Nightfall

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He had disobeyed before.

He had done it so many times that it had become a joke among many of the adults in the settlement. He saw it, in smirking asides or quick grins, in comments made that they thought would fly above the head of a youth. There’s Laaro, they might say, the reckless boy who climbed atop the grain silo roof on a dare and fell in. The careless boy who tried to swim the shallow lake where the root-taps grow. And then they would shake their heads at his folly, as if they felt sorry for him. But no, not for Laaro. For his mother and father.

He paused in the undergrowth and crouched low. His heart was hammering in his chest, so loud in his ears he would have sworn they could hear it all the way back to the lodge house. Larro chanced a look behind him, through the snarl of twisted scrubland, off in the direction of home; and he immediately regretted it. Rods of faint yellow lantern-light bobbed and shifted, sweeping this way and that across the grasslands, coming closer. On the cool, still air of the night he could hear the grunt and spit of mai cats on their leashes, pulling at his scent. With them, the rumble of adult voices, most distinctly the dry snap of the Elder Aaren’s words.

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