Darwin's Paradox by Nina Munteanu Read Free Book Online Page B

resplendent towers sprouting up like great crystal stalks out of the brown froth of heath was Icaria-5.
    She foraged and ate as she hiked. The season was ripe for berries and ground herbs and so she had plenty to eat. While her plans were admittedly a bit sketchy, her mission was clear: lure them away from Angel and Daniel and then stop them from pursuing her and her loved ones, forever. The first part had been easily accomplished by leaving her family behind. The second part of her mission ultimately relied on her returning to Icaria-5 and confronting those responsible, Julie decided, as she bedded down for the night under a grove of feral apple trees in a long-abandoned settlement. Before she fell asleep, she wondered if she was just rationalizing her urge to return to Icaria.
    On the second day she reached the great Saint Lawrence River at the remnants of the small village of Iroquois. Julie made out the seaway locks and the dam as she waded through the hummocky wetland of sedges and purple loosestrife. Overgrown and crumbling from disuse, the locks used to control the river’s fluctuating levels and linked the northern shore, once a part of Ontario, Canada, to the south shore that used to belong to New York State in the United States of America. Now it was all simply Icaria’s North Am.
    The Iroquois Locks formed part of an extensive navigation system of dams, powerhouses, locks, channels and dikes that made up the St. Lawrence Seaway, linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. Julie imagined the deep-voiced grinding of those locks a hundred years ago, serving the constant traffic of heavy cargo ships and pleasure boats. Now these monoliths languished under a thick mantle of moss and scrub in a quiet breeze, ghosts of a bygone age.
    ***
    She’d known the day was going to be hot when she woke from a restless sleep the next morning already perspiring. By mid-morning, the sun blazed with an oven’s heat, rousing the grasshoppers into an oscillating chorus. Their hissing songs seemed to commiserate with the heat that crawled over her body as sweat ran down.
    Around noon she stopped to eat a meager lunch of berries, roots and several over-ripe plums she’d picked from a derelict orchard. In the shade of the copse of pitch pine trees she had a view of a bridge remnant that once spanned the two-kilometer wide river. As she leaned back, letting the drowsy heat of mid-day envelope her like a narcotic, Julie peered abstractly up at the canopy overhead. How deeper a shade of blue the sky appeared through the gap in the green than in the open. This was, of course, perception, perhaps enhanced by the physics of increased moisture from the trees—it was the same sky, after all.
    Was that how her father saw the world? The same yet different through his lens of stable chaos? And how was it possible that he chose to make his world—the very same one as hers—so different? She would never, NEVER give up her daughter to anything or anyone, no matter what the cause. Julie realized that she’d squeezed the black berries in her hand and their crimson juice ran through her fingers. She jerked to her feet and pressed onward.
    By mid-afternoon she was sweating under the beating rays and found an inviting cold creek to cool off. When she returned to her pile of clothes and bent to put them on, she inhaled sharply at the sight of a fresh men’s size nine boot print with unworn treads in the sand of the dried creek bench. After the initial surge of adrenalin, she realized that if he’d meant to kill her, he’d have done it by now—even taking into account a delay out of vicarious pleasure to watch her bathe. She let herself feel the thrill of knowing that she’d lured her pursuers away from her family and concluded that this one was simply a spy like Aard, not an assassin. She smiled grimly and fought the impulse to look around as she rose, feeling like a celebrity caught in a compromised position.
    Okay, buddy boy, get a good look