made a picture pop into my head of Kest with nothing but that lacy pattern on, so I hurried up and changed the subject.

“Doesn’t seem like it would blend in really well around here,” I said. “With all the reds and browns of the sand and stuff.”

“Yeah, but if you ever see a picture of Selk, it’s spot-on.” She went back to her bag and pulled out the improvised machete, setting it on the workbench.

“Selk?” I messed with a grime-encrusted spring and got stuff all over my hands. “Is that your home planet?”

“Technically, Van Diemann is our home planet. My mom and Rali and I were all born here. Mom’s parents were political prisoners—part of a failed coup or something—our nona didn’t like to talk about it—and the sentence for that on most Confederated planets is transportation until the third generation.”

“Which is you and Rali.”

“Which is why we avoid criminals.” The stinky flesh-boots came out of her bag next and overpowered the scent of grease and rust. “Third genners can buy their way off Van Diemann. If I can just make enough money for a ticket, we’ll have a clean record and we can live anywhere.”

Kest found a metal bucket full of bolts, dumped its contents into one of the pigeonholes, then put the boots in and filled it with a mixture of oils and liquids from cans on the shelves under her workbench. The result smelled like antifreeze and old lady potpourri and those Black Ice car air fresheners all rolled into one. It was enough to make my eyes water.

I switched to breathing through my mouth. “What’s that stuff supposed to do?”

“It should kill the microorganisms making that smell.” She covered the bucket with a wide piece of tin, then climbed up onto the bottom shelf of her workbench, reached up, and switched on a fan cut into the ceiling for ventilation. “A lot of them, anyway. That’ll help the price. Somewhat.”

We stood there staring at the bucket and listening to the vent fan for maybe a whole minute.

Then I asked her, “How much does it cost? A ticket out of here?”

“Off world? It depends on who you can get to take you.” She adjusted the tin on top of the bucket. “But I’d say I’m about halfway there.”

Rali came into the shop bearing bowls of what looked like green ramen with vegetable chunks. In spite of the lingering heat from the day, the steam curling up from the bowls was pretty enticing. My stomach growled.

“Supper is served,” Rali said.

Then he caught a whiff of the boots and deodorizing solution. The lace in his eyes thinned out until it almost disappeared.

He turned around and headed back outside. “But if you want it, you have to eat in the new room.”

Prison Planet Sunup

YOU KNOW HOW SOMETIMES you wake up and you have no idea where you are? It’d only happened to me once in my old life. I’d been really little, maybe three or four. We were supposed to be at my dad’s friend’s house for a few minutes, but that turned into hours and hours of me trying to find something to do while the adults partied. Eventually, I got tired, so I found some towels and curled up in their shower. I don’t know why the shower. Weird stuff seems like a good idea when you’re little. Anyway, when I woke up, I was all alone and had no idea where I was, so I started crying and hollering for Dad. He didn’t come, so I got myself under control, then went and found him passed out on the couch with his buddies.

My first morning on the prison planet was similarly confusing, but I didn’t start screaming. The first thing I saw was a ring of stones around a smoldering fire pit. I was lying on a thin blanket on a hardpacked red dirt floor. I rolled onto my back. The walls were boards and planking and the ceiling was rusty corrugated tin, spot-welded to mismatched metal poles and beams.

The welds jogged my memory—Kest and Rali. We were in their new room, so named because they’d built it two years before, when Kest’s collection finally pushed them out of the shipping container.

The wind had picked up the night before, blowing weirdly cold air through the cracks between the boards while we ate, but with the fire