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it. They got tired of watching, but sometimes did go back, irresistibly pulled, their hungers pulling them, and one day saw a young Cleft walking alone by the waves not far from them. She stopped, turned her back on the watchers, and leaned her head back into her hands and stared out across the waves. This description of the girl, alone – the Clefts did not like being alone – taking her time to dawdle along the beach, hints that she was already one of the new Clefts where some kind of developmental yeast was brewing.
    There were four boys (or Squirts) that day, on the higher rocks. An impulse took them and they crept down behind her, quiet, not really knowing what they intended to do. Then her nearness, and their hungers, defeated their fear of her and they ran forward and in a moment had her arms down by her sides, and were running her back towards their home valley. She let out short angry cries, her voice constricted by terror. She was not in the habit of panic, of alarm, and probably had never ever screamed or yelled. She was shocked into compliance. Taller than they were, much larger, but she was not stronger than four tough,well-muscled boys. They kept her running, while they cried out in triumph, which was fear, too. This was a Cleft they had there – and they had most thoroughly been taught fear of them. It was a good run from the part of the beach where they had found her, along the shoreline, then over the rocky hills to where the great river ran, before it burst in foam into the seas. Up the edge of this river they went, always running. She had begun to scream, roughly, in her unused voice. They stuffed handfuls of seaweed into her mouth.
    Now, exhausted with running, half stifled with the weed, she moaned and gasped and then at last they were in the valley where the males lived. They were on the wrong side of the river. They swam her across it at a place where the waves ran less fiercely: that was no hardship to a girl who had swum and played in water since she was born. Then she was standing in the middle of a large group of Monsters, whom she had seen as babes, mutilated, or in the few moments between birth and being snatched away by the eagles. They were of all sizes, some children, some already past middle age, and these were the ones worst damaged, when they had been ‘pets’. All of them naked, and seeing them there, the monsters, with their squirts pointed at her, she spat the weed out of her mouth and screamed, and this time it was a real scream, as if she had been doing it all her life.One of her captors stuffed the weed back, and another tied her hands with strands of weed – all this clumsily and slowly, because this was the first time hands had been tied, and never had there been a captive, or prisoner.
    And now instincts that had ranged free and untrammelled and often unrecognised spoke all at once in this crowd of males, and one of the captors threw down this soft, squirming female, and in a moment had his squirt inside her. In a moment he was off her and another had taken his place. The mass rape went on, it went on, they were feeding hungers it seemed they could never sate. Some lads who had gone off into the forest to find fruit came back, saw what was going on, and soon enough understood it and joined in. Then she no longer squirmed and kicked and moaned but lay still, and they understood, but not at once, that she was dead. And then, but not at once, that they had killed her. They dispersed then, not looking at each other, feeling shame, though they did not know what it was, and they left her there. The night was long and fearful and they were by now sickened by what had happened. If questions that had been tormenting them in some cases for years were being answered, by their flaccid squirts, their feelings of rest, relaxation and assuagement, they had killed, and they had never killed purposelessly.
    In the morning light she lay there on the grass bythe river –