Half Way Home by Hugh Howey Read Free Book Online Page B

stuck in—the late twentieth Earth century. I knew from experiments there that we would all be dead before the rocket was complete if we continued down our current path.
    So I decided to take action. Later that morning, I went to have a talk with Colony.
    I found Myra at the door of the command module. She and a few others from that first night had taken up residence in the structure. Hickson had moved in after Stevens died; rumor even had it that his handful of belongings showed up before the funeral.
    As I approached, I noticed how tired Myra looked. From what little I knew of her, I had a hard time imagining how she could cohabitate with the guy presently running our colony into the ground. She attempted a smile by way of greeting but couldn’t quite manage it.
    “How’re you holding up?” I asked her.
    “Fine,” she said, nodding her head. “Hickson’s not here, if that’s who you’re after.”
    “Hickson? I’ve got nothing to say to him. Why would you think I came for him?”
    “Oh. He told me this morning he really needed to speak with you.” She looked past me toward the cluster of modules and parked tractors. “Must’ve crossed paths.”
    “I came to see how you were doing, see if you wanted to come spend a night with us. We have a little group that sleeps in a construction tractor.” I turned and pointed. In the distance I could see Tarsi and Kelvin still out on the hood. “We talk at night, and I just thought—”
    “I know where you sleep,” Myra said. I turned back around and saw her shaking her head. “I can’t. It wouldn’t feel right—”
    “What? No!” I laughed and shook my head. “No, not like that. I’m a psychologist. If you need to talk, well, forget my profession, if you just need any friends—”
    “I have my group here,” she said. “I’m Hickson’s girl now.”
    It isn’t often one experiences true speechlessness. Not wordlessness, the inability to come up with the right thing to say, but a moment of absolute muteness. Throat constricting, lungs inoperable, mouth dry, jaw unhinged. Truly unable to speak, even knowing what I wanted to say. Or shout.
    Myra seemed to hear it all. She shrugged. “He makes me feel safe,” she said. “And it meant not having to learn to sleep somewhere else. Anyway, I’m starting to see those first few days as a training program. My final one. That was the life—minus the grief and the shock—that I’m supposed to work toward. To eventually live. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m trying to feel like that again.”
    “Were—you and Stevens, you were together those first days?”
    Myra nodded and wiped at her eyes. “It was just training,” she whispered.
    I grabbed her shoulders and pulled her close to me, wrapping my arms around her. But I could feel her own arms between us, the hard bone from elbow to wrist lined up vertically in front of her chest like bars in a protective fence. Or perhaps a restrictive cage. I held her and tried to comfort her but just ended up disgusting myself. If an embrace could feel like molestation, that one certainly did. I was wrapping up a thing that didn’t want to be touched, so I let her go.
    “I need to speak with Colony,” I said. I stepped past her and into the command module, shaking my head with the shame of the encounter.
    Behind me, her voice cracked as she tried to argue—to say I wasn’t allowed—but I heard her resistance crumble before she could even erect it, the squeak of her voice like the last wail of something dying within her.
    And in those uncomfortable, tragic moments, Myra had perfectly demonstrated why I had come to speak with Colony. She was moving through a deteriorating progression, the will to live leaching out through her pores. She had arrived at the last stages of some disassembly line, one we all were traveling down and couldn’t seem to get off.
    ••••
    I sat in the center seat, directly in front of the main monitor. It reminded me of Stevens, and I