“I will help you eat,” I declared, glad to have an excuse to feed her.
She looked ready to protest, but I held up a hand.
“I insist. You will like this dish; many females do.” I picked up the slippery noodles and held them to her lips.
She hesitated for a moment, but the delicious aroma drifted to her nose and she relented.
“Mmm,” she hummed. “This is so good. What’s in it?”
Before I could reply that it was made from highly nutritious floating sea vegetables from just off the coast between their colony’s continent and ours, someone gasped loudly in the crowd below us. The gasp turned into a screech, and one of the new females leaped up from her cushion.
Chapter 8: Clara
The woman screamed again, jumping up from her cushion and pointing to something on the ground. It was a... something. A creature. A dark, furry creature the same color as the cave rocks. The creature I'd been noticing out of the corner of my eye the entire tour.
I hadn't been imagining it after all.
“It's okay,” a lady next to the screaming woman said. “That's just a cooki.”
“A cookie?”she screeched. “That's not a cookie. That's a rat.”
“Cookis are harmless,” the one pacifying her continued. “They help keep our caves clear of bugs and creepy crawlies. They're just coming out to beg for extra food. They know the warriors are total softies and can’t help but give them handouts.”
Then, as if to prove her point, two more of the creatures scurried out of the small flap in the wall—the warriors had built teeny, tiny doors for their mouse holes. They approached the closest Kadrixan warrior and sat on their hind legs in front of him, eyeing his food. The Kadrixan looked as if he dealt with this every day; he picked up a few of the wet, saucy noodles and tossed them to the creatures.
“See, totally harmless.”
They looked like living pom poms with big eyes and oversized, perky ears. Long, fluffy tails curled back behind their bodies. One of them was carrying a small stick in its tail. I looked a little closer. No, that wasn’t a stick. It was a piece of the herbs used to season the meat.
“They’re kind of cute,” I said softly, mostly to myself.
“The kukee were here before we were. This is their home.”
The way Krxare pronounced it wasn't quite the same as the way the woman had. The women here must have used a familiar-sounding word instead.
“We elected to let them stay,” Krxare continued. “And as Sarah said, they keep the invertebrate population in check. They also help turn our food scraps into fertile soil.”
“How do you manage their waste and get it out to the field?” I asked.
“They do it themselves. Kukees do not soil the place they sleep and eat. Each year they pick one spot in the valley, and they all go there. We locate our gardens each spring on last year's refuse patch.”
That was convenient. Back at the colony, they would have exterminated these little guys and called them vermin. I assumed that since the Kadrixan kept them around that they were also disease-free.
One of the little critters approached us.
“Is it okay to feed them? Won’t they stop hunting if we feed them too much?”
“They do. So if we see invertebrates around, we put a temporary ban on hand feeding. It seems to work. There is no ban now. Go ahead.” He picked up a slippery piece of noodle and handed it to me.
The noodles were delicious, but they tasted a lot better than they felt. The slimy thing slipped out of my hand and landed with a wetplopon the floor next to my cushion. The creature ran in but stopped just out of reach, unsure if I was safe. It looked at me, then at the noodle, then back at me.
It was adorable.
I froze, not wanting to scare it. Slowly it crept forward, one step at a time, getting braver and braver. Suddenly, another cooki dashed in from the side, picked up the noodle, and ran off, tripping over the slippery strand. The first creature, the one who’d taken too long to work up the courage, made a soft squeak of protest. Then its tail, which had been perky and curled in an S shape, drooped, flopping to the ground.
It looked so sad. I reached for one of the noodles on my plate with my bare fingers, struggling to pick it up. I had my hand all up in my food, but I didn't care; I just wanted a single noodle. Just as the cooki was about to give up and try his or her luck with someone else, I managed to pick up a piece.
“Yes! Finally.” I clicked my tongue at the creature, hoping it would turn back.