The danger always came with the falling leaves. It came with the golden-brown crunch underfoot, and the blaze of red and orange in the trees. It came with the shift in the wind, and the fluctuating decrease in temperature.

  Joaquin had lived with the danger since landing. Now, it was time to teach his daughter to do the same.

  Together, they headed out into the trees, forsaking the safety of the homestead, but not forsaking weapons or the orsovite. Joaquin was one of the few to have adopted the native insectoids as mounts.

  Most of the other settlers found the number of legs and the semblance to spiders too disconcerting. It was a fear Joaquin had overcome. The orsovite fed on nectar, and they had helped him find more new flowers than he would have found on his own.

  His wife, Mariam, had grown to love the orsovite, grooming the soft blue fur that covered their chests and flanks, rubbing dry patches on their chitin with shrew-pod oil, and nurturing their larvae. She had gone out last autumn, and not returned.

  Joaquin had never taught her about the dangers in the trees, and he had lived with that regret, ever since. He would not allow the same fate to befall his daughter.

  “Hurry up, Rylie,” he called, and she emerged from the greenhouse, locking the doors behind her.

  “Are you sure they’ll be okay?” she asked, meaning both the flowers and orsovite within.

  “As long as we’re back in two nights’ time.”

  “But what if something happens to us?”

  “I’ve set the beacon, and left a message.”

  “All right, then, dad.” Rylie walked to the young orsovite she’d saddled that morning, and ran a hand across the flat of its face.

  The creature gently seized her hand with the cilia surrounding its mandibles, and then let go.

  “I love you, too,” she said, laughing as she came around to its side and mounted.

  “You know the Billinghams think we’re crazy,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because we keep the orsovite.”

  Joaquin snorted.

  “They’re the crazy ones. Those horses they brought in won’t last the winter.”

  “They’re going to keep them in the new barn.”

  This time Joaquin didn’t snort. The Billinghams’ new barn had been the talk of the colony, and there were many farmers watching to see if it worked. It wasn’t that the winters were too harsh for horses, just that something burrowed up through the floor, and ate any livestock it could find. Stone flags had helped to some extent, but the beasts kept in stone-floored shelters had been so stressed by the burrowers constant attempts to get through the floor that none had made it through winter.

  The xenobiologists that examined their bodies said it was shock, and scientific tests carried out on the barns had shown signs of burrowers trying to claw their way through the flags.

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  “They’d have panicked,” one of the scientists had said, referring to the horses. “Night after night with nowhere to run and no way to know if the monsters under their feet were going to get through? It’s no wonder their hearts gave out.”

  “Is that it?” Harry Potomin had asked, devastated by the loss of his latest stud. “Shock?”

  The xenobiologist had spread his hand wide in a gesture of puzzlement.

  “It’s the best we can come up with. There are no toxins in their systems, and no injuries, save what they did to themselves trying to get away. I’d like to give you something more tangible, but it’s the only thing that seems likely. Death from prolonged stress. I’m sorry.”

  No one had bought horses after that, but at least they’d known. And then Freddy Billingham had built his barn. Plascrete floors and foundations that went down ten feet, with a basement level below to give the horses some distance to anything coming up underneath. Joaquin half-hoped it would work, but he thought it beyond time the others got over their fear of the orsovite.

  “Why don’t you think of them as big ants?” he asked.

  “Are you kidding? Look at the fangs on that one!”

  “They’re not fangs. Their pedipalps, and the orsovite use them to hang onto the fruit.”

  “Well, we don’t want them hanging onto the fruit. We want to sell the fruit.”

  “They eat less fruit than the fodder crop your horses take, and they give nectar.”

  “Next you’ll be telling us to think of them as cows with too many legs.”

  “Now, that’s not a bad idea,” Joaquin said, but it had been a losing battle, and he’d bowed out of the argument. Coming to accept the orsovite was something the others would have to do in their own time.

  “Hey, dad, are we going or not?” Rylie was staring at him, her gray-blue eyes puzzled at the delay.

  “Sorry, Ry. I was just thinking.”

  “Well, you won’t change their minds.”

  “Not until they see the first cheque for the nectar, anyway.”

  “And probably not even then. Anyway, what is it you want to show me?”

  “Every autumn, we’re in danger,” Joaquin said, squeezing his knees against the orsovite’s sides. “And I don’t mean from the burrowers.”

  “Well, that makes sense, They only come in winter,” Rylie told him, with all the confidence a teen possessed.

  “And they leave when all the horses are eaten,” Joaquin added.

  “But they don’t come after us,” Rylie replied.

  “How do you know?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I mean our houses have always been built with a solid slab of stone or plascrete, and our hearing isn’t as sensitive as the horses’, so we might not have been able to tell,” he answered, and almost regretted it when her face fell.

  She shivered. “I always have nightmares when the snows come.”

  “And that’s the other thing. You always have nightmares when the snows come.” Joaquin said it like she’d just proved her point, watching her expression grow thoughtful.

  “Last year, they came early,” she noted.

  Joaquin nodded. “And the snow followed the next day.”

  “Are you sure the autumn thing isn’t the same?”

  Joaquin glanced at her, and then at the forest edge. When he answered, his voice was completely bereft of humor.

  “I’m sure,” he said, and wished he didn’t have to sound so bleak.

  “Dad? Are you all right?”

  Joaquin shook his head. He wanted to shout that he wasn’t all right, that without Mariam, nothing would be ‘all right’ for him, ever again, but it was too much to reveal, too much of a burden to lay on his daughter’s shoulders.

  “Watch the orsovite,” he said, shortly. “When we’re close, you’ll know.”

  “And what do I do?”

  “Trust the orsovite.” As soon as the words were spoken, he wanted to take them back.

  Mariam had been out with the orsovite, and she had never come back. Still, it was all he had.

  He trusted the furry chitinous beasts in so much else, it just made sense to trust them in this. He wondered where the orsovite that had accompanied his wife had gone.

  “Dad?”

  Joaquin sighed.

  “Sorry, Ry. I…”

  “Mum went this way, didn’t she?”

  Joaquin opened his mouth to deny it, and then noticed that this had been exactly the way Mariam had gone.

  “Yes.”

  “Are we going to try and find out what happened to her?”

  “We already did, remember?”

  “You never allowed me to help.”

  Looking back, Joaquin saw that had been a mistake. He just hadn’t wanted Rylie to be with the group that discovered whatever was left of her mother. As it was, they’d found no trace, either of her, or the two orsovite that had been with her.