Anamnesis by Cassie Greutman

Author:Cassie Greutman [Greutman, Cassie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cassie Greutman

* * *

* * *

The rest of the day went by uneventfully. Which was nice, for once. The forest we walked through felt wary, but had none of the anger of the trees earlier.

Thankfully. All that emotion stuff was exhausting.

And I didn’t want to think about how my emotions affected the plants, because that meant I needed to get better at controlling them. Bottling them up. I needed to figure out how to be more like Star.

And I’d thought she was so cold when I met her. To be fair to myself, she had been cold. But now I knew why. It was just easier that way. So much easier, if you didn’t care.

Then I saw Nina’s face, grinning at me with a tray of cookies, and I knew. I could never not care again. Not caring was terrible.

“We’re getting close,” Starren said.

My head snapped up. Finally!

But… what?

There wasn’t anything around us that looked like a mine of any kind. The forest went on around us, just like it had since we’d left Carver’s.

“Don’t ogres live in smelly holes in the mountains or something? How is this…” I gestured around us. “A mine?”

“Humans dig into mountains because it’s easier,” Starren said. “Ogres don’t care much about easy.”

That wasn’t intimidating at all.

“Okay. We should probably have been talking about what to expect those last however many miles.”

“Death,” Starren said grimly. “Just expect death. If it isn’t death, then I’ll consider us lucky.”

“How optimistic,” I muttered under my breath.

“Then maybe we should be coming up with another plan,” Carver said. “What about going back to following Nara’s path? That plan was much safer.”

“Can we get them to come above ground somehow?” I nodded toward the trees. “Then we’d have some help.”

“We can try.” More optimism from Starren. But really, what could be worse than the monster we’d just encountered? I shivered, the fear from the trees back near the spirit resonating through my brain.

“Ferid will send others after you,” Carver said. “He isn’t going to come up here himself. That’s not a great plan, it announces our presence with no helpful results.”

“I don’t know that he won’t come,” Starren answered. “He likes to take care of things himself. We didn’t leave things in a good place the last time we saw each other.”

“After you stole his ore?”

She winced. “And maybe a jewel or two.”

I groaned. “We’re doomed.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

I straightened. “We’ve been doomed before. I’m sure we’ll live through this to be doomed again, until the final time when we don’t survive our doom.”

“Easy for you to say.” Starren shrugged. “What? I’m serious. You come back from the dead.”

Carver squinted at me. “Back from the dead?”

That showed how much Starren trusted him, to speak in front of him like that. Starren didn’t make mistakes. It was annoying.

“How about I ask to meet him first, and if he says no, we try something different? How does he feel about Quintin?” I asked.

“Hates him.” Starren’s voice had gone monotone, like it always did when our father was mentioned.

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.