Alien--Echo by Mira Grant

Author:Mira Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Imprint

12

SOMETHING TO HOLD ON TO

Kora kneels beside me, sliding one arm around my shoulders, offering me my mother’s volt gun. How did she get that? I gave it to Alisa. It feels like the world is skipping tracks, refusing to move in the calm, linear way I’m used to. Everything is happening so fast.

Someone is sobbing. I think it might be Lin. Honestly, though, it might be all of us. If ever a day has been awful enough to justify a public breakdown, it’s this one.

“Here,” says Kora, pushing the gun into my hands. Her own gun—hers now, even if it came from my family’s ATV; I don’t want it back—is clipped to her belt. She’s not disarming herself to make me feel better, and somehow that is the one thing that actually does make me feel a little better. Brains are weird.

“Here,” she says again, and this time I take the gun from her, wrap my fingers around the long, familiar shape of it, pull it to myself like a teddy bear. A teddy bear …

“The bag!” I straighten, turning to stare at her. My nose aches. I must look awful. There’s blood all over my face, and my hair has been whacked short by the machete, which isn’t famed for making the most even of cuts.

This is a strange time for vanity. Again, brains are weird. They do what they want, and it’s up to us to make them follow along.

Kora blinks at me. Then, understanding dawns, and she says, “It’s right over there,” gesturing toward the control panel where Rockwell and Johnson still stand, frozen in their terror over what just happened. They saw monsters, confirming every nightmare they’ve ever had about the world outside the safe walls of the colony. They saw two teenagers taken, carried screaming into the wilds.

They are not handling this very well.

Everyone is crying, shaking and screaming as they try to deal with the situation. That says something about their faith in the wall: they believe we’re safe here.

Kora isn’t crying.

Now that I have my breath back, neither am I.

I clip the volt gun to my belt as I stand and move to retrieve the bag my mother gave me. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s a bunch of photo albums and keepsakes from the original Viola, the one who died before she had the chance to develop a fondness for gossip, a habit of leaving the bedroom window open whenever she could get away with it, all the things my Viola’s programming may have extrapolated from those early brain scans, or may have come up with entirely on her own. I don’t know that Viola. I don’t want to know that Viola. I want my Viola back.

It doesn’t really matter what’s in the bag. It’s what I have left. Mom wanted me to have it. That’s good enough for me, at least for now.

It fits on my shoulders like it was sized for me. Maybe it was. Dad said it was time to tell me the truth: maybe this is part of that truth.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.