Survivor

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I didn’t know enough to appreciate my foster father the way I should have when we met back on Earth. That was when I was about fifteen and his Missionaries caught me stealing from their cornfield. They shot me, would have killed me, but he stopped them. Then he carried me back to his house, got a doctor to tend my wound, and announced that he and his wife were adopting me. Just like that. I heard the doctor try to talk him out of it when they both thought I was unconscious.

“You could be making a mistake, Jules. She’s not the harmless young girl she appears to be. And she’ll never replace your children.”

“My children are dead,” said my foster father quietly. “I’ve accepted that. I wouldn’t expect her or anyone else to replace them.”

The doctor was silent for a moment. Then he sighed. “Well, at least she can talk.”

“Of course she can talk! She is human, Bart, wild or not.”

“Yes… physically anyway. Some of them can’t do much more than grunt, you know. They’ve either forgotten speech, or they never learned it. As wild humans, they spend their lives either hunting or being hunted. By the time they’re this girl’s age, they’re more wild than human.”

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