The Decemites (The Echelon Book 1) by Ramona Finn

Author:Ramona Finn [Finn, Ramona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-01-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

I scraped my way through the remnants of breakfast as quickly as I could, stacked the bowls back on their shelves and tamped the cookfires down to embers. By the time I got through, Ben was waiting, gloved and masked, a heavy coat draped over his arm. He tossed me one, too, and a pair of thick gloves.

“You’ll need these,” he said, “but just carry the coat for now. Can’t have you sweating yourself to death.”

I pulled on my gloves and the mask he handed me. “We’re going out?”

“You want to know about the old base, right? Well, I’ve got the day free. Figured we’d take a field trip.” He handed me a tank and secured his own, its hose bobbing foolishly as he clipped it to his mask. I hooked my own up quickly, already moving toward the exit.

“Jetha’s okay with this? I’m allowed out?”

“It’s educational. Why not? It’s not like you’ll be alone.” Ben clipped a blaster to his belt, and my brows went up.

“What do you need that for?”

“Shooting you dead if you make a break for it.” He bumped up against me and grinned. “For mutants, of course. We don’t get many this far out, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared.” His lips tightened, and I got the sense there was something he wasn’t telling me, but then we were out in the open, the desert sun beating down on our heads. I tilted my face up to take it in.

“Still not tired of that, huh?”

“I went seventeen years without it,” I said. The sky was brownish today, a faded shade of copper. The sun hung like a coin, too bright to look at. “I threw up the first time I saw it.”

“What, the sun?”

“Yeah.” I blinked away its afterimage. “It wasn’t what I was expecting. I had this image in my head, rays splashed out over the sky. Like a painting, I guess.”

“And reality made you sick?” Ben glanced up and chuckled. “It is like that sometimes. After it rains. The sun comes through the clouds, and, yeah. There’s rays.”

“I want to see that.”

“Wait for spring and you will.” Ben struck out to the north, the dry grass crunching under his boots. I followed behind him, trying to imagine how rain felt, how it sounded on the dirt. How the creek bed would look swollen to flooding, sticks tumbling in the current. Rain in the Dirt just meant flash floods, waterlogged socks and the hiss-thunk of the pumps.

A light breeze blew up as we left the plains behind us, heading into the mountains. I sighed with relief as it cooled the sweat on my neck. I wanted to take off my mask and luxuriate in it, but Ben kept looking back at me, checking I was still there.

“Let me know if you need to slow down,” he said. “It gets pretty steep up ahead.”

I nodded, but I felt like I could keep going forever. The path wound gently up the mountainside, choked in places with furze and washed out in others.

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