Read Outcasts for Free Online Page B

have had such restraint a year ago.
    Jason put Gryf down between the makeshift partitions that
marked their section of the shelter. Gryf was pale beneath the pattern of tan
and pigment. Kylis almost wished Troi and Chuzo had left him in the Pit. The
Lizard might then have been forced to put him in the hospital.
    She wondered if Troi or Chuzo might be helping the Lizard
make Screwtop as hard on Gryf as they could. She did not want to believe that,
but she did not want to believe Miria was an informer, either.
    Their spider — Kylis thought of it as a spider, though
it was a Redsun-evolved creature — skittered up the corner post to a new
web. Kylis often imagined the little brown-mottled creature hanging above them
on her tiny fringed feet, hating them. Yet she was free to crawl down the stilt
and into the jungle, or to spin a glider and float away, and she never did. In
dreams, Kylis envied her; awake, she named her Stupid. Kylis hoped the web box
held enough silk to soothe Gryf’s back.
    “Hey,” Jason said, “this stuff is ready.”
    “Okay.” Kylis took the bowl of greenish mold
paste. “Gryf ?”
    He glanced up. His eyelashes and eyebrows were black and
blond, narrowly striped.
    “Hang on, it might hurt.”
    He nodded.
    Jason held Gryf’s hands while Kylis applied first the
mold, then delicate strips of spider silk. Gryf did not move. Even now he had
enough strength to put aside the pain.
    When she was done, Jason stroked Gryf’s forehead and
gave him water. He did not want to eat, even broth, so they kissed him and sat
near him, for his reassurance and their own, until he fell asleep. That did not
take long. When he was breathing deeply, Jason got up and went to Kylis,
carrying the bowl.
    “I want to look at that cut.”
    “Okay,” Kylis said, “but don’t use
all the paste.”
    The poultice burned coldly, and Jason’s hands were
cool on her skin. She sat with her forearms on her drawn-up knees, accepting
the pain rather than ignoring it. When he had finished treating her, she took
the bowl and daubed the mold on his cuts. She almost told Jason about Miria,
but finally decided not to. Kylis had created the problem; she wanted to solve
it herself if she could. And, she admitted, she was ashamed of her misjudgment.
She could think of no explanation for Miria’s actions that would absolve
her.
    Jason yawned widely.
    “Give me your tag and go back to sleep,” Kylis
said. Since she had been the first to get off work this time, it was her turn
to collect their rations. She took Gryf’s tag from his belt pouch and
jumped from the edge of the platform to the ground.
    Kylis approached the ration dispenser cautiously. On Redsun,
violent criminals were sent to rehabilitation centers, not to work camps. Kylis
was glad of that, though she did not much like to remember the stories of
obedient, blank-eyed people coming out of rehab.
    Still, some prisoners were confident or foolish or desperate
enough to try to overpower others and steal. At Screwtop it was safest to
collect neither obligations nor hatreds. Vengeance was much too simple here.
The underground society of spaceport rats had not been free of psychopaths;
Kylis knew how to defend herself. Here she had never had to resort to more
serious measures. If she did, the drill pit was a quick equalizer between a
bully and a smaller person. Mistakes could be planned; machines sometimes
malfunctioned.
    The duty assignments were posted on the ration dispenser.
Kylis read them and was astonished and overjoyed to find herself and her
friends all on the same shift, the night shift. She hurried back to tell them
the news, but Jason was sound asleep, and she did not have the heart to wake
him. Gryf had gone.
    Kylis threw the rations in the floor locker and sat on the
edge of the platform. A scavenger insect crawled across the lumpy floor of fern
stalks. Kylis caught it and let it go near Stupid, barricading it until the
spider, stalking, left her new web and seized the