Girl on Fire: A Dystopian Sci-Fi Adventure (Girl on Fire Book 1) by Eden Hart

Author:Eden Hart [Hart, Eden]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Phoenix Flame Press
Published: 2024-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

41

Einstein’s words echoed in Asher’s mind over the following days.

A life lived looking back is a life half lived.

His grief for Willow remained sharp, but he tried to blunt its claws by focusing on the present and the future.

He ate the meals the chef sent up to him. Stared out at the silent city stretching to the horizon. Visualized people hiding in buildings, alone, afraid. Frowned at the thought of the terras continuing to spread wherever they liked.

At first hesitantly, then with increasing determination, Asher resumed driving around Manhattan. He killed more terras, gathered more survivors, and within two weeks had doubled the community at Weston Tower.

The red-haired girl found at Hillsend High School remained weak and ill.

“I think Charlotte will recover,” Nurse Ortiz assured him. “You found her just in time.”

“Good.”

“She keeps asking about her mother and some other people.”

“I didn’t find anyone else alive in that school. I’m guessing they’re all dead.”

The nurse nodded and returned to her patient.

Asher assigned some of the newcomers to the kitchen and indoor farms.

The rest were broken into two-person teams that searched the city. Several collected canned food, meds, and other supplies. On Asher’s orders, they only took three-quarters of anything they found, leaving a quarter for survivors who hadn’t joined his community. Other teams were tasked with capturing some of the animals that roamed the streets. Horses and camels were stabled for use as transportation. Pigs, deer, cows, and chickens were bred for meat or milk or eggs.

“What about the museums?” Chef Einstein asked Asher one day. “And the art galleries and libraries?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s only a matter of time before those buildings are destroyed by terras, wild weather, or vandals. We need to collect as many of their important pieces as possible and store them in Weston Tower. We must preserve as much of our history and culture as we can. They’re an important part of humanity’s heritage.”

“Good idea, Einstein. I’ll assign two teams.”

Every scavenging or recovery team that left Weston Tower was equipped with high-tech radios. These allowed them to keep in contact with each other, depending on the weather or their locations. When the groups came across dangerous terras, they added them to Asher’s growing list of plants to be destroyed.

Asher and Harlem, plus two other teams, focused on battling the dangerous terras. Asher knew they’d only be able to destroy a few hundred of the millions of non-terrestrial plants on the planet. He didn’t care. Einstein might be right about Earth being one flower in an infinite cosmos, but he couldn’t let these invaders win without a fight.

In one week alone, he and Harlem destroyed eleven patches of crawlers and eight fields of glow-lotus terras. They also obliterated seventeen clumps of Hades terras—golden plants that burst into flames when their leaves or stems were broken.

A few days later, Asher and Harlem heard music coming from an empty conference room in Weston Tower. Inside, an Asian teenage girl in a black leotard was practicing ballet.

She pirouetted and whirled to Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, dancing with the grace of a butterfly.

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