Star Trek The Original Series The Folded - By Jeff Mariotte

One

They emerged again on the third afternoon, when the scouts told them the giant had gone. Climbing the stairs, Aleshia peered into the frothy murk of low clouds. Giant’s clouds. They would dissipate in a few hours, a day at the most.

Gillayne cleared the shelter’s doorway ahead of her. She dropped to her knees on bare earth and a ragged cry tore from her throat. Aleshia stepped around her (Gillayne’s narrow back, all hard wedges of shoulder blade and curled knuckles of spine, hitching with her liquid sobs) and saw what had elicited such an agonized wail.

The giant had walked right through town.

In his horrible, huge footprints lay the ruins of buildings—homes, barns, the children’s school, all of it destroyed, flattened. Beams and timbers scattered and splintered, kindling for winter’s fires, perhaps, but nothing more. Bricks and stones had been torn asunder and strewn about.

Aleshia’s father cuffed the back of her head. “You’re blocking the way, girl!” Startled, she took three stumbling steps and turned toward him. He glared at her, his thick lips curled in his usual disapproving sneer. Times like this, Aleshia was glad her mother was dead, so the woman who had brought her into this harsh life couldn’t see what her husband had become. “There’s no doubt cleaning to be done at home,” he said. “I’ll be around later.”

This could only mean that he would go to Knott’s tavern before coming home, drunk and even angrier. It still stood; somehow, giants never seemed to destroy Knott’s. Simply strolling past it made Aleshia uneasy. She always felt that the people inside were eyeing her with malicious intent. It was even worse when her own father was among them, except that at least then she could count on being alone at home for a while. Those moments were the only times she felt truly comfortable there.

Always, though, he returned. Banging doors, upending furniture, shouting, threatening, and worse. Aleshia accepted her lot. What else was a girl to do? He beat her only rarely, and had never seriously injured her. She knew other girls in town who could not say the same.

She also knew some who were not beaten at all. Or so they claimed. She never altogether believed them.

The path home took her past one of the giant’s footprints. Aleshia heard moans and cries as she neared it, and she hiked up her tattered skirts and ran to the side.

The sight made tears flood her eyes. The giant’s massive foot had collapsed one of the shelters. The earth was caved in, and most of the people hunkering inside were dead or injured. One man raised a scrawny arm toward Aleshia, beseeching her, but his legs were crushed, bone showing, blood soaking the dirt around him. There was nothing she could do by herself, so she turned away from his plaintive cries, seeking help.

Yignay, one of the village elders, walked toward her with his usual awkward gait; a childhood disease had left his spine twisted and his legs weak. She beckoned furiously, but he could not increase his pace. Finally, he came to a halt at the pit’s edge.

“Do something!” Aleshia pleaded.

“Do what? We’re all better off, anyhow. Fewer mouths there are to feed, fewer of us’ll starve this winter.”

“Yignay, you can’t just—”

“I can’t what? Ignore them? Watch me.” He spat into the dirt and hurried away, as if those weren’t his own townsfolk, his neighbors, suffering in that pit.

Aleshia looked down again. The people below called to her, begging. But she was just a barefoot girl, with no influence in the village and not enough strength to haul the injured from the pit. The stairs had collapsed, so ladders would have to be lowered. If she couldn’t even get Yignay to help, she didn’t know what she could do.

And her father expected her to have the house cleaned up when he got home. If this was like the other times, it would be a mess. Furniture might be broken, and even if not, things would have tumbled from shelves and fallen from hooks. She tasted smoke on the air; people had run for the shelters so fast that they hadn’t put out their fires, and now houses were burning. Hers was stone, small and sturdy and unlikely to burn. Still, she needed to be home before someone broke in, to steal whatever had not been lost to the giant’s carelessness.

Aleshia ran again, this time not toward the pit but away from it. She told each person she encountered about