Read Online The Orphan Army by Jonathan Maberry - Free Book Online Page B

clench and unclench over and over again.
    â€œBarnaby?” Milo said tentatively.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWhat’s going on? Do you know something about that girl?”
    But the young Cajun shook his head and refused to say anything more. He got up and walked back to the pod, leaving Milo to wonder exactly what the heck was going on.

T hey set about their work. The crash site was divided into quadrants, and the debris field was far enough from the banks of the bayou for the ground to be firm. No risk of deep mud. However, the squadrons of mosquitoes and biting flies had come up from the flat water and had descended on the pod. Shark, as always, seemed to be the centerpiece of the menu. Every time he swatted a mosquito, he smiled fiercely and said: “Take that back to the Swarm.”
    The Earth insects were not connected in any way to the Dissosterin, but if it made Shark feel better, Milo didn’t see any reason to constantly correct him. Over the last few months, some of the other people in camp had started saying the same thing. Shark was always a trendsetter when it came to stuff like that.
    So, despite the aerial assault, they focused on the task at hand.
    Scavenging sites like this was what the pod was trained for and what they were good at. Locating debris, identifying it, examining it, and salvaging anything that could help his mother’s resistance team. The most important items were things like working servos, undamaged computer parts, and any kind of weapons system. Milo looked at the wreckage and thought that it would be a real stroke of luck if they found anything of even minor use.
    Milo usually loved the work of scavenging, but as he worked, he kept going over everything that happened. As time went on, he began to doubt some of his memories. Like . . . the hands that grabbed him. How many people could there really have been standing behind him? How had so many grabbed him at once? And how had they all vanished so quickly and completely?
    And . . .
    What was with the girl? Had she really been able to see into his thoughts? Was that even possible?
    And . . .
    What was all that about the Heart of Darkness, and the rest?
    His dad had once told him, “If it happened, it’s possible. In that case, it must have meaning. Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it can’t eventually be understood.” Milo hadn’t really gotten that when he was little, but he thought he grasped it now. Whatever was going on, it must mean something.
    As he moved through the routine of examining debris, he also laid out the facts as he remembered them from his encounter.
    The pyramid was built by someone to be a shrine. In the camp’s sit-down school, Milo had read something about shrines, and he poked around among all of the information he had in his brain until he came up with a definition. A shrine was a holy place. Usually built to honor a saint or a specific religious figure. There was a Catholic shrine to a saint over in Grand Coteau that Milo had seen once on a long trip with his mother.
    Okay . . . so was this a shrine? If so, to who? Or what?
    It didn’t look like the saint’s shrine. This was rougher. Less . . . He fished for a word. Civilized?
    And the shrine apparently contained something called the Heart of Darkness. Whatever that was apparently mattered to the girl and her friends. Milo didn’t know what it could be, though he once saw a book called Heart of Darkness . He hadn’t read the book and didn’t think that it could be connected.
    The girl originally thought Milo had opened the shrine and taken the Heart. Then she changed her mind. But she was still mad at him. How had she put it?
    You’re probably happy the Heart is missing. Now your kind can finish what you started . Without the Heart, you can finish killing us all.
    Milo didn’t know what she could even mean by that, but somehow it hurt his heart to know it’s what she