After the End by Amy Plum Read Free Book Online

with his face. I lay a hand across Neruda’s head, my thumb pressing one of his temples and my middle finger the other. I grasp my opal as I crouch down to whisper into his ear, “How do you feel about this man?”
    The man chuckles nervously. “Do you always consult your dog for your business decisions?” he jibes, and a bead of sweat forms on his brow just below the black pelt.
    I stare at him and feel the tingle as I connect to Neruda’s thoughts. Animals don’t think in words. It is my dog’s primal instincts that I Read, and Neruda’s instincts tell me the man cannot be trusted. My dog sees him as an inferior pack member that must be expelled to ensure the security of the others.
    I stand and hold my palm out. “My nugget,” I insist, and wait.
    The man’s hand trembles slightly. “Let’s not be hasty, girlie. I’ll check my charts and see if I can do any better on that offer.”
    I pluck my nugget from his fingers before he has a chance to pull his arm away, and turn his scales around toward me. Placing the gold atop the scales as I saw him do, I read aloud from a shiny strip near the base. “Two hundred grams, not a hundred twenty-five.”
    I nod toward a sign I saw when I entered the store. “That says you pay forty dollars per gram of gold. According to your chart, you should be offering me eight thousand dollars for this nugget.” I slip the stone back into its bag.
    “Now just wait a minute here, missy. You have no idea what standards the pricing is based on. A gold nugget is not as valuable as gold dust, which is what is melted down to make this high-quality jewelry.” He waves his hand to display the ugly jewelry inside the case.
    His eyes tell me that he is lying. That my nugget is rare, and that he desperately wants it. I think of Whit’s satisfaction whenever one of us finds a nugget in the Denali riverbeds. “That may serve us well someday,” he says before ordering us to take it to the shelter and stash it with the rest. Unlike plentiful opals and semiprecious stones, the gold nuggets are hard to come by, and this man’s excitement confirms their value.
    “I saw another ‘cash for gold’ sign by the waterfront,” I say, and nestle the bag into my rucksack.
    “Stop!” he shrieks. Sweat courses down the sides of his face. “Okay, I’ll give you seven thousand,” he says, pain audible in his tone, “as well as some valuable information.”
    I hesitate. “What kind of information?”
    “Someone is looking for you,” he responds.
    We stare at each other in silence for a minute before I fish the bag back out of my rucksack. He ogles it and licks his lips.
    “Talk,” I say.
    He walks back to where a red plastic apparatus is attached to a wall. Telephone , I think, as I recall the picture of a similar one in the EB.
    The man pulls a card off a board stuck full of scraps of paper and slaps it down on the counter in front of me. On it is printed a ten-digit number, and scribbled in pencil in one corner is “Girl w/star.”
    “They were big guys. Dressed in camo,” the man says. “Came in here yesterday saying they would pay top dollar for information on your whereabouts.”
    My chest clenches painfully. The man’s description sounds like Whit’s captors, the big men I saw in the fire holding his arms. Why are they looking for me? “What does this mean?” I ask, pointing to the scribbled words.
    “They described you as a teenage girl, long black hair, probably accompanied by two huskies.” He hesitates and studies my face suspiciously. “And what looks like a gold starburst in one eye.”
    My starburst. The same as the rest of the clan children. The sign that we are in close union with nature. Yara-Readers. Our parents tell us it is something to be proud of—an inheritance from the earth. But now it marks me as someone to pursue.
    And how do these men know what I look like anyway? I could ask the same about how they found my clan. Or how they knew I wasn’t with the