The next crewmate who came down was bombarded by accounts of our success at navigating the ship on our own. She exclaimed over our achievement. That’s also where we’d go to get food, remember, she told us, since our snacks were running out. And getting stale. She told us the kitchen staff would always have food there for us. We told her we’d go there whenever we needed to.

Then she exclaimed over the state of our coveralls. We looked at ourselves. We were filthy. She began digging through our boxes and pulled out a change of clothing for each of us. Then she muttered under her breath why we hadn’t been shown where the laundry facilities were.

She read us some books, including my favorite one about a kalik-sorai and a child meeting and helping each other with their respective problems. The moral, of course, was friendship between species, as humans and kalik-sorai had only come into contact with each other only about twenty years previously at the time the book was published. I’m making myself sound like a dinosaur, aren’t I? Yes, I lived at a time when alien contact was a remarkable discovery. Books were still being distributed that promoted peace between the species back then. The pictures of the alien technology the kalik-sorai had in its ship never failed to fascinate me.

Then the nurse said she had a surprise for us. She was going to teach us to write.

I was excited. It was like learning a code. I wanted to know everything that other people knew that I didn’t.

First she taught us how to write our names. Wyatt got the easiest one. Two of the letters in his name repeated. Kiara and Leora had names that ended in the same two letters. Yes, I was my name was by far the most difficult to write. The nurse made me write it in its full form, not Ava like they normally called me.

“A-V-A-R-I-E-L-L-A. See, you have letters that repeat too.” I could see that where she’d written it on the slate, but it was much too long for me. I asked her why my name was so much longer than the other toddlers’. “Well,” the nurse replied, “I think your mother named you that to make up for how small you were. You were so tiny when you were born, Ava.”

That made sense. I was the smallest, so I got the biggest name. It was only fair.

After we wrote our names out on the slate, the nurse sang us the song about the bunnies again. I traced the shape of my name on the wall with my finger as best I could remember it before I fell asleep.

Over the past week the crew’s visits had became shorter and shorter, and the crewmates who visited us had appeared more and more tired. I felt sorry for them, but I didn’t know what I could do to help them. Until I started spying on them, of course.

We discovered spying the day after we became independent shaftwalkers. It was a medium-sized ship, so there was about two thousand people living on it, each with their own story. Undoubtedly these stories would have been more all-consuming before the pirates had taken over, but not even oppression can squash the human capacity for drama.

When I woke up the nurse was gone, of course. The twins were awake and whispering to each other. Wyatt was still asleep. I decided it was time to get up, because I was now hungry. I wanted to see if we could get to the kitchens again.

Then I had an idea. I wanted to show the people who gave us food what I’d learned earlier. I dug around in my box until I found a pad of doodling paper. I ripped off a piece and wrote on it with extreme concentration with a crayon. A-V-A-R-I-E-L-L-A. The last two letters were squished because I’d run out of room. Then I went over and poked Leora. She and her twin looked at me. I held out the paper. Leora looked at me blankly. “Write your name,” I said. She frowned.

“Why?”

“We can show the kitchen people we can write.”

Kiara reached around her twin and grabbed the paper and crayon. She wrote her name on it, slowly and shakily. “C’mon,” she told her twin. Leora took the paper and crayon and laboriously wrote her name under her twin’s.

We all turned to Wyatt, who had been awoken by our conversation. “I wanna write my name,” he said. I passed him the paper and crayon. He wrote his name, frowning in concentration.

Good, I thought. I took the paper and held onto it. “I’m hungry,” Kiara said. Leora and Wyatt said they were, too.

“We’re going to the kitchen,” I said. I got up and opened the door silently, as the nurses had taught us. They followed me out.

We walked neggexwards towards the main shaft, climbed the ladders again and went to the kitchen. I was going to be the stepping stool again but Kiara motioned me aside and crouched down in my place. I smiled my thanks as I stepped up and scrambled up out of the opening in the floor.

Then I helped pull up Leora and Wyatt. I looked around quickly. There was a wall to our left and in back of us, and a wall of crates to our right. Around the corner of the box wall came the sounds of the kitchen. I crept over to the corner and stuck my head around the corner up to my eyeballs.

The amount of activity I could see through the open door amazed me. Everyone was moving, everyone was shouting, everyone was making some sort of noise, and since I was seeing everyone from the knee up, there was an awful lot of very tall people. Really quite intimidating.

I saw where they’d put our food – it was directly above me, where one crate stacked on another unevenly and left a ledge. A packet of something was wrapped in brown paper. I stretched my hand up carefully – I could just reach it – and grabbed the package. Then I put the paper we had all written on in its place. I scurried back to the opening and got back down into the shaft after Leora and Wyatt.

They turned to go, but I stopped them. I wanted to see if they would notice. I heard an exclamation, but nothing else. I was slightly disappointed. Wyatt shot an enquiring look at me. I shook my head. It certainly wasn’t that big of a deal.

On the way back to the room home we got slightly lost. When we got back to the fifth floor, we went neggexwards away from our room along the primary shaft. We soon realized we were lost and started looking through all available vents to try and figure out where we were, which was how we discovered spying.

I can’t think as to why it hadn’t occurred to us before. I suppose we were just so used to being silent we tuned out all other noise as well.

The first place we peered into to get our bearings was down into a long hallway filled with beds, very like the hallway we’d first come to the shafts from. This section of hallway was darkened, and I could just make out the forms of people asleep in their bunks. We were about to move on when the light suddenly turned on and a loud buzzer sounded, startling me. A collective groan arose from the bunks and the crewmates sat up, yawned, rolled over, and other various things one did upon being woken up. They dressed quickly and efficiently and soon were all making their way down to one end of the hallway, except for one blond boy who was still in bed. He wasn’t asleep, though. He was just lying there, staring at the ceiling.

One of the stragglers stopped by the youth’s bed and shook him. “Get up, Caleb,” he muttered. Caleb sighed.

“Come on, Caleb. You’ve been like this for a week. Don’t you get it? We’re all suffering. You’re not the only one who lost someone. My aunt was killed, and I’m still working!” His voice became harsher. “And while you’re just laying here grieving, we have to take care of your share of the work. I can only monitor so many computers, Caleb! We need you.” He sighed. “Please get up, Caleb. This is hard for all of us.”

Caleb started crying, still staring at the ceiling. “I can’t,” he croaked. “You don’t understand. She was everything.”

“Shellroy’s daughter, wife and uncle were killed, and he’s still working! I’m sorry you lost your sister. We’re all sorry. But you can’t do this to us!”

Caleb looked at the boy blankly. He sighed and got out of bed. The boy sighed as well. “I’ll see you in the mess hall,” he told him, as Caleb began to get dressed. Eventually Caleb wandered out after him. The light turned off as soon as there were no more moving bodies to activate it.

I was mesmerized. This was a strange adult world, completely without bunnies or blocks. I was formulating my own perception of these pirates who had invaded our home and forced us into hiding.

We kept wandering down the shaft afterwards. We were still going in the wrong direction, but we didn’t know that. The next loud noise we heard was when we were over the female section of the hall, apparently, as all the crewmates who flooded back into the corridor were women. Some flung open their trunks, took out some sort of equipment, and left as quickly as they’d come. Others changed into strangely colored suits which, I was to learn, enabled the wearer to walk in space. One of these women collapsed on her bed after she was dressed and began sobbing quietly.

The woman on the bunk above her poked her head over the edge to see what was making the noise. Her expression became resigned, and she signaled to a woman three bunks down. The woman looked up, sighed, and came over to the crying woman.

The first friend clambered down the bunk ladder to sit beside the crying woman, and the second friend sat down on the other side and pushed the hair out of her eyes. “Oh, Espa,” she crooned. “I’m sorry, honey.”

“I can’t stop thinking about him,” she said shakily. “Everything I do reminds me of him.” She sat up and pounded her fists on her knees. “If he hadn’t been working overtime! If he’d just come straight back he wouldn’t have been there when they came and –” her friend grabbed her hands. The woman stopped and began sobbing again, shaking, and turned and buried her head in her friend’s shoulder.

“I know,” her friend said. “I know.”

The crying woman pulled away, wiped her face and heaved a long, shuddering sigh. “I probably shouldn’t even be crying,” she said unsteadily. “Some people lost their whole families. And at least I’ve got his ring.” Her lip trembled, but she didn’t cry again.

“He wouldn’t want you to be sad because of him,” one of them said.

“And he wouldn’t want you to get overduty because you were late because of him,” the other friend said dryly.

The woman sighed again. “You’re right. We should go.” She looked up and smiled weakly. “Thanks.”

“What are friends for?” one of them asked her as they walked down the hall. The light clicked off.

The four of us looked at each other. We smiled. This was fun.

---

Awright. No new chapter till Tuesday. Sorry bout that.

Lady-sesshoumaru41: My, she does seem to mention it being so long ago a lot, doesn’t she... you’ll just have to wait and see! :P Definitely checking out your story sometime.

Stay cool.