Survival Colony 9 by Joshua David Bellin Read Free Book Online

all right.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    “How’d it go today?” he said. “Any change?”
    “You mean . . . ?”
    He raised an eyebrow. “Yeah.”
    “About the same, Dad. No real change.”
    “You sure, now.”
    “Pretty sure.”
    He fiddled with something in his hand, tucked it in his jacket. When his eyes met mine his expression had hardened. “It’s been six months. Lot of things have happened since then. All that time, I’d have thought. . . .”
    “It doesn’t work like that,” I said. “It just gets further away.”
    He acted as if he didn’t hear me. “The memory exercises Tyris taught you. You’ve been using them?”
    Truth was, I barely remembered the memory exercises. “They don’t seem to work very well.”
    I got ready for him to blow up at that, but he didn’t. He just sat there, scratching his beard absently. When he spoke again his voice was deadly calm.
    “I don’t know how long we’re going to be here,” he said. “If it was up to Aleka, we’d already be gone.”
    “She thinks we’re sitting ducks.”
    He sniffed. “We talked that through.”
    “Maybe she’s right.”
    Again I braced for an explosion that never came. “I’ll worry about when it’s time to move on,” he said. “But while we’re here, you have a chance to focus on what happened. Really focus. You might not get another chance like this for a long time.”
    “Is that why we’re here?”
    “That’s why you’re here,” he said. “And I don’t want you to waste it.”
    “I’ll do my best.”
    “Do better,” he said. “Remember what’s at stake.”
    He rose with an effort, stood beside me and laid a hand on my shoulder, like he’d done with Yov. Through the thick cloth of my uniform I felt his hand clench as if to pull the memory out of me.
    Then he released my shoulder and left. I watched his dark shape limp toward headquarters until he was lost from sight.
    I spread out my bedroll and lay perfectly still, arms under my head, staring into the moonlit dark. The frames of houses glowed skeletal above me. Every night since I’d recovered from my accident it had been the same. Though he told me to forget the past, he insisted I try to remember the accident itself. For the good of the colony, he said. I couldn’t see what good it would do for me to remember how I lost my memory, but I knew better than to say that to him.
    I felt eyes on me and turned to find that Yov had lifted himself on an elbow and was staring at me across the row of sleeping bodies, a taunting smile on his lips. I wondered if he’d heard the whole conversation. I got the feeling he’d heard others like it on other nights.
    “Daddy tuck you in real tight, Space Boy?” he said. “He tell you the big bad monsters won’t come back to get you?”
    I looked away, tried to focus.
    “Boo!” he hissed. And wouldn’t you know it, I flinched.
    His laughter trailed off until there was only silence.
    The empty houses leaned over me like sentinels. I shut my eyes, tried to trace the lost memory in the pulsing darkness beneath my eyelids. But it was like looking down a dark tunnel with a twist in it, seeing solid rock then, just beyond, nothing. What came into my mind instead were Aleka’s words: Are you willing to take that chance? If my dad had chosen to keep us here on the off chance that staying put would help me remember the attack, was that worth what we risked? Worth waiting here, in unknown territory, for someone or something to find us?
    I knew sleep would be a long time coming. Another night of questions that had no answers lay ahead of me, without the company of a single sound or soul.

4
    Rust
    The next morning, we found tracks leading from the bomb shelter.
    Human tracks. Not that that meant much. Skaldi make human tracks with whatever body they happen to steal.
    But whoever or whatever had made these tracks hadn’t wanted to be identified by boot size or markings, because they’d gone barefoot. The prints got smudged