Dead and Buryd: A Dystopian Action Adventure Novel (Out of Orbit Book 1) by Chele Cooke Read Free Book Online Page A

kind to Jacob and leave Lacie to wrap the wound, she wanted to be nice to all the patients that came through the Way, but she knew that even if she had to be the bad guy, it would help them more in the end.
    “Just a short while, I promise.”
    Lacie frowned, looking between Georgianna and the unconscious Jacob before nodding and undoing the bandage she’d been wrapping over the mark.
    Checking behind her to make sure there wasn’t a patient in the bed, Georgianna slid down onto it, dumping her bag next to her and slipping the strap from her shoulder. Lacie had been with her, training to be a medic, for almost a year. Most Veniche started training for their profession by their twelfth birthday, but Lacie’s capture by the Adveni and her years spent as a drysta meant that, by Veniche traditions, she was a long way behind.
    Beck Casey, the leader and marshall of the Belsa, had found Lacie, fourteen at the time, beaten half to death and starving in a back alley of the Oprust district. It had taken quite a bit of coercion, Georgianna had heard, getting Lacie to trust him enough to carry her down to the Way for treatment. Since that day he’d treated the girl like she was his own, and from what Georgianna saw between them, Lacie loved him as a father in return.
    While the going had been tough in the beginning, earning the trust of a skittish young woman, she could not have asked for a more attentive student. Then again, it wasn’t as if she had taken a student before. She didn’t know exactly how well Lacie should be doing at this point. She’d been only sixteen when the Adveni invaded, only recently accepted as an adult within the Kahle herself, not in the position to take on a new trainee. Now, at twenty-six, Georgianna had yet to take on a new medic. She didn’t feel safe bringing a young student down to the Belsa territory with her, and she couldn’t have expected the student’s parents to be okay with her affiliations: not until Beck had asked her to help Lacie in exchange for a few coins a week.
    They managed about twenty minutes before Lacie broke down and begged that they dress Jacob’s wound. Georgianna, unable to watch the forlorn look on the girl’s innocent face any longer, nodded and allowed Lacie to redress the nsiloq mark. She didn’t know what dressing or keeping it open would do, it wasn’t often that she treated nsiloq marks. The Adveni had their own medics, their own systems, not to mention that they’d been dealing with the marks for decades, maybe even longer.
    When the Adveni had arrived on Os-Veruh, in their big, impressive ships and with their fancy technology, it had been like something out of the stories her father used to tell her as a child. Almost everyone knew the story of the meteor and the floating ships, how they left before Os-Veruh’s seasons changed. As her father also told stories about talking coyotes and bears, however, she had begun to wonder about the truth in the history as it had been described to her. Her father said that the story had been passed from one generation to the next for over five hundred years, but even as a child Georgianna had known far too much about how a story changed with each telling.
    It had been just after her sixteenth birthday when they arrived. Scouts from within the Kahle tribe had travelled ahead to check the trail as they did every season, and returned with news that there were large shining clouds above Adlai. The tribe had travelled onward, wanting to see the phenomenon. When they arrived, it had seemed like all of her father’s stories had come true. The Adveni, as they called themselves, used to call Os-Veruh home. Having found another planet to inhabit after leaving in one of the ships, they had flourished, but the desire to return to their home planet had always been great. Scouts had been sent, and upon seeing that their home world remained, they had come back, and they planned to stay.
    Now—looking at the injuries of the young man