Death Cultivator by eden Hudson (knowledgeable books to read .txt) 📗

out between gorges, but this first gap stretched as far as I could see both ways, and it looked like you could drop my high school in and the building wouldn’t get stuck until about halfway down.

Dust Bowl, then. After a drink.

I wandered around until I found a halfway decent path down my side of the shut-in to the bottom. There were a couple places where I had to climb out on those wispy evergreens branches and drop to the next ledge down, but I figured when the time came, I’d be able to get back up.

When I finally made it down to the water, I was so hot and thirsty that I waded right in. Goosebumps covered my whole body, and I immediately started shivering. I dove under before I could chicken out and screamed at the temperature. The noise bubbled out of my nose and mouth in huge water-air balloons.

I came up for air, teeth chattering, then slapped my wet hair out of my face. Time for a drink. I put my mouth to the surface and started slurping down ice-cold water.

I don’t think there are words for how refreshing freezing cold water tastes when you’re dehydrated. It even has a smell, and it’s the same on Van Diemann as it is on Earth—freaking beautiful. I drank so much that it made my stomach hurt, but I didn’t care. It was delicious. And not just because I was thirsty. Water tasted exactly the same as it had at home.

Saying that, it sounds ridiculous—like, obviously water’s water. But after getting dumped on some unrecognizable world with no one and nothing from home but the clothes on my back, it was so comforting to have one thing that was familiar, even if that one thing was just water.

River Monsters

ONCE I HAD A GUTFUL of icy cold sloshing around in my stomach, I shut my eyes and floated on my back in the shallows with my heels and butt and fingertips dragging in the sand. It’d been a long day, and instead of getting some sleep the night before, I’d gotten killed. That’ll wear you out.

I realized I’d messed up the second I felt something dripping on my forehead. I jackknifed up into a sitting position, splashing water everywhere, and smacked face-first into the top of a mouth lined with razor-sharp teeth wide as my hand.

Which also happened to be coming down to chomp me in half.

I freaked out, inhaling water and splashing and scrambling, but it was like one of those dreams where you try to run and can’t get away. The teeth were slamming down too fast, and the water felt like it was dragging me under. Images of my legs sticking out of the mouth of some prehistoric megalodon flashed through my brain unhelpfully.

Then someone grabbed my arm and jerked. I caught a split-second glimpse of black hair and opal-colored eyes with weird lacy patterns in them, then I heard wood splinter behind me. A rib-shaking roar tore through the shut-in.

“Come on!” the girl who’d grabbed me yelled, dragging me toward the bank.

I sloshed through the water with her, hauling backside now that I was on my feet.

We ran out onto the rocky shore, and a calf-deep wave hit us in the back of the legs. I swung around, figuring I could at least block that monster from eating her, but it was gone. All I caught was a translucent blue-green fin as tall as I was slicing back down into the deeper part of the stream.

“It’s okay,” the girl said, finally letting go of my arm. “We’re safe. Creek carp can’t walk on land until after their third molt. Their adolescent legs aren’t strong enough to support them.”

I’m pretty sure my eyes got as big as my fists. “There are versions of that thing that can walk?”

“Adults.” She shrugged. “But none of them can breathe on land, so they’re not in it for an extended chase. Carp are more ambush predators. The carnivorous ones are, anyway.”

“Should we—I don’t know—get out of here?” I pointed up at the red sandy tops of the gorge. “Climb back up top?”

“Go ahead,” she said. “I still have day sun to burn and materials to scavenge.”

The girl had black hair twisted into two messy buns, and she was wearing a set of welding goggles pushed up on her head. What really got my attention, though, was the eyes I’d seen when I was about to be chomped in half. They were huge, and instead of irises and whites, she had this black lace pattern.

Realizing I was staring, I glanced at the wispy trees and undergrowth surrounding us. There was an awful lot of brush on this side of the stream. Plenty of space for something big and hungry to hide.

“What if one of them sneaks up behind us?” I asked.

“I’ve got my fish-finder on.” She tapped the big screen on her wrist like that would save us. “It’ll go off if one gets close enough to do any damage.”

“Isn’t ‘close enough to snap us in half’ too late?”

She glared at me, and the black lace in her eyes got darker and thicker. “It’s a prototype, okay? When it reliably alarms at close distances, then I’ll be able to recalibrate its radar to scan a larger diameter.”

Right about then I realized I was arguing with a cute alien girl about man-eating mega-carp early warning systems, and my words dried up. Under normal circumstances, I wasn’t great at talking to the opposite sex, and the girls at my school had never wanted anything to do with trash like me anyway. This was probably the longest conversation I’d had with one since puberty struck and even just saying hi to them got complicated.

She bent down, picked up a huge backpack stitched together out of gunnysacks, and slung it onto her shoulder with a metallic clinking. Once she had it on, she turned toward the trees.

“Hey, uh...” I took a step to follow her,