The Burn by Annie Oldham Page B

door is completely
devoted to a bank of probably thirty different monitors, all
showing different images. That is where the voices come from. The
people on those monitors talk to each other or to no one in
particular. All the images are from the same angle—just barely off
from directly overhead. Some of the monitors show image after image
changing in rapid succession, and others stay focused for minutes
at a time. Sitting on a simple metal folding chair in front of the
monitors is a woman with black hair streaked with gray that reaches
out in wild waves all the way down her back. She hunches over to
see some of the lower monitors, so from where I am, she looks like
an indistinct lump. Then she turns to the door and stares hard at
it with sharp, green eyes. I jump back.
    “Don’t just stand there staring. Come in.”
    I heave the door open. It scrapes along a groove worn
into the rock from the door being pulled open and closed time and
time again.
    Gaea stands when I come in, and the indistinct shape
falls from her to reveal a tall, slender woman. She wears a long
colorful skirt, scuffed boots, and a loose shirt with long sleeves.
A head band keeps her unruly hair from her face and makes the hair
around the crown of her head look like a black and gray halo. Huge
earrings in the shape of elephants weigh down her earlobes. She has
smooth, copper skin with furrowed wrinkles at her eyes and around
her mouth. She smiles at me, and the smile is a dare to go through
with what I have been contemplating for I don’t know how long.
    “So, Terra.”
    Gaea gestures to a chair in a corner of the room.
I’ve never seen a chair like it before. It’s woven out of some kind
of wood. I run my fingers over it.
    “Wicker.” Gaea has a mocking smirk on her mouth.
“Used to be a popular kind of furniture on the Burn.”
    It creaks at me as I sit down. I rub my palms on the
arm rests.
    “How did you get it?” I ask, the question I have for
just about everything I see around me.
    “I brought it here,” she says, shrugging her
shoulders. She goes over to the other corner of the room. There’s a
bed there—a mattress shoved into a recess of rock—and a dresser. A
photo stands on one end of the dresser, but she turns it over
before I can see it and tucks it under her pillow. Then she grabs a
whistling tea pot off a burner.
    “Coffee?”
    “Real coffee, the kind with caffeine?” Has Mr. Klein
been here to have real coffee?
    Gaea takes two mugs from a drawer and pours a packet
of dark crystals into each one. “The only kind of coffee. That
garbage in the colony shouldn’t be called coffee. Rint loves this.
He requests it every time he comes to see me.”
    I have the feeling she is the kind of person I
shouldn’t ask too many questions of, but I can’t help myself.
    “Does he come here a lot?”
    She hands me a cup and sits down on the folding
chair. I’m about to take a sip when she stops me.
    “Careful, you’ll burn your tongue clean off.” An odd
glint comes into her eyes, but she tempers it and looks back at me
with a shrug. “No temperature regulators.”
    I watch as she blows into her cup. “And yes, Rint
comes when he can. Though his visits have been fewer lately. He and
I were anticipating you.”
    “What do you mean?” Her presence is…I can’t find a
word for it. Almost ominous, like a bad omen. Of course that stuff
is all bogus Burn superstition, but I feel like it applies
perfectly to her.
    I blow on my coffee, watching the small ripples float
across the surface and then hit the edge of the cup. I take a sip
and make a face. It is strong and bitter. I’ve never had
coffee—even in thcolony—and I wonder what all the fuss is about.
Gaea laughs, a short rasping sound in her throat.
    “We wondered when you would finally want to escape
badly enough. So we limited our contact with each other. We didn’t
want anyone getting suspicious and stopping you.”
    “Um, that was good of you.” I shift my