Untune

I

I stood dumbly in the snow all wrapped up in jackets and scarf and the hand-made hat and I watched her kneeling, her body steaming, her skin flecked and smeared with blood so fresh and rich and wet. Her chest was heaving and she gasped for breath and she stared at me, right at me. She held her shaking hands out to me as though showing me something. "Look." she said, smiling distantly. "Look, Hart. Look!"

I think she meant the blood slicking her palms and fingers. "I'm looking, Reka."

"Oh God." someone whimpered, and Reka's face darted towards the voice. She sucked the tips of her fingers. "We shouldn't have come. Why did we come?"

"Jesus shut up!"

"Reka?" I said, and she turned back towards me and I could feel the sweat trickling into my eyes. She was breathing very deeply.

II

The first time I met her she was six years old and already taller than my mother and both my elder siblings. We had been invited up to the homestead for a party of some kind and the little kids had been introduced to each other. At the time I had never seen a Heja that wasn't a grown-up, so meeting this girl who was supposed to be my age even though I was eye-level with the bottom of her ribs was a little unbelievable. She was a little shy and I was a little rude and when I teased her about how tall she was she hit me in the face so hard that I couldn't even process the pain but bawled anyway. Reka had been petulant then and her mother hadn't been impressed and later we sat sniffling together and bonded over our black eyes.

We hadn't been living on Surface long at that point. Mum and Dad argued about the whole thing that night and then they argued about everything else.

I had been born on planet X but I didn't have much attachment to it. Sila and Cahaya hated leaving but they were teenagers and I thought that teenagers were just stupid.