Tremor by Patrick Carman

Author:Patrick Carman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Wanna Play Asteroids?

Dylan stood alone in the middle of the prison awaiting instructions. While he lingered there, wondering if the training would include being attacked from behind, he thought about the previous hour or so. Fending off Clara’s advances might not have been the wisest move, but given the circumstances, he hadn’t had a lot of options. Clara had been cooped up with her mom, her dad, her brother, and a bunch of way-too-old single pulses for more than a hundred days. She was, to put it mildly, in need of some affection. He could have at least humored her for a day or two, and he might have been able to do it, but Clara was always aggressive when the mood struck her. He knew they had the same dad, but she had no clue; and this had turned the private space of cell block D into an awkward place for Dylan pretty fast. Clara had pushed him into the cell and asked, in her most seductive tone, How about I lock us in here and turn out the lights?

There was a limit to Dylan’s acting skills, and the demands had quickly outstripped his abilities. His lame response had been that he was tired and wanted to be alone. That was when she’d pinned him against the wall of the cell, her chest against his, and whispered things into his ear that were strictly taboo between a brother and a sister.

“I’m still with Faith,” he’d blurted out, a pronouncement he regretted a split second later. Whatever advantage might have been gained from controlling Clara’s feelings had been lost in an instant.

Clara had backed off slowly, as if a cowboy had roped her around the shoulders and begun gently pulling against her will. “Then what are you doing here?”

“She’s not involved in this, not anymore. But we’re together.”

“And here I thought she was dead,” Clara had said, a mean tone in her voice as she backed up into the hall outside. “I should have thrown that rock a little harder, I guess.”

“You’re not attractive when you talk like that.”

Dylan had managed to dig himself into a deep hole in a hurry.

“Whatever you say, Dylan Gilmore. I’m going to expel all this pent-up energy one way or another,” Clara had said, engaging the lock system and staring at him from the hall with those steely eyes of hers. “You had your chance.”

Now that he was waiting alone in the training yard, all he could think about was whether he was going to survive the afternoon. He’d been too cautious to press his sound ring and speak inside the cell; there had been too much risk of being heard by some surveillance system to keep pressing into the sound ring. He imagined that the whole cell block was bugged and wired up to monitors—had to be. And then Wade had retrieved him, escorted him out into the light of day behind concrete walls, and left him there.

The sky over zeroed cities and towns was always filled with circling birds.

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