Read Online Summerhill by Kevin Frane - Free Book Online

“What do they need you alive for?” he asked as he looked at his own food. There were cubes of meat of some sort, but he couldn’t tell exactly what kind. It was slathered in some type of sauce that also defied easy identification. Whatever it was at least smelled edible.
    “I stole something,” Katherine said as she slowly sat back up. “And they’re coming to get it back.”
    The sauce-laden cubes of meat were quite tasty, though Summerhill was no closer to determining what he was actually eating. “So give it back to them,” he said. “Whatever it is can’t be worth getting shot over.”
    “You’d be surprised.” Katherine poked her fork at her food, but didn’t eat just yet. “And anyhow, I can’t give them back something I don’t have.”
    “But you just admitted you stole it.”
    Katherine jabbed the fork into one of the cubes of meat and let it sit there. “I stole it, yes, but that doesn’t mean I still have it.”
    “What did you take?”
    Pushing the tray away from her, Katherine shut her eyes and set her head back against the wall of the lifeboat. “Something that’s worth shooting me over,” she muttered. “It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s gone, I can’t give it back, and when they find that out, they’ll probably kill me as a matter of principle. So the plan stays the same: I keep running.”
    Summerhill took a few more bites of his food. “Can you at least tell me who you’re running from?”
    Katherine opened up one eye. “Now how’s that for an ironic question?”
    “Hey, at least now I know you can empathize with me.”
    “Yeah. Maybe.” She closed her eye again and took a deep breath. “Honestly, I thought I’d already outrun them for good. Guess what they say is true after all: the past always has a way of catching up with you.”
    Summerhill looked out the viewing port at the strange reef—this nevereef, frozen in a state of pseudo-lifelessness. “And why is the past trying to catch up with a cruise hostess?” he said.
    “I wasn’t always a cruise hostess,” Katherine replied with a faint laugh. “Really, I wasn’t much of anything, aside from a girl who’d stolen something.” With an expression of reluctance on her face, she reached out and dragged her tray back over to her, taking hold of the fork and finally trying a bite of the emergency rations. “You know, if all we have to survive on is this, we could be doing a lot worse.”
    “Who are you running from?” Summerhill asked again. “I’m guessing you at least know.”
    Chewing slowly, Katherine nodded, then swallowed. “They call themselves the Consortium,” she said. “They’re a sort of interdimensional police agency. That’s my understanding, at any rate.”
    “You’re on the run from the law?”
    “I’m not going to pretend I understand how their jurisdiction works—or what the legitimacy of it is. What I do know is that, where I come from, we’ve certainly never heard of them and probably wouldn’t recognize their authority even if we had.”
    Summerhill entertained the possibility that the World of the Pale Gray Sky could be some sort of dimensional prison, and that at some point in the past, he’d run afoul of this Consortium and been sentenced to that dreary oblivion. “Where are you from?” he asked Katherine, trying not to jump to any one conclusion too soon.
    A wistful look overtook Katherine’s face as she set her tiny fork down and leaned back again. She rested both hands in her lap as her eyes went distant. “New Zealand,” she said, and then she made eye contact with Summerhill. “It’s a small island country on a planet called Earth.” She took a deep breath and then spaced out again. “Honestly, I’d given up hope of ever seeing it again years ago.”
    Tears had formed in her eyes. Small ones, nothing that required her to sob and damage her dignity. She reached in below the neckline of her blouse and drew out a thin, leather cord necklace bearing a simple