Ages in Oblivion Thrown: Book One of the Sleep Trilogy by Kate Gray Read Free Book Online

few
weeks. Antonio would constantly sigh and shake his head when he
thought she wasn’t looking. Jemi and Grace were solicitous to the
point of annoyance. Josh just kept trying to get her into a
meditative state. It was as though they were sitting around waiting
for her to do something .
What, she didn’t know. Maybe they thought she’d crack up
completely.
    Maeve walked down the corridor, feeling
self-conscious. The colonel had assured them that most personnel on
board had no idea she and her friends existed. This had been a good
reason for placing them in otherwise empty temporary housing.
Hidden in plain sight.
    This didn’t stop her from feeling as though
everyone was staring at her. She wished she had a mirror to check
and make certain her hair wasn’t standing on end. She was utterly
and catastrophically self-effacing, though she had long been at war
with this tendency.
    It was a benefit when facing into actual
mistakes; otherwise it was a terrible habit. Yet, Colonel
Tarkington seemed pretty convinced that she was the person who had
been picked to be at the forefront of whatever happy little mission
this was supposed to have been. And he based that on a few flighty
details that almost anyone could poke holes in, given a reasonable
debate.
    Her head was aching again. She’d grown used
to the pain, but not what came with it.
    … There was water again,
but this time there was a distinctly different feel to its
presence. Its ripples were unfriendly, sending warning in their
movements, while shouting echoed around her, seemingly emanating
from the ground beneath her feet. The smell of blood hunted air
currents to steal a ride on, reaching her nostrils, turning the
sand ever darker before her eyes. A few steps took her over a rise,
and she saw again the source of the shouting, the fires burning on
the horizon, soggy forms crawling from inky seas.
    These visions, or whatever one might call
them, that was the hard part to handle. She knew it wasn’t a
genuine memory, either, a nightmarish amalgam of her past….
Frustration and terror boiled up, bringing the pain in her head to
a peak of intensity like she had not yet experienced.
    Maeve leaned against a wall, gasping for
air. The smell of burning flesh hung round her; a specter of some
forgotten evil. The image was there and gone, more quickly than she
could try to remember where it had come from. It was a fragment of
a fragment, too brief to discern what was reality or falsehood. She
walked into the cargo hold, feeling like a fraction of herself. She
tried to stow her unhappiness. There was no point in telling anyone
about these visions she had been having. Not just yet, anyway.
    “ So, Colonel, what do we have?” He
looked over her way, from his doubled over position next to Dick’s
inherited workstation, and as some form of answer, tapped the
monitor.
    “ Come and see.” His finger held steady
on the screen, drawing her closer. She walked toward the container,
toward the nameless beast of burden that had been her home of late,
and stepped into uncertainty. Or maybe she was just being
melodramatic.
    “ Interesting.” The monitor displayed
what evidently was her file. Maeve Brighid Howard, date of
birth..., place of birth..., schooling, and then, below all the
harmlessness, her military duty record. There was no gasp of
surprise on her part as she swiftly pretended to scan the data,
merely moving on to find the next person. Tark glanced her way to
gauge a reaction, but found only an expression of displeasure
shadowing her face.
    “ What’s wrong?” Not for the first
time, he wished he could read her mind.
    “ Let’s see the rest. Then I’ll
discuss.” She delivered those few words with a degree of terseness
Tark had heard before. Maeve looked impatient and unhappy. Dick
read the cue. He flew through his tasking to retrieve first the
rest of the files, as well as other information that had been
recovered.
    They seemed to have been selected for some
sort