Theo.

It was a technicality, failing to inquire about his name or to communicate hers. From the first she had thought of him as a Neanderthal and in the slow process of her recovery, before she had the strength to remember her manners she had come to think of him as “Neanderthal”. Not an ideal name but fitting for a beast. Theo was a civilized name and it had the same pronunciation in his language as hers, it was a name that had withstood the test of time. (The boyfriend’s name had an Englih pronunciation and a future pronunciation.) Though evidence proved that Theo was not a Neanderthal – his body hair was far too light -- his head was, beyond a doubt, Neanderthal hairy.

“How much longer can this storm go on?”

“Until it blows out.”

“And that will take how many more days?”

“As many days – or weeks – that it needs,” Theo said in a querulous voice.

“Weeks?” Dani protested. “How can a storm go on for weeks?”

“This is Haven.” He said as if that explained everything.

Haven! It seemed the worst possible name for a planet that could flash-freeze you, where winter storms carried on for weeks at a time. Mama’s boyfriend’s descriptions of Haven had made her want to visit. According to him Haven had sounded like a paradise – yeah, as in virtual paradise. He had said nothing about storms that shrieked on and on until you wanted to pull your hair out or run screaming into a wall – the only possible option to achieve blessed silence.

Besides what did she know of the measure of days and weeks or even hours? Her watch had stopped working from day one and was now tucked away in one of the pockets of her Redwing. The darkness of the cavern was unbearable. It precluded any hope of keeping time. There was no way to tell night from day, there was no counting the hours; she slept when she was tired, she ate when Theo ate – or she would go hungry, he had promised -- and bathed when Theo was not around. She went hungry often.

Dani asked Theo once how many days had passed since her arrival and he had glared at her.

“I do not know. Thanks to you my internal clock is completely thrown off.”

Since the incident with the haversack, Theo stayed close. A couple of times he tied her up while he went rock hunting. Now that she was recovered from the sickness, cabin fever lurked always at the periphery of her subconscious and expressed itself in constant pacing and endless questions that surly Theo answered with the shortest answers possible. The decision to wear clothes had garnered the desired affect; Theo gave her his I am contemplating having sex with you look with less frequency.

At the moment Theo had allowed the fire to burn down to a few glowing embers engulfing them in near complete darkness which did not permit any form of activity that could distract her from the noise of the storm. It was a rare moment of inactivity for Theo as well. They were sitting together next to the fire – even when diminished to a bed of glowing embers it still put out plenty of heat. It smelled good too, sweet and pungent. Dani was on the verge of voicing another complaint when Theo took her by the arm and pulled her close.

“Look up.”

There was a fissure in the ceiling above the fire, a natural chimney that allowed smoke to escape and brought oxygen to the fire. At the very top of the fissure she saw a sliver of strange shimmery light.

“What is it?” She whispered.

“The canopy.” His voice came out of the darkness not far from her right ear.

His short answers were infuriating. “You know, if you would only say more, I could pick up your language much quicker. I need to hear it to learn to speak it. It would also help me build a vocabulary.”

“As I was about to say, that shimmer can only be seen at night.”

“It looks like phosphorescence.” She commented, saying the term in English because she had no idea how to say it in his language. All she knew of the canopy was the boyfriend’s one reference to ‘the great sentinel canopy’; had that been a reference to this?.

“The Great Sentinal?” she asked testing her knowledge.

“Some call it that. Rather than phosphorescence, it is similar to chemiluminescence, a rare form of it unique to Haven and the Fugharim.” (Foo-gar-eem)

Dani was surprised to hear a term coming out of Theo’s mouth that needed no translation. Maybe some scientific terms remained universal? She had never heard of chemiluminescence but she did not ask for a definition. She was more curious about the Havenish connected to it.

“Fugharim?”

“The Canopy,” he said and explained no further. “When summer comes you will see.” With that he fed a few short sticks into the fire.

After her last tantrum, as Theo insisted on calling it, she had repacked her Redwing, carefully arranging Mama’s effects on top of her clothes for easier access – except the photo, that she put facedown at the bottom of the pack. She had gathered the scattered letters and secured them in one of the pack’s several outer pockets because the rubber band that had secured them was now in Theo’s possession. He was fascinated by its stretch, though she warned him the rubber was old and prone to disintegration. She waited for the moment the rubber would snap and he would be stung by it, one small pleasure to look forward.

Among the items from the Old Navy box was one of her mother’s clothbound journals; a quart sized Ziplock bag filled with scraps of yellowed paper and napkins with notes and sketches; a thick bundle of lined paper filled with Mama’s cramped handwriting, folded in half and tied with a navy blue cross grain ribbon; and a small manilla envelope with Dani’s name handwritten on it.

As the light from the growing fire increased, Dani accepted that Theo had said all he intended to and retrieved the brown envelope from her pack. It was the one item from Mama’s box she was most curious about because it bore her name. It held her birth certificate and social security card, the newspaper birth announcement and her hospital photo; class photos and report cards through the first quarter of seventh grade; a white card with her fingerprints and other identifying marks listed (a mole under her left arm and a small strawberry birthmark to the left and slightly below her belly button) vaccination records and a small rosary made of tiny pink pearlized beads. The rosary was inside a small white velveteen pouch.

While Danielle skimmed through her school records, Theo picked up the rosary and examined it. He poked at the small silver crucifix with his finger, making it spin and sway.

“Who is this?”

“Jesus,” she said without enthusiasm.

He questioned her with his eyes, demanding more information.

“God.” She said, feeling great satisfaction to be in a position to give him minimal answers.

“God on an instrument of death?”

“”You know what a crucifix is?”

“Of course; the Lowlandians have a crucifixion tree, but they stopped using it after the war.”

“What war?” What and who were the Lowlandians?

“The Orphan War.”

Dani was getting used to his condescending tone, as if he looked down upon her for not knowing what he considered to be obvious.

Mama’s three novels were commonly referred to as “The Orphan War Trilogy.”

Dani snatched the rosary out of his hand, suddenly, inexplicably annoyed with him.

“What were you doing during this war; raping and pillaging no doubt?”

His expression was stony, but he answered her question giving her the first – and only as it would turn out – personal glimpse she would get from him in a long time.

“I was growing up at St. Sebastian Abbey.”

No matter how many questions she threw at him, he told her nothing more, not even so much as explaining that his history was of no consequence, that at least would be something. No he shut right up and looked as if he regretted parting with even that little bit of information.

Dani gave up and returned the relics and her vital information to the envelope, save the rosary. She put that around her neck, not because she had any faith in the suffering God hanging on the crucifix nor in the dim image of Mary on the center, she had no plan to pray the rosary anytime soon. She wore it to tease Theo. He seemed inordinately fascinated by the prayer beads and its religious iconography and she was sure from the look in his eyes that he wanted to possess it as surely as he possessed the rubber band and the note from Mama’s boyfriend. He could keep the rubber band and the note, but the rosary, let him stare at it and wonder for a while. The rosary was small. It barely passed over her head, the center settled in the hollow at the base of her throat and the crucifix hung about two inches below that.

Mama had once warned her that the rosary was not to be worn as jewelry but what did she care? Religion meant nothing to Dani. All her life it had been a source of strife, one way or another between different branches of her family. Mama’s devotion to Great-Grammy’s catholic faith had been a severe bone of contention between her and her Baptist mother. Dani’s paternal Methodist grandmother, Patrice, often made deriding remarks about the Baptists, which included the better part of Dani’s family. Great-Grandma Allen, the sweetest elder in Dani’s life, called the Vatican the Whore of the Babylon. The local Catholic parish denied Grandpa and Mama the sacraments for daring to marry outside the faith, but closed ranks around priests who sexually molested Alter boys.

She returned the envelope into her pack and retrieved the Ziplock baggie. She spread the contents out on the floor beside the fire, glanced at some of the hand written notes, one napkin had a mathematical equation scribbled across it and another had a long list of names, a sheet of typing paper that was folded to fit the baggie showed a partial diagram on the edge of the fold.

A memory pushed its way to the surface and would not be squelched. An inky stain of nostalgia spurted. She had seen all this before, long ago on a rainy spring day. Dani had come home from school and was drawn to the kitchen by the smell of fresh baked oatmeal cookies and had found Mama at the table, her Old Navy shoebox open on a chair and the table strewn with these same papers and old napkins – only slightly yellowed at the edges -- with writing and numbers and diagrams. A hand drawn map was balanced on the handmade wooden napkin holder Mama had made in high school.

The napkin holder was one of many items to come out of hiding that year, the year Daddy was arrested and forbidden to have contact with Mama. Dani still spent time with him at Grandma Patrice’s every other weekend while he awaited his trial, but with his mother right there he was on his best behavior and treated Dani like gold.

When Grandma Patrice became convinced she could not make Daddy’s trouble go away, she made him plead guilty to lesser charges and he went away for a few years. To this day Dani remained unclear what Dad had done but she guessed it had to do with why Angie picked her up at school one day and she had to live with Uncle Martin and Aunt Birdie for a month. No one told her anything, but then she was seven years old going on eight and only wanted to see Mommy and had not understood why no one would let her.

A plate of cookies and a glass of milk waited for Dani at the end of the table opposite Mama. She was eight years old and disappointed that bad weather would keep her from riding her bike outside until supper. She dropped her backpack on the floor beside the chair, shrugged out of her light jacket and sat down in front of the cookies and milk. The kitchen smelled spicy and was warmed by the oven. It made Dani curious when Mama ignored the water dripping on the floor from her backpack and jacket and the muddy prints her shoes had made on the shiny black and white linoleum.

“Hi Mom.” Dani took a bite out of a cookie.

Mama glanced up with a bemused expression. “Mmm?”

Before Daddy left, chaos – including puddles and muddy tracks on the floor – had been strictly forbidden and Mama had spent her days keeping everything spic and span and scolded Dani with tight lips and a glassy terrified look in her eye if so much as one crumb touched the table and Mama failed to be right there to clean it up.

Seeing Mama’s old Army-Navy shoebox out of the attic made Dani feel silly and nervous. Mama had warned her once, when she was really little, never ever to go into the attic, but she had followed Mama into the attic once and had found her sitting on a dusty trunk holding the shoebox on her lap like it was Aladdin’s lamp and if she rubbed it just so a Genie would appear and grant her three wishes.

Dani indicated the mess on the table. “What’s this?”

Mama paused to take it all in. “It’s a project Grammy and I started when I was in high school – a story.”

Dani was already wondering what she was going to do to keep busy while Mama fiddled with her project. She was not a mother who felt compelled to entertain her child. Since Daddy left Mama stayed occupied on one project or another that involved lots of writing and numerous cups of hot coffee and this looked like a project that might cut into the dinner hour, so Dani gobbled one more cookie, drank her milk and grabbed two more cookies before heading for the living room.

“Dani,” Mama’s voice warned, her mind was already beginning to focus on the project. “Homework before TV; I want to see your work, and then you can watch something.” Dani liked this distracted peaceful version of Mama much better that the jumpy frightened Mama of the days when Daddy still lived with them. It was fifty-fifty whether Mama would remember to check her homework, but Dani decided to get it done right away. If she neglected it and Mama discovered it later after dinner or around bedtime, she’d get all twitchy and that sick look would come into her eyes that made Dani feel queasy. She did her homework and returned to the kitchen thirty minutes later, startling Mama out of a thoughtful examination of the map.

Dani shrank away from the memory. She picked up the folded sheet and opened it. It was a hand sketched map on two sheets of dingy typing paper held together by yellowing strips of tape on the back. The aged paper was rumpled and ragged around the edges. It had pinholes where Mama had inserted tacks to attach it to the wall beside her desk in her small study so that she could use it as a reference when writing her books. It showed a large continent broken up by mountain ranges, rivers, lakes, marshes and forests. Little red dots indicated populated cities. One red spot was circled with a heavy black line and far above it to the northwest was a large red star indicating, Dani supposed, a government seat.

“New City,” was written next to the star in faded pencil, an unimaginative name if ever there was one. She could hardly credit her mother with thinking it up.

Dani tugged on Theo’s arm to get his attention, but it was unnecessary, he was already eyeing the map with open curiosity.

“Where are we on this map?”

He took the map and after a moment of feeling the paper with his fingers and turning it to examine the tape and the diagrams penciled in on the back, he studied it with a bemused expression. Finally he pointed to a large forested area northeast of New City.

“Here.”

“Can you be more specific? Where is here located?” She meant the cave. Having a sense of the distance between here and New City might help her work out her travel plans. The legend on the bottom left corner of the map would help her gauge the distance and perhaps the time in days it would take to travel there.

Theo shrugged.

The area showed no population centers at all. Was the map incomplete?

“There must be other people living somewhere close by.” Dani persisted.

“This whole area is wilderness. There are no cities and no outposts. There are only native trails and they seldom go anywhere but from one Fughari to another.

“How will I find my mother without roads?”

“Roads?”

“Roads.” Dani repeated unwilling to believe he did not know what a road was. “You know, a road that connects populated areas so that people can travel from place to place?”

She saw a light go on behind his eyes as he comprehended what she meant.

“You are in the Wild.” He said as if that was all the explanation needed.

“And that means?”

“You really are a greenhorn. You are from off world so I should not expect you to appreciate the trouble you are in. The Wild is no place for a neophyte. Left to your own devices you will likely be dead in no time.”

“How is that helping? Just show me the nearest road to New City. If you point me in the right direction I’m sure I can get there without your help.”

“I am sure you will be dead in no time.”

“Stop saying that.”

“The last place you want to go is New City.” When he pronounced “New City” in Havenish is sounded much nicer, but in translation it was still as unimaginative as the English version. “Besides, there are no roads in Haven.”

“Why?’

“Insiders are not free.”

“Why are there no roads?” She clarified with a shake of her head.

He shrugged again. When no answer about the absence of roads was forth-coming, Dani went back to the subject of Insiders, whatever that meant.

“Okay, so these insiders are not free because of the Authority?”

“What do you know about the Authority?” His voice was sharp.

“Perhaps the Authority will help me find my mother.”

She knew nothing at all about the Authority. She had glimpsed a reference to it on a napkin with a comment that it was the name of the power base of Haven. She threw it out there to see what unsolicited information the word might provoke from Theo. Strangely, Theo reacted with anger and the anger was laced with fear.

“The Authority is not to be trifled with.”

“Why? What can they do to me?”

“They will take one look at you and you will be a pawn in their endless struggle for power.”

“Oh?” Now that was a telling comment and yet it conveyed nothing. Theo pulled back and looked into the fire. He fed two more of the spindly branches into it. Why did he bother? There was already enough light and the heat was nearly unbearable. Dani decided not to push Theo further. Already he was shutting down. It was obvious he was annoyed because he must have again said too much.

“I have to start somewhere.” She said in a conciliatory tone. “I did not come to your planet to camp out with you in the wilderness. I have to find my mother. So far, you have been no help at all.”

“You will never get out of this wilderness alive without my help. One minute out there and you will be in trouble from which even God cannot save you.”

None of that mattered. Theo’s warnings … well she would take them under advisement, but as soon as the storm passed she was determined to strike out on her own. It would be easier if he would at least point her in the right direction. Still, without his help, no matter which direction she took, sooner or later she was bound to run across other humans. At some point someone would recognize Mama – the photo would come in handy to identify her as the subject of Dani’s search -- and point Dani in the right direction.

The storm gave up the ghost halfway through a dinner of stew a few hours later; all at once. One minute the wind was howling and the next it was silenced and the last whistling eddies curling around her feet died to thin whispers.

In his usual overbearing manner, Theo told her in no uncertain terms that she must remain in the cave until he deemed it safe for her to go outside, or until he was amenable to taking her.

“You have no idea what dangers await you out there and knowing your proclivity to act without thinking, you will be up to your neck in pooke before you know it.

Pooke?

Dani pretended to accept his ruling on the subject but determined to go out into the wood as soon as his attention was elsewhere and make a search of the entire area for the sapphire necklace. It was not in the cave. It was not on her person. If it was not in Theo’s possession – and that had yet to be determined - the only remaining place to look was outside in the open.

Next Chapter: Chapter Eight