- Emilia -

“Cabron! I can't believe this crap!”

I fling the handful of clay onto the wall of the cave and it sticks to the rock for a moment. Then the disgusting mass of useless brown dirt falls down to the ground with a sickening, wet splat.

I hide my face behind my hands and take several long, trembling breaths, trying to get a grip. It's an unspoken rule in our little tribe that nobody breaks down in tears in public. Our fate on this jurassic planet is uncertain and bad enough as it is, if we're not going to constantly be sobbing and bringing each other down, too.

Sophia comes over and puts her hand gently on my shoulder. “What's wrong, Emilia? Not the best quality clay, huh? It's okay, we'll find something better.”

She's doing her best. But her voice is uncertain and I know she doesn't like to see me like this. I know why. I'm usually pretty quiet, and this is my first outburst since we got to this planet.

Everyone is looking at me.

“Heck,” Heidi says as she walks by with a blood-dripping animal skin in her arms, “that thing looks better than most of the pottery stuff I made in art class. I remember I tried to make a piggy bank once, and it came out looking more like a toad that someone had stepped on. I could just about fit a penny in it, but I could never get it out again and the thing just wouldn't break. It's still in there. The teacher thought it was supposed to be modern art. Like, a commentary on fiscal policy or something. I said it totally was. I think I was nine?”

I take a deep breath, calming down from Sophia's touch and the need to not make more of a spectacle. “I'm fine. Don't worry. Just ... this damn planet gets on my nerves sometimes.”

“Better to let the frustration out than to bottle it up,” Aurora pipes up from the other wall of the cave, where she's trying to make a bow and arrows. “Feel free to go at it, Em, any time. 'Figlio di puttana' usually works for me. And the occasional 'vaffanculo'.”

“Or just a simple 'damn this fucking bullshit',” Sophia suggests. “But 'cabron' has a good ring to it. I'll make a note of it for later.”

“I recommend 'scheisse',” Heidi says, sitting down by the fire. “Because 'shit' is usually a little too short, you know? It must be said with feeling to work the best. Like, slowly and with a real snarl at the end. Scheeeiiiisse! See?”

Sophia nods appreciatively. “Nice.”

Caroline looks up from her sewing. “Give 'helvete' a try. Make the first syllable really long, like 'hæææl-vette'. It has to be the æ as in 'ass', not the e as in 'hell'. Actually, it just means 'hell', but it really works.”

I straighten from my squatting position over the little pottery wheel I've tried to make and stretch my back. The girls are totally making me feel better. “That's a good one,” I agree. “I'm starting to appreciate the swearing opportunities the Norwegian language offers. Or maybe you're just a natural talent, Caroline.”

She shrugs and continues her sewing. “Could be.”

Yeah, most of us are bilingual and now I guess we're all developing some kind of very elaborate Tourette's syndrome, calmly discussing swear words like we would brands of shampoo.

It's the kind of thing that happens when a whole bunch of linguistics students are kidnapped by a flying saucer and dumped on an alien planet full of dinosaurs and cavemen. A deadly planet where danger lurks behind every tree and bush and the closest cheesecake is several light years away. So we swear a lot.

We all hate it here. We're living in a large cave, us six girls and Jax'zan, the local caveman who's now Sophia's husband. We're trying our best to make it work and to just survive, which is hard enough on a planet where everything is trying its damndest to kill you. But we've made it this far, and things are getting better.

Slowly.

Okay, very slowly. Without Jax'zan we would all have been dead weeks ago, of course. But he's the kind of guy who just goes about his business calmly and quietly and makes sure we're safe. He's totally great and excellent and cool, and we all agree about that.

At the same time, we all know that we really need more than just one guy. Sure, the caves and the one warrior with a huge sword can keep us somewhat safe from the worst of the dinosaurs. But if one of the other tribes discovers us, then our fates will be sealed. Even Jax'zan's own tribe, which has cast him out, would come here and kill us if they knew where we were.

It's only a matter of time. We all know it. None of us girls are trained killers, and if Jax'zan is an average caveman, then they're all twice our size, too, and any fight would end with disaster for us. With rape and murder. And that's if we're lucky.

I lean back against the rock wall and idly spin the crude little pottery wheel I've made. All the girls are busy doing something. Caroline is sewing some kind of garment from animal skin, Heidi is scraping the fat off the skin she just brought in, Sophia is cooking a stew made of dinosaur meat and leaves, Aurora is shaving little slivers off a branch that she says will make a nice bow and Delyah is studying the extremely colorful and mysterious wall paintings in this cave, probably the most important thing of all. Everyone is doing something useful.

And me?

Scheisse.

“Still daylight,” I state. “I'll just go and see if there's some more actual clay with smaller grains out by the creek. This stuff here is pretty much just sand.” I kick the blob of moist dirt out of the cave.

“You want to take a spear?” Sophia says softly. It's more a reminder than a suggestion. We all have to be armed with something every time we leave the cave. The gun we had in the beginning is empty of bullets, and now it's collecting dust on a shelf.

I grab the long spear by the cave entrance and stand there for a minute, peering out suspiciously, making sure there's no predator right outside the opening. Then I slink out.

The sun is setting. The very alien sun that comes and goes in about twenty hours and gives a light that is just different enough from Earth's Sun that it's a constant reminder that we're very far from home.

Of course the first thing I see is the mountain that the cavemen call Bune, which isn't a mountain at all but a huge spaceship. It must have been here for hundreds or thousands of years, because it's completely overgrown and does in fact look like a mountain. For a little while it gave us some hope of actually being able to make it fly and go home to Earth, but after we took a closer look it's obvious that it's too alien and too old and stripped bare to be of much use. So now it's just another reminder of how hopeless this really is.

I ignore the trees right outside so they'll know how disappointed I am in them. When we first came to this cave, there was a whole lot of fruits hanging all over them. But of course it turned out that they weren't all that good and they were mostly hard pits. We've had to accept that there actually isn't all that much fruit here that's not totally sour.

I trudge over to the creek where we get our drinking water. I'm always looking around, always ready to bolt at the slightest sign of anything living. So many women died the first day here, taken by the flying dinosaurs that we now just call the 'not-dactyls' because they look a lot like pterodactyls but are clearly not the same thing. They have four wings, for one thing.

The brook babbles like any stream on Earth would, and when I kneel down and take a sip I close my eyes, imagining that I'm home and that this is the creek close to my uncle's cabin in the woods in Durango. The water is cool and clean in my mouth, and for a moment I enjoy the illusion, with the gentle wind rustling the treetops and blowing strands of hair into my face, just like the summers when I was a kid.

Then I hear a distant shriek from some alien predator or monster and I'm right back on this jurassic planet.

“Hal-vety,” I seethe. Norwegian sounds can be hard to make, but I think it's close enough.

I stay on my knees and scoop some of the cold dirt next to the creek into my hands. Yep, it's pretty much just sand, and it can't be used for making pottery the way I'd like to try.

To find better clay I'd have to move further upstream or downstream. But I'm not doing that. It would take me out of sight of the cave.

I place the spear carefully beside me. It's tipped with the tooth of a not-dactyl, and it's very sharp. Still I doubt it would make much of an impression on a determined predator. But Delyah says it's better than nothing.

I glance over at the cave opening. I can see Sophia's face as she looks out and checks on me. I wave, and she waves back. Shit, my outbreak must have really unsettled her.

Sophia doesn't hate it here as much as we other girls do. In fact, I'm pretty sure she's starting to like it. I don't blame her at all. She's married to a spectacular caveman who loves her with a fervor I've never seen anywhere before, she's getting laid like a champ and she's been around this planet much more than anyone else of us. It doesn't scare the daylights out of her anymore. She's made it hers, in a way. She mastered it. Or parts of it, at least. And isn't that all any of us can hope from any planet, including Earth?

We all envy her, I suppose. She has Jax'zan, and they love each other passionately in a way that I personally only know from movies and books. They're very discreet about all the sex they're having, but we live in close quarters and some sounds do seep out from behind the furs that we use to separate the cave into individual spaces. Sometimes they'll walk into the jungle together on some unspecified errand, and then we sometimes hear Sophia's happy screams and unrestrained noises a while later, carried on the wind from far away. Then when they return we'll make naughty, barely veiled comments and Sophia will smile sheepishly while she'll cling to Jax'zan for the rest of the day, starry-eyed and just sighing deeply at the strangest times. She is obviously very satisfied physically.

And she's pregnant. I know she worries about that, but I think it'll be fine. After all, humans lived like this for thousands of years before civilization arose. And some of the girls are really smart. We'll deal with it. Yep, she's got a much better life here than the rest of us.

I try another handful of wet dirt. Nope, too many pebbles. “Vaffanculo!”

Hm. Italian rolls easier off the tongue.

Some cabin fever is setting in, of course. We're just seven people living close together, and angry words and small conflicts do happen. Still, we're glad that we each have our space in the caves, and we make sure to hug and make up as soon as possible after any little altercation.

It's important, and the only time I've seen Jax'zan get angry was one time when Heidi and Caroline had some squabble about ... something, I don't even remember. He stood up, positioned himself between them, grabbed them by their arms and just stared them both down, one after the other, with those intense, fiery eyes of his. It felt like a thundercloud had come into the cave and it was so quiet we could hear the insects buzzing outside. Then he said something about behaving like children, very slowly, and then we were all walking on tiptoe for days. Nobody wants to anger that guy again. He's usually smiling and supportive and happy, but at the same time he's dangerous like no man I've ever seen.

We all speak his language now. It's only taken us a couple of weeks. Hey, we study linguistics and the language is pretty simple, with no insane sounds or overly bizarre grammar. It helps that Jax'zan doesn't seem to dumb it down for us – he speaks to us like he would to anyone.

The translator device that we worked on back on Earth and which came here with us lies next to the useless gun on a wooden shelf by the inner wall, covered in dust. The battery has to be pretty close to empty, and we'll have to save it for some time when we'll really need it. If, for instance, someone were to come and save us.

Because what keeps us going is the hope that we'll get home to Earth some time. Now that the spaceship that is Bune is obviously not our escape, pretty much the only hope we have is if the kidnappers come back and get us again. But that could be worse than anything, of course. They treated us very cruelly and even killed one girl before they just dumped us here, pretty much right into a nest of not-dactyls. They had nothing good in mind for us.

Still, we don't talk much about getting home. It's too demoralizing, and those conversations usually end in collective sobbing. But I think about my family all the time. I want to go home. I really want to.

We all hate this planet.

But I hate it more than the other girls do.

They have all adjusted to this life more than I have. Sure, they'll complain about missing coffee or Facebook or Instagram or Target or some kind of food or even just random soap operas and music. And decent underwear, of course. But they'll all go into the jungle with a spear and then come back with some animal they've killed, and they'll proceed to skin it and cut it up, cracking jokes and even humming. And swearing like sailors, of course. They'll go and collect roots and edible leaves and they'll chat easily while they're doing really useful things.

I have never done any of those things. I've tried to make pottery, but the clay here isn't good enough. The baskets I tried to make from vines didn't hold together. I can't go into the woods – I'm scared stiff every time, to the point where I freeze up and someone has to lead me back to the cave. I can't kill anything, and I hate the sight of blood. I hate the smell of dinosaur fat. I hate the look of not-dactyl bones and the claws and teeth that we use as tips on our spears. I hate the trees here. I hate the taste of the food. I hate the smells of the jungle and the dirt.

I can't bring myself to kill animals. I haven't eaten meat for years, and as a kid I had too many pets to remember. My room was always full of cages and litter boxes and little animals, both furry and not, all kinds of strays and injured little things. My mom finally declared it a health hazard when she had a little lizard fall right in front of her feet and scurry under my bed, causing her to scream her head off. But I didn't stop – I just kept the critters better hidden.

I always stay close to the cave. I'm so afraid, it's all I can do to not weep bitter tears at the thought of what might be lurking in among the trees. I keep seeing in my mind's eye the not-dactyls diving for us and snapping up dozens of other women, breaking them in half in their long, toothy beaks and carrying the bodies away.

The jungle here paralyzes me completely and reduces me to a shivering wreck.

And everyone knows it.

I didn't ask to come here, it's true. But neither did the other girls, and still they're always doing things for all of us, womaning up and doing what has to be done, going into the jungle and coming back with new discoveries or new herbs or more food or a hunky caveman to help keep us safe. They do it despite the dangers and despite the fact that they don't like hunting and killing any more than I do. But they're growing, becoming braver and tougher because the planet forces it from them.

All the planet has forced from me is fear. In huge amounts.

I've done nothing useful for the others. This pottery thing looks like it won't work, either. Caroline started it, and then she lost interest and started sewing clothes instead, so I took over. I've made a couple of usable pots, but that was weeks ago. If there's no good clay to be found here, then that's it.

We're supposed to be a tribe. And in a tribe, everyone has to be useful.

None of the others have given me a word of blame or even a miffed glance. But I feel it every second of every day: I'm not pulling my weight.

I'm a coward and a freeloader.

Yes, I hate this planet.

But the worst part is that it is making me hate myself.

I try another handful of wet soil. At first it looks like the grains are small enough to be useful as clay, but then the whole clump falls apart and turns out to be just a brittle rock.

I fling it at a rock face and wipe a hopeless tear from my face. “¡Hijo de puta!”

Sometimes the only words that work right are the ones you've known forever.