Read Online Survival Colony 9 by Joshua David Bellin - Free Book Online Page A

thought he could, he grabbed my arms and squeezed. Hard, so hard it hurt. His face loomed in front of me, his breath sour, his eyes on fire. I tried to twist away, but he clasped me in a grip like a steel trap.
    “It’s not over,” he hissed. “You hear me? You don’t say that, you don’t even think it. When you start thinking that way, you end up like . . .”
    My arms burned. “Like who?”
    “Like them,” he said, tossing his head. I couldn’t tell if he meant the people in camp or someone, something, out there in the dying world.
    As suddenly as he’d grabbed me, he let go.
    “Life isn’t a luxury, Querry,” he said. “You’ve learned that much. But despair is. A luxury and a waste. You think those trinkets they carry around are what’s keeping them alive. I think they’re just a more subtle form of despair. A form that’ll kill them as surely as any monster we have to face.”
    He pointed toward the tallest of the houses, a full three stories. A sentry’s outline filled the frame of the top-floor window.
    “That’s what’s going to keep us alive,” he said. “Focus. Caution. Sharp eyes. Concentrating on what can be saved, not crying over what we have to let go. You want hope, you fix your mind on those things. Not on magic and daydreams.”
    With that, he left me to return to his sentries, his officers, his broken-down truck and secret schemes.
    When he was gone I hugged my arms, felt the blood pounding in them, closed my hands over the place I could still feel his fingers. I waited until my heart had settled, then went back to the others. I found the man with the light tower shaking Aleka’s hand, over and over, thanking her for what he didn’t know was only a reprieve.
    That night, for the first time in the past six months, my dad didn’t show up for our bedtime interrogation. I fell asleep to the sound of Mika’s tools clattering away in the darkness.

5
    Waste
    I woke up sweating.
    Heart pounding. Hands clenched to my chest. Like always, my first thought was that it was a Skaldi attack. But there was no sign of movement from any of the bodies sleeping around me, no noise in the night. Mika must have finally given up and gone to bed. I held my breath to make sure. Dead silence. Whoever came up with that expression sure had it right. When just about everything’s dead, there’s nothing but silence.
    It wasn’t an attack that had woken me up. It was a dream, only a dream. But I couldn’t remember it.
    I sat and rested my head in my hands. My palms felt clammy against my forehead. But no matter how hard I concentrated, whatever I’d dreamed had vanished as completely as the rest of my memory.
    And that’s the way it always was. I don’t remember my dreams. Ever. You’re supposed to remember what you’re dreaming if you wake up in the middle of one, but for me it felt like a wall slid into place the second I woke. A wall between me and my own mind. I’d clutch at the hazy shapes I sensed on the other side of the wall, but they’d slip through my hands like dust and shadows.
    Even so, I was sure I was having dreams. Bad ones. Nothing else could explain why, when I wrenched myself from sleep on nights like this, my gut felt twisted in knots and my pulse raced wildly.
    A panic reaction, Tyris called it. A night terror. The kind of dream that happens in deep sleep, when you’re not supposed to be dreaming. Dreams that scare you to death while they’re playing in your mind, but that you can’t call back once they’re gone.
    My dad filled me in on some of the details. He told me he’d seen me thrashing around on my cot. Clawing at the air. He said he’d even heard me screaming. I didn’t thank him for that piece of information.
    “It might be related to the head trauma,” Tyris said.
    And that’s all she could say. Though she was officially our camp healer, she didn’t have any medicine, any real way to treat anyone. She had bandages, needles and thread for stitching, maybe