A Snake Falls to Earth: Newbery Honor Award Winner

by Darcie Little Badger

I wondered how anyone found each other in a place where it was so easy to become lost.

“Oh? Oh? You can’t control yourself? That makes you even more dangerous.”

However, when the anxious hum of the evening news slipped into her bedroom, carrying prophesies of disease and pain, it seemed more likely that the future would be a place of nightmares.

It was a world-shaper, an act that momentarily tweaked the natural laws through willpower alone.

“They were slaughtered,” she said. “A human breed known as colonizer killed millions.”

They didn’t hunt the bison for food. The colonizers desired to annihilate another group of humans. Indigenous peoples. They knew that the Indigenous ones relied on bison. So the bison had to go.

All I could do was make the most of the time I had and hope that my actions mattered.

What if I don’t want to be nice,

But that kind of temperature change usually happens over generations. A human body shouldn’t live through it.