Chapter Eighteen: Yram’s Story

“You should your story to them tell,” Petey heard Ruhtra say in the darkness.

There was the sound of a sigh a little farther away than Ruhtra’s voice and of a slight movement. Then a pause. 

“From Tierfer Süden I come.” 

The voice was Yram’s – throaty, deeper than the voices of most girls, and a little phlegmy from not having been used in some time. 

“Land by the slave knecht ruled where the black man returned has been to his condition of normality, as so called by Izan: black under white, woman under man, poor man under rich, ruled by the motto ‘Arbeit macht frei.’ Unless of course rich you be, then ‘Gelt macht frei.’ A chain of slaves, all of society. At top, Izan stands; at top of Izan, Leiter and Gauleiter.” She cleared her throat. “My father Gauleiter of our province be—the province of Adolfiana at the mouth of the river Serpent—called that because it like a vast serpent lies, like Fafner over his gold, across the middle breadth of Acirema. He the province with an iron fist ruled. Its konzentrationlagern, in bayous built with Spanish moss hung in mockery of beauty, crowded with dissenters be, and those my father of even the possibility of sedition suspects. And my father on suspicion thrives. But of the sedition under his nose, he saw nothing.”

One day Yram discovered there was something profoundly wrong about the world she lived in, despite the wealth, the splendor and beauty, the endless stream of delicacies and pleasures she and her family enjoyed without question or scruple. Even as a small child, she had been given a little black slave to be her servant and plaything. At first, she took her child slave for granted, ordering her about like a spoiled princess and mocking her when she made mistakes, especially in Germanglish, which happened often, since, though Yram had had tutors almost since infancy and was a precocious reader of the regime’s official texts by the time she was five, her slave was illiterate. In fact, it would have been a crime to teach her to read let alone to write.

Then one afternoon Yram was playing house in the nursery when she heard a muffled sound in the closet where she kept her surfeit of clothing: small lacey dresses, ribbons of every color in a seamstress’s imagination, skirts the size of handkerchiefs, snug little bonnets, diminutive shawls, and an array of tiny shoes. 

It was someone crying quietly. 

Curious, Yram snuck up to the door and opened it a crack. 

It was her little slave, curled up in a back corner, underneath a row of Yram’s dresses crammed together on hangers and far too many for her ever to actually wear. The slave was crying to herself in a lacey hand-me-down she had been given from Yram’s small wardrobe. The dress had always looked ridiculous on the little black girl, but now it looked unbearably sad to Yram, who felt something she had never felt before: a tingling wave of sadness for the little girl she had been, unknown even to herself, misusing for so long. 

And with this strange feeling of compassion there came another feeling, extremely uncomfortable, which she had never felt before. It would take her some time to realize, eventually, what she was feeling or to find a name for it. And the realization would be horrifying for her. The name was “guilt” – a feeling called guilt caused by a fact of guilt, since she came in the end to realize she was one of the causes of the black girl’s suffering. These feelings were not only intense; they fought both againset each other and against Yram herself. Surely she was not able to do anything wrong! Not me! Not me! And yet there it was: the price of guilt was the suffering her actions had caused. And the fact that her black slave had not accused her made it even worse. Yram had no defense against this discovery: her fault was as stark as the sun. 

But this was still in the future. At the moment, these warring emotions, half conscious as they were, were unbearable, and there seemed only one of two ways to get rid of them. One way was to attack her slave with all her might. After all, she was the immediate cause of these awful feelings. How dared she make Yram feel this way! She had no right, she was just a slave, she was nothing.

But at the same moment, watching the girl (who wept, completely unaware she was being watched), Yram realized, in a flash of insight, that the girl was not nothing. She was a living creature. She was completely vulnerable, utterly defenseless, though Yram did not yet have these words in her vocabulary: in their stead, the image of a small mouse shivering in a corner flashed through her mind. 

To take advantage of this would be disgraceful. Like attacking someone sleeping. And getting angry because someone was suffering made no sense whatever, and would even make everything worse—both the girl’s weeping and Yram’s own terrible feelings. Somehow, she would even deserve these feelings if she attacked the girl.

There was another way, but it was risky, because it might embolden the other girl to attack her in turn—though the little slave had never shown the slightest sign of rebellion against her mistress. And so, Yram decided to chance it. After all, if it didn’t work, she could get mad later.

“Selma,” Yram whispered gently to the little black girl. “Why crying you be?” 

The girl stopped and looked in terror at her hitherto unpitying mistress.

“Sorry, miss,” she said, so softly Yram could barely hear her. “Not know you be in nursery.”

Her gentleness surprised Yram, who usually denied everything furiously, even when she was caught with her hand firmly in the cookie jar, and would rather be caught dead than crying in the back of a closet.

“It all right be,” Yram surprised herself saying. “You me tell can.”

Selmas stared at her.

“I can, Miss Yram?” she asked, not daring to believe what she had just heard.

Yram decided not to correct her grammar, for a change.

 “Yes,” said Yram, instinctively crouching down on the floor of the closet, to be at the same level as Selma’s glistening eyes, which followed her own, partly hopeful, mostly suspicious. “You can me tell, I no one tell will else—promise!” And Yram crossed her heart in the universal children’s code of honor no child would even think of breaking: “Cross my heart and hope to die. Stick a piggy in my eye!” spoken, as was traditional, in old Anglish.

Whereupon the dam of Selma’s suspicions broke, her hopefulness won the combat in her perplexed but famished soul, and the little black girl poured her heart out to her suddenly, and uncharacteristically, sympathetic mistress.   Yram’s older brother had insulted Selma in the most atrocious manner; not only that, but what he had said was a complete and shocking lie. And he had said it in front of Selma’s mama and papa. Selma couldn’t bear facing him or them or anyone else after what he had said. She had no way of defending herself except to deny his cruel and slanderous words – and she knew how far that would get her. The brother’s word was law in that household; he could do no wrong, and he took full advantage of it.

Yram was shocked—not so much by the story of her brother’s lies, which were legendary, and she had long known how to deal with them: become so hysterical the family would do or say anything to quiet her down. Yet her brother’s insults continued to fester, and she was never sure other people did hot believe his lies no matter what she did or said. Sometimes she even felt that the stronger her denials, the less she was believed. It was a horrible, impossible position to be in.

What shocked the hitherto oblivious little girl of wealth and privilege was the realization how deeply her small, dependent companion felt—in fact, it was the realization that she felt much of anything at all, since up to now Selma had always put on a precociously stoic mask around her mistress. Yram had thought her rag doll had more feelings than Selma, or the family’s cat Mortimer. But Selma’s tear-streaked face and quivering voice went right to Yram’s heart. She remembered her own callous behavior toward Selma with a piercing sense of shame—it was clear Selma had felt the same humiliation and shame that she, Yram, had felt at the hands of her casually cruel brother, and therefore Selma was in a position—uniquely—to understand her in a way no one else ever had or indeed could. Her bitter feelings of absolute aloneness were broken—and she instinctively wrapped her arms around the other little girl and hugged her tight. And Selma hugged her back. Yram felt a shock when she realized they were crying together. 

She hadn’t realized how much she had been seeking an ally against her brother’s assaults, to say nothing of the petty insults the adult world regularly visits on children even without intending to.

And so, on that day, Yram and Selma were no longer mistress and slave. In sharing the pain they both felt, and seeing instantly how they could help shield and protect themselves and each other, with the malleability of childhood, and without making a conscious decision, they became dedicated allies against a world that did not respect either of them. In their weakness was their strength, in their innocence was their wisdom, in their very youth there was a maturity that adults often lose: Yram saw immediately how much Selma and she had in common: vulnerability, pride, the capacity for deep and shared feelings, and a determination not to let a world win that sometimes seemed to oppose, and certainly resented, their very existence.

This was the first step in an even larger lesson: she would eventually learn that what had happened to Selma was part of something profoundly wrong with the world in which she lived, though it took years for the lesson to sink in. And she discovered that this evil was rooted in the social order that gave her family its wealth, its privileges, its very happiness—because Yram, until she made this discovery, was, despite a few stains here and there, largely contented with her little life, its elegance and comfort, its constant variety, its many small pleasures and graces, and she wouldn’t have wanted most of it to change, honestly, for the world. She saw, with increasing clarity, that things like the bullying of her and Selma by her brother were not accidental: she began to see a pattern of abuse and misuse, a pattern she too was part of. Even her parents were part of it. The slaves they owned were all, like Selma, fair game for the suffering imposed on them by Yram’s brother—and by anyone else who could get away with it. They had no rights against it. When any of them tried to put up a defense, they were beaten, sometimes to the edge of survival. Sometimes beyond it.

Three years later Yram had the revelation that would throw her young life into turmoil, drive her into the arms of the resistance, and make her dedicate her life to the ending of the tyranny of Izan.

It was not caused by any single incident, though it had begun in the little closet with Selma; it was the result of her coming to a conclusion about the world she lived in after thinking long and hard about it and the network of cruelty and suffering that Izan supported and that supported it, and which she had gradually become aware of, with the thought, both horrifying and disgusting, that this might be the inescapable nature of reality and therefore trying to change it was futile, and childish to hope for. 

If there was one thing that tipped the balance it was the discovery of a book, one that had escaped the great burning decades before. 

Yram had often wondered why Izan so feared books. After all, they had newspapers, magazines, broadsides, posters and other things in print. What was it about books that so enraged them?

Then she found one in the attic of their house—ironically, given her father’s position as Gauleiter. There was something mysterious and oddly compelling about it; its compact form, with the front cover opening like a little door, and all those words inside it, suggested an opening into a new world. It was immediately enticing, and Yram crouched down in the light coming from the attic window and let her eyes wander over the printed words. She was soon absorbed in a story the book told, and completely wrapped up until she heard her mother calling her to dinner—good heavens, she had been reading the forbidden book for over two hours and hadn’t even realized it, and she hid the book under some old rags and ran down to dinner, being careful to say nothing about her discovery. 

But she didn’t forget, in fact she couldn’t wait to find out what happened next in the story, and over the next few days, whenever she could steal half an hour, she would sneak up to the attic and read a few more chapters, until, a week later, she had finished the book, with a delightfully mixed feeling of satisfaction with the story and sorrow it was over—and so, since there seemed to be no other books in the attic, she decided to read it again, and this time she enjoyed it even more than she had the first time.

But that wasn’t all. What the book showed her more than anything else was this: other worlds were possible than the one she lived in. The evils she saw were not inevitable if the world she lived itself was not. Other worlds could exist—the universe was an ocean, a wilderness, a laboratory; it was anything but a cage or a jail, a trap or a prison, unless you allowed others to turn it into one—and any prison you had built, you could also tear down, any jail broken from, any cage escaped: this was proven, as far as she was concerned, by the very existence of this book—perhaps of any book. That was why books, all books, had been burned: in order to destroy the very existence of the possibility of a way of life other than the bleak horror that had been imposed on most of humanity, and indeed (as Yram had come to realize, with deepening dismay) on most of life on earth, by Izan, whose motto now was brutally clear and meant to be taken with absolute literalness: “Alles für uns!”

At the opening of one term at school, after Yram turned eleven, she became friendly with a tall girl with immensely long, thick auburn hair, often plaited down her back to her waist, and curiously slanted eyes. She learned only later that the girl’s parents had fled to Acirema from Osovok in Aibres during the war with the Izan, to find they had walked into the tiger’s mouth they thought they had escaped, after the Izan won the war and conquered their new homeland. They had to live in secret, as the Izan considered their people an inferior race, and they had kept a fire of rebellion alive for themselves and their only child over the years. 

Yram listened with deepening sympathy to the exotically beautiful girl’s

story and shared her growing sense of horror about the Izan. One afternoon Yram invited Aramat (her real name, not the “Hildesieg” her parents had adopted for her) home and introduced her to Selma, whom, after their moment of shared tears, Yram had made her best friend in the world (though pretending to treat her “badly” when other family members were present; this became something of a game for the two girls, and they would giggle about it when they were alone together, Selma sometimes playing “mistress” and Yram “slave” until they both dissolved in laughter).

The three girls immediately became friends and, after meeting several times at Yram’s home or the local park, Aramat asked them if they had ever heard of something called the “League of Freiheit”? 

Yram was immediately on her guard, but Selma was all innocent curiosity. Aramat talked about it lightly, as though she didn’t know much about it, but wondered what they’d heard. Selma shook her head dubiously. Yram said, slightly haughtily: “I only hear they bad rebels be. My Vater them condemn. My Mutter them fear.”

“Yes, but,” said Aramat innocently, looking at Selma, “they no slaves have.”

Selma’s eyes opened and she smiled broadly when she heard that.

“They got no slaves?”

“Well,” said Aramat, retreating, “so do they say. They in equal rights of all humankind to live in peace and harmony they believe.”

“That don’t sound like Izan,” said Selma.

Aramat paused. 

“No, they Izan oppose,” said Aramat carefully. “They organizing against Izan be.  Mostly children. Adults too afraid to join. Anyway, no one children suspect. Or so I hear.”

The three girls were unusually silent for the next few minutes. They avoided eye contact and seemed to look with excessive concentration at various objects around them: Yram at a frill on her frock, Selma at a bee hovering over a daffodil, Aramat at a twig just past the toe of her left shoe.

“What about them think you?” asked Yram finally, after the silence became unbearable. She played with the frill on her frock.

Aramat took a deep breath before speaking; it caught Yram’s attention and she looked at her friend with some alarm.

“Our only hope for future be think they,” said the girl with the slanted eyes, not quite answering Yram’s question. “Our only hope in their victory be,” she continued. “Must they Izan destroy. Then new world on human harmony and decency and acceptance they can build.”

“Decency!” said Yram. She had never heard of a world built on “decency” let alone “acceptance” and “harmony.” The idea gave her a shock. It was too far good to be true. Her family had always made it clear the world was built on two things and two things only: money and power. 

“Huh!” she said, pretending a dismissive laugh. “Where sign up can I!”

“Me too!” said Selma, more wholeheartedly, even though, as a slave, she could neither read nor write. Then she cringed as Yram gave her a warning look.

Aramat said nothing and they turned to other things, Yram soon forgetting about it in a new set of games and pretend rivalries with her new friends. 

But a week later, when they met, Aramat brought it up again.

“Remember about the League of Freiheit we speak?” she asked out of the blue while they were discussing the best hats for their fashion dolls (they were feeling very grown up these days – no more “baby dolls” for them!).

Yram’s heart skipped a beat and she flushed and looked wildly at her friend. Aramat smiled. Selma also reacted, though her excitement was more subdued; even at her young age, she was too used to disappointment to put too much hope in anything.

“Do either one of you wish to join?” Aramat asked matter-of-factly, as though asking them to go to a party. 

Yram was about to shout but caught herself in time. She looked around her cautiously, as though there were anyone near, but they were entirely alone in Yram’s family backyard, except for a neighborhood dog sniffing a bush. 

“Maybe,” she whispered.

Selma looked like she was about to faint. She couldn’t believe her ears. 

“Could you please repeat that, ma’am?” Selma asked Amarat respectfully.

Aramat did so, in the same tone of voice as before.

Selma stared at Yram, as though waiting for permission.

“I think maybe I might,” Selma said, awkwardly, still looking at Yram, who looked like she was waiting for permission from Selma. “That is, I think, maybe, do you think you might let me maybe join, if I like, if you permit, the league of . . . of . . .  of . . . ?” “Of Freiheit.”

Selma hesitated.

“What that mean?” she asked, ingenuously.

“Freedom,” said Amarat. 

The little black girl took a deep breath and looked hard into Amarat’s eyes.

“I like to join the league of freedom,” she said.

Amarat turned to Yram.

“M,me too!” Yram stammered, blushing at the thought Selma had proven braver than herself at the moment of truth.

“Then,” continued Amarat, “authorized I be to invite you both the league to join.”

“You’re already a member?!” asked Yram, with disingenuous surprise. 

Amarat gave her a grin, as if to say, “So slow on the uptake you rarely be!”

It turned out Amarat had been a junior spy for the league for the previous two years, sending messages to other girls (using code in hopscotch) about local conditions in the city. She was now authorized to seek recruits, and Yram and Selma would be her first. 

Amarat was twelve, and already a seasoned rebel (even, thought Petey, as he listened to this part of the story, what in his world might be called a “guerrilla”). It was humiliating; Yram felt herself to be what might have been called, in that other world, a “slacker.”

Over the following month unfolded the first adventures of the three girls, working together usually as a team and following instructions from a mysterious headquarters only Amarat was privy to: spying out police actions and troop movements and learning the private addresses of the local high command (actions easy for Yram, with her father’s rank, and one of the reasons she had been such a good catch for the League), breaking message codes (another ace up Yram’s sleeve, for the same reason) so they could forward Izan communications across the League, and even engaging in small acts of sabotage: helping to spike the tires on Izan vehicles (the girls brought the nails, the boys the hammers), pouring sand into vehicle oil tanks, painting graffiti on the walls of government buildings in the middle of the night when parents thought their kids were having sleepovers: “With Izan Down!” and “To Izan Death!” were painted in blood red across store fronts and apartment buildings along the streets leading to Izan headquarters and the pathetic city hall where civilians pretended to govern. 

One of the bolder actions was to set fire to the home of one of the sub-Gauleiters, leading to a savage crackdown across the city: scores of men and women were hauled off to a local konzentrationlager, an almost certain death sentence—sobering, even daunting proof of the actions’ effectiveness; indeed, the Link (which the Yram and Selma learned was how the organization called itself internally) was careful not to try anything as audacious again for a long time. But no one ever suspected the children.

The most serious moment of truth came when Yram’s membership in the rebel group was discovered three years after her recruitment. It was Sammy Dinnison who threatened to squeal on her (not all children, naturally, joined the League, and some “kleiner Izan,” bullies and tyrants of the playground, openly opposed it, flaunting their “Junge Izan” badges and blackening the eyes of anyone who was not sufficiently enthusiastic in the Izan cause). 

Sammy threatened to expose Yram. It was exquisitely ironic that it should be Sammy, of all people, to rat on her; she’d had a crush on him when she was in third grade, till she learned how brutal he was underneath his brash ways and fütballer’s good looks. When he turned on her after she lost interest in him, she regretted ever sharing her lunch with him on the playground the day their little romance started. 

Yram faced a stark choice—be outed or run away. She had little time to decide.

She met with Aramat on the volleyball court. Sammy had been targeting Aramat as his next love interest. It was only a matter of time before he found out about her ties to the League. 

Aramat said nothing. She didn’t have to. The girls just looked at one another without speaking. 

All that needed saying spoke in their eyes.

That night Yram packed her small backpack and ran away from home, aided by the Link, and, with Aramat, fled north. Her parting with Selma was filled with tears. 

Yram left a note to her parents, telling them not to try to find her, and adding a postscript: “Selma blame do not. Selma nothing know! It not her fault be! Only mine! Only mine!” 

Though she knew this would do little good. Selma would be the easiest to retaliate against in her parents’ frustration: she would be penalized for “losing” their daughter with all the brutality an Izan Gauleiter and his bitter wife could muster. After all, in a system based on slavery, everyone was a slave to someone else; even Yram was a slave to her parents, and Selma, though nominally Yram’s slave, was, in the end, the slave of her parents, one of whose duties was to help them control their child. It was a cruel and absurd situation to be placed in but inevitable in a society founded on the principles of slavery: hierarchy, oppression, intimidation, and cruelty. Which Izan is and was.

Days later, Yram and Aramat ended up in the northeastern city of Nattahnam on the river Sonhud, where she had been ever since, running guardian operations for the Link and eventually becoming a ranking member with Ruhtra.

Yram never heard what became of Selma. 

Chapter Nineteen: Are We Home Yet? 

“Wow!” It was Bumper’s voice. “Those were great stories!”

“If only stories they were.” That was Ruhtra’s. “Not our lives.”

“But ours better”—And that was Yram’s—“than many others be.”

The truck bounced and shook as it ran over a pothole.

“If you like going nowhere fast in the dark,” came Chace’s voice, light and ironic,

“while trapped inside an oil tank.”

Petey sighed.

He had lost count of the hours, and the days only made themselves felt by the growling in his belly. But he now believed he had a clearer understanding of both Ruhtra and Yram; felt better able to feel what and how they thought and felt about their world, their lives, themselves: the kinds of pain they had faced and survived, the shape of the drives to action that resulted, when suffering could have led to despair, resignation, and defeat; also their courage in seizing the opportunities to act when they came—the courage to judge, to choose, and to act on their choices. They were more like adults than most of the adults he had ever known. He was, in some ways even despite himself, deeply impressed by what he had heard and believed he now understood. The more so as this was by no means either Ruhtra’s or Yram’s intention. If anything, they had seemed reluctant to go into details, but the time and place made it easier and even necessary to while away the monotony and darkness inside the tank as it drove across the country, they had no idea where, to make their history, their experiences, and their world as clear as possible to their listeners. 

That world was bizarrely like the world Petey had grown up in, but turned inside out and upside down because of one fatal difference: a brutal enemy in an old war had conquered and humiliated them, and they and their bravest friends and allies had been, not only beaten, but crushed into submission. An entire way of life had been swept away—though not quite: these two flashed proof, high and brilliant, that there was still a memory of it flickering in a darkness as impenetrable as the darkness in the tank, an implacable will to fight existed to bring that light back into the world; to refuse to lose faith but to keep belief in it alive in watch fires across the night.

All five were asleep when the truck came to an abrupt stop. Petey woke and listened as he heard voices outside the tank. His blood tingled as he heard someone climb up the ladder and start to open the hatch almost straight above his head. Someone else shouted at whoever it was, who sniped back, then noisily clambered back down. The hatch was left slightly open and a beam of dawn light pierced the solid black that had housed them for days. 

  Petey moved to the person nearest him and shook the sleeping form.

“Are we . . . home yet?” came the sleepy voice of Bumper, followed by a yawn.

“No,” said Petey in a whisper, “but I think we have to leave anyway.”

Petey quietly called out the names of the others, who one by one pulled from sleep, except for Ruhtra, who was already awake: “I too them hear.”

There was a pause.

“Everyone awake be?”

Four voices quietly replied in assent.

“Good. Now we get out must.”

He faced no debate on that issue. The problem, of course, was how.

Petey heard Ruhtra crawl to a spot near Petey, just underneath the crescent of light showing the slight opening of the hatch. 

“Have you ever a circus act where a bunch of acrobats a tower make by onto each other’s backs by climbing seen?”

There was a silence while the three boys disentangled the older boy’s syntax.

“You mean . . . a . . . turtle tower?” asked Bumper hesitantly.

“Exactly yes,” said Ruhtra. “So a turtle tower we make shall. Chace, you upon my back climb.”

“And a-turtling we will go,” Chace whispered as he followed the other boy’s directions.

“Peter Myshkin, you on top of your friend now go.”

And Petey climbed the ladder made by the two boys’ backs onto Chace’s and carefully took position in the darkness. The only sound was the breathing of the boys.

“Yram next,” Ruhtra said, wheezing slightly as he locked his arms and hips under the growing pressure on his back.

Yram climbed cautiously in the darkness and kneeled on Petey’s back.

“Ready,” she whispered. 

“And Bumper now you,” Ruhtra gasped. “And when on top of Yram you go, and if you can hatch reach see.”

“On top of Yram I go and if I can hatch reach see,” Bumper repeated, hoping he had the slightest idea what Ruhtra meant.

“Exactly,” wheezed Ruhtra, “yes.”

“Okeedokee,” said Bumper, using the most assertive statement of assent he knew.

And Bumper slowly worked his way up the turtle tower, which was now trembling slightly under the pressure of four vertical non-turtle bodies, till he got onto Yram’s back. Once there, he reached up to the crescent of light around the hatch and pushed. The hatch opened half way without a sound, and Bumper cautiously looked outside. He saw they were surrounded by a crown of mountaintops and the faint light from an early dawn sky. 

“Can anyone you see?” whispered Yram.

Bumper looked carefully around the open slit of hatchway. 

There was no one. 

But there was a strong smell of corroded metal and grease and something else—not oil exactly, but something very familiar, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. And there was a shadowy something off to one side: a metal tower loomed above the oil tanker with what looked like an immense hose hooked to something a few feet away from the hatch. 

Bumper gulped. 

Uh-oh.

Was it really what at first he thought it looked like? 

Because what it looked like to Bumper was something he didn’t really want to think about: what it looked like at first, and now at second and third, was that they were just about to stick that hose into the tank and fill it to the brim, drowning anyone inside it who had made the mistake of thinking it would be a good place to hide. And it wasn’t oxygen or corn flakes or hot chocolate they were going to fill it with . . . 

It was . . .

(“Nyaaaa!” Bumper thought but was careful not to let out in the howl he so wanted to.)

. . . gasoline!

Everyone had to get out! Now! Before now! Last night! Yesterday!

But how?

Then he saw that the hose could be used for a purpose other than filling the tank. 

So, double checking there was nobody else in the vicinity, Bumper climbed out the hatch onto the top of the tank, crawled over to the hose, and detached it from its hook, then pulled the hose over to the open hatch and lowered it into the tank. He wasn’t entirely sure this was a good idea—who knew what turned on the hose? But what else was there to try?

So down into the tank lowered the hose, like a huge snake still asleep after a debauched night out.

Nothing switched on. The surroundings were quiet as the grave.

So far, so good! Bumper gave himself a congratulatory pat on the back. Or tried to. He discovered, like many another, that it was easier said than done.

Yram was the first to climb up the hose onto the tank top. She was followed, uncertainly at first, by Petey. Then Chace appeared, huffing as he grabbed at the slippery rubber of the hose. And finally Ruhtra: the hose was just long enough for him to jump to catch it after several tries, with alarming bangs as he fell to the floor of the tank, but finally he too pulled himself out.

The noise made them panic and forget to cover their tracks. A bird began singing its dawn song as they scrambled down the outside ladder and slipped away just as Petey heard the oil crew walking back toward the truck. 

“I you tell I from the tank strange sounds hear,” one of them was saying. “For rats too loud! . . .”

The five hastened away to a screen of woods nearby before the crew found the hatch open, the hook dangling inside the tank, and the litter a bunch of young stowaways had left behind after four and a half days of journeying west across the lost continent of Acirema.

____

Christopher Bernard is a prize-winning author of both poetry and fiction. The two earlier stories in the “Otherwise” series are If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia (winner of the Independent Press Award in Preteen Fiction and short-listed for the K. M. Anthru International Literature Award).