The dryads were small and slender, with round faces and soft features. The natives of Felicity were all the same morph type, a custom job the original colonists had commissioned to help make their weird little society work. I wasn’t supposed to look completely harmless. I’d ended up with a willowy, fragile-looking build that I wasn’t at all happy with. I didn’t mind that so much, but growing so fast burned through a lot of calories. I’d been shooting up like a weed this past year, gaining a centimeter or more every month until I could easily pass for a teenager.
A rotating three-dimensional image of myself appeared in my mind’s eye, showing every detail of my physical condition. I had a lot of enhancements, but this was one of the fanciest ones I knew about. I closed my eyes, and pulled up my internal management interface. So many things in there that I didn’t get from the vegetarian diet the matrons served. I bit down on a rib, crunching it between my teeth and savoring the tangy flavor. Killing one without getting any scratches that might give me away was a challenge, but I’d managed it. The security bots mostly ignored them, since they were nocturnal and good little orphans weren’t supposed to be out of their beds at night anyway. They had long limbs for jumping from tree to tree, and big hooked claws for catching things. I usually hunted zangos, a kind of vicious furry predator that hunted monkeys in the forest canopy. I would have felt bad about eating a squirrel, and monkeys would be too weird. So every now and then I’d sneak out to indulge my hunting instincts, and catch a little extra food with my own hands. The matrons didn’t mean to starve anyone, but the house bots had never been programmed with a metabolism like mine in mind. But sometimes my cravings got too strong to ignore, especially when I was going through a growth spurt. I was supposed to be asleep in bed, of course. I smiled, and tore another bite out of the zango I’d caught in my little pre-dawn hunting expedition. Today I could see an especially pretty solar prominence, a ghostly streamer of hot gas rising so high it looked like it might escape the sun entirely. Having a giant ball of nuclear fire hanging in the sky was just too cool for words, and there was always something interesting going on up there. My roommate, Dika, told me the other kids just saw a bright glare when they looked into the sun.
As Felicity’s sun cleared the horizon I looked up into the warm yellow glow with the contentment that comes only from the prospect of a full belly. I greeted the dawn from a perch high atop the tallest housetree in the complex, happily enjoying the fruits of my latest hunt.
My last day at the Benevolent Goddess orphanage started out full of promise.
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