Read Online Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon - Free Book Online Page B

with the heavy boards needed in storms. Then the kitchen door, the outside louvered door and the inside solid one. She came in through the door to the lane, and shut the louvered outer door, latching it firmly. She would leave the inner door open until later, when the wind came that way.
    She had time to make more flatbread, fry onions and fresh vegetables to eat with it, and eat a peaceful supper, before the next squall came with a blast of wind that forced a draft through the kitchen door. Just try it, she thought to the storm. She and Humberto had built the house solidly, and kept it in repair. It had held in worse wind than this.
    She went to bed in the squall, and fell asleep, hardly waking when one squall followed another with breathless pauses between. In the morning, no light filtered through the double shutters. She didn’t need to look to know that the main storm pressed on the village now. She could hear the howl of the wind between the buildings, feel the drafts squeezed through every crevice by that immense force. She turned on the lights, glad that they still worked. They had worked in other storms, but she remembered from her childhood on another world that the power plants could fail in storms. It was strange to feel so hot and breathless, with all that wind outside, and those little drafts tickling her feet like mice. She made herself fix a breakfast she didn’t really want, one of the golden melons from someone else’s garden. She hoped she would smell it less once she had eaten it, but the cloying scent hung in the air. She could open a window on the downwind side. She went back in the bedroom, and opened the inside shutters. The smell of melon followed her, oozed past her out the window. She stepped into the corner of the room, then jumped as a bolt of lightning struck nearby, the white light spearing in through the louvers; the crack of thunder sounded as if someone had hit her head with a shovel. She could stand the heavy smell of melon better than that. When her breath steadied, she closed the inner shutters and lay down on the bed. The bed did not feel safe enough. Reluctantly, she got up, and dragged off the bedspread and pillows. The closet would be airless, but safe from lightning. She made a nest there, and curled up.
    The noise increased; the wind began to seem like a live thing, a demon determined to get to her and rip her apart. Ofelia cowered into the nest of bedclothes and pillows, trying to force herself into sleep. It didn’t work; it had never worked. Every crash of thunder brought her alert, her breath short. Every new noise meant something wrong — something loose to blow against the doors and windows, something unmended that could break and let the storm in.
    Phrases she had not said in years came to mind, prayers her grandmother had taught her, that she herself had said. In the storm it was easy to believe in powers and spirits. She had given all that up when she married Humberto; he had not so much forbidden it as ignored such concepts out of existence. Later, when they were trying to apply for a colony slot, he’d put “none” in the blank for religion and Ofelia hadn’t argued. Away from her family, here with others who expressed no superstitions, whatever they believed, with no structure to support her, the last of her childhood faith had frayed away to nothing. She murmured the phrases now, stumbling over forgotten words, but comforted nonetheless. She dozed and woke in jerky alternation, miserable in the cramped stuffy closet, until she fell asleep at last, to waken in eerie silence.
    Never go out in the middle of the storm. She had known that; she had always obeyed. She had made her children stay inside too, though she had heard, through the tight-shut doors, the wondering cries of other people and their children, and the scolding voices of those who sent them back inside. Was it day or night? Was this the storm’s center, or the storm’s end? She peeked out of the