Reviewers, you are awesome. All my thanks are belong to you.

Note: The grammatical error in paragraph five is intentional.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.

------------

Eighth Waking.

Well I didn't give Shanda the ring. Stuff happened yester-waking, and Porter is being very scary.

Shanda found a fish. At least, we think it's a fish. She caught a fish and killed it while we were out climbing all over the mountain.

There are fish down here! Fish! No sardis, but some kind of fish, anyway! And if there are fish, then maybe, if we need to, we can hold out longer than we thought.

But that's what Porter is worried about. The fish, I mean. When Greys and Dhalan and me got back to the ship, we found Porter and Shanda arguing in the galley--and Dhalan told me that was a sure sign that she was feeling better: she was well enough to argue.

She and Porter were in the galley, and Porter had this stance in front of all his cookware like he was protecting it. Shanda was holding the dead fish. Now, I usually try to avoid being judgmental. I really do. But this fish, this thing...was ugly. My first thought when I saw it was something like "Moons, what unholy creature gave birth to that thing?"

It was grey-brown, just about the same color as the mud, and almost as long as my arm. Its shape was just...odd. It had no dorsal, anal or caudal fins. There was the hint of something ridge-like along the spine near the tip of its tail, but that was it. Actually, it didn't really have pectoral fins either. Instead it had these sort of trailing side-flaps that were more like extensions of its body than they were like fins. It also had four feathery sort of feelers or lures or something above its eyes. I've written before how Porter used to rant about all the kinds of fish he cooked. He told me about some that hunt with lures. So is it a carnivore? It had the teeth for it. And its mouth, its jaws...were just strange. They opened sideways. Like an insect.

When you think of a fish, you think vertical-flat. This thing was horizontal-flat. Like something that got squished.

Anyway, Shanda wanted Porter to stew it up for when the three of us got back. But Porter didn't want to have anything to do with it, and he was going on and on about diseases and worms and poisoned flesh. That was about when we came in, and Greys did that thing where he angles his chin a certain way, and glares, and the whole room shuts up.

The way it happened was like this: While we were on the mountain, Shanda just decided to take a walk or something in the sled-shoes. She did have the idea for them. She had gone over to the post that marked Haley's grave, and then gone a little bit downhill. At some point, she took a step, and something in the mud started wriggling underneath her left sled. She said it scared her so bad she almost fell over backwards, and then that the thought of falling in the mud was equally repulsive, so she just calmed down and thought for a minute.

There was a thing under her sled, and she didn't know what it was. (Come to think of it, that would scare me too.) Anyway, she only knew that it was small enough that her stepping on it was keeping it stuck in the mud. So she took off her right sled, and used it to whack the thing hard, whatever it was. It stopped wriggling, and she used the sled to pry it out of the mud, and she got this ugly fish-thing. It wasn't completely dead, so she whacked it a couple more times before she brought it back to the platform outside the ship. (No nets, no line, no hook, and she's still the best angler.)

We keep a little rag there on the corner of the platform, to wipe the mud off our sleds. She used it to get the mud off the fish-thing, and her hands, and then she got the crazy idea to ask Porter to cook it. He didn't want to, and they started arguing, and that's how we found them when we came back from the mountain.

I admit, it did look pretty disgusting. Not something I would jump at eating. But Greys just took everything in stride, and asked Porter what his objections were to stewing up Shanda's freshly-caught fish-thing.

Porter said something like, "I won't be sullying my pots and serving up our deaths with that dirty, plague-ridden mud-worm!"

And then Greys calmly inspected the fish-thing and said, "What is it?"

And Shanda replied, "It's not sardis." And by the tone of her voice, everybody could almost hear the implied "...which we've been eating forever, and which we're all tired of."

It's true. Our biscuits ran out a fair while ago, and it's just been sardis, sardis, sardis. Don't get me wrong--I'm glad for the food we have. But something different now and then is good. I think. Maybe.

Something different.

We had been out to sky for a long time before we were shot down. I don't know how many days eight wakings comes to, but I think we're past the point where we would have put back in to port to restock our supplies. Fruit, biscuits, small moonstones, twine for the nets. Water.

Does it rain down here?

But we've still got some of that.

So all we have to eat is sardis. And they are getting old. In more ways than one. Maybe Porter can find a way to preserve the meat or make jerky of it all or something. I don't know.

Anyway, "It's not sardis" was good enough for us. It was something different, and something fresh besides. Greys told Porter to go ahead and figure out a way to cook it, just in case we had to live on these things later, but Porter wouldn't do it. Shanda volunteered, but Porter wouldn't let her do it either. He only just barely, begrudgingly let Greys get at his cookware to do it.

Everyone respects Greys. Greys is careful and respectful in everything he does. Which is the reason and which is the result? I don't know. Anyway, Greys cooked the ugly fish-thing.

Porter wouldn't have it. He locked himself in his quarters and didn't come out the rest of the waking. On his way there he kept going on about poison and females and bad luck. Shanda glared after him. It was a low blow. I'd heard that superstition too: that it's bad luck to have a female on board. I'd almost believed it until I met Shanda. I wish I could recall how I first wrote about her, in my other journal. It was perfect. Worth trying to repeat:

Luck has nothing to do with Shanda--she does her fair share of the work, just like the rest of us. She's very strong, and she definitely pulls her own weight, maybe more. She and Dhalan always get a bigger catch than Haley and me. Maybe they work together better because they're brother and sister.

I can't remember very much. It was such a good entry.

Yes, I'm vain, I'm proud; I fancy myself eloquent when I write. My journal is very important to me. I always want it to be the best.

Ugly fish-thing. Right. Greys did it all. Normally nobody really cares when the cook is preparing food. People only start caring when the food is ready to eat. But we all watched while Greys gutted it and carved it and chopped up the meat. It seemed so easy to him. I didn't know he was so good with the prongs and carving-knife. Has he always been a good cook? Or maybe what held our interest was the ugly fish-thing. We see common fish every day--or we used to--but this thing? I don't know why we were all so transfixed; he cut it up just like any other fish, and threw the pieces in a pot to stew.

So it cooked, and then it was ready, and Greys served it up. But nobody ate right away--the four of us just sat around the makeshift table in the galley (it's a little tighter now, since what was the wall-space is now the floor-space), and stared at our stew. Then eventually everybody started looking at Shanda until she took the first bite.

We couldn't really tell from her face what she thought. Well I couldn't. But after she took her second bite everybody else started. What, were we scared like she's instantly going to die if she has one bite? I don't know.

Well, ugly fish-thing tastes like...fish. It's not that bad. It's not that good either. The texture was very strange.

Who cares. It's food.

And we're all feeling fine this waking. All except Porter. I think he thinks we're all going to catch a plague and die. Including him. He still spends most of his time alone in the galley. Last time I checked he was still scrubbing out the pot Greys had used to cook the fish-thing. He snapped at me when I lingered to look in. Is he losing it?

It's hard. Greys said think positive. But I wish Porter wouldn't talk about all of us dying all the time.

I've just got to keep thinking positive. We can survive this, we can survive this. I wrote in one of my other journals something I once heard: "Writing something down gives it power." Ah, maybe I remember it because I wrote it down, and that gave it enough power to be memorable.

We can survive. We can survive.