Read Bhotta's Tears: Book Two of the Black Bead Chronicles for Free Online Page A

her. Alain was supposed to be harvesting the row to her right, Tam beyond him. Megan had the row to her left, Connor cutting beyond. Alain had progressed from study to actual tinkering. He lay underneath his walker, his fingers twiddling with the leg mechanisms. He had only managed to harvest a quarter of his row. Connor had grown tired of waiting for him and had moved on, his picking haphazard as he sped over his row towards Tam.
    “Zeff will be checking our progress,” Cheobawn reminded Alain as she nudged her walker alongside. Alain came out from under his walker. The sun made his distinctive coloring all the more apparent, turning his auburn hair into a cap of fiery copper, his eyes made doubly green by the verdant ambient light of the melon field.
    “You know what?” Alain said, an excited look on his face, “I’ll bet I can make this thing go faster with a little bit of a redesign. They might be prone to tipping, but that would not matter if you were careful.”
    Cheobawn paused, intrigued.
    “Really? You should tell Finn.”
    “Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” Alain said. “Next thing you know, I would be drawing maintenance duty in the machine shops with him.”
    “Oh, my,” Cheobawn nodded sagely, “that would be awful.” Alain, preoccupied, did not note her sarcasm.
    She moved up the row. Connor grunted at her as he carelessly tossed another melon into his cart. He took her presence as an opportunity to rest and drink from his waterskin.
    “Alain is going to fix his walker. Did he tell you? He wants to fix mine too. Then we can have races,” the dark haired boy said excitedly.
    “I don’t know if that is such a good idea. It has only been a month since we got off restricted duty for the last time,” Cheobawn said doubtfully, not wishing to repeat the punishment any time soon, although the memory of their adventure did bring a smile to her face. Trying to climb the ribs of the dome had been a lot of fun. Free climbing using the natural irregularities in the organically grown support strut had been relatively easy. They had grown bored and were getting ready to climb down when someone noticed them from inside the dome. You would have thought they had stolen all the honeypots out of the Pantry or something. It was not like they climbed all the way to the top. The scoldings, lectures, and extra duty had been nearly unbearable. Cheobawn suspected the elders were less worried about them killing themselves and more worried about the integrity of the dome.
    “See,” Connor said, spotting her smile. “You think it will be fun, too, don’t you? That’s why we need to do it! Summer is almost over and we haven’t done anything but collect fungus caps on our forays and clean out sewer vents in our off time. I’m tired of pretending to be good.”
    “Let me go ask Tam what he thinks,” she said. “Maybe we can plan a hunting foray. I’ve never been hunting.”
    Connor looked up, a bloodthirsty gleam in his eyes. She shook her head, amazed at little boys and their irrepressible enthusiasm for killing.
    She caught up with her cart as it lumbered to a stop and nudged it along.
    Megan and Tam had their heads together, looking at something in Tam’s hands. Megan looked up as she approached, a pleased smile on her face.
    “Ch’che, hold out your hands. We have a surprise. No fair peeking in the ambient.”
    “Why?” Cheobawn asked suspiciously, putting her hands behind her back. She’d seen Alain play that joke on Connor with a big fat melon grub.
    “Because it’s a surprise,” said the older girl impatiently.
    “A good surprise,” Tam added, smiling.
    Cheobawn held her palms out as far away from her face as possible, just in case the thing wanted to leap up in the air.
    Tam placed his cupped hands in hers and opened the bottom. Something with tiny claws tried to get out between her fingers.
    “Don’t let it get away,” Tam cautioned.
    She closed her hands together as he carefully slid his