Protecting Her Heart by Nicole Murphy

Author:Nicole Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Escape Publishing

Chapter Eleven

Plissa was looking through the monthly figures from the various distributors when her communicator went off. She answered and Mikhal’s face appeared on the screen.

‘Mikhal. How are things in Northern Angonia?’

‘Terrible.’ The young man’s voice was edged with tension. ‘It’s much worse than we’d been told. There’s an entire village that has run out of masitum. Seventy-five people, who have all had to move into the colony of Zagham because there’s nowhere else around here who can bear that many extra mouths to feed or bodies to heat. I went to the village and, Ms Waltric, it’s terrible. The emptiness. The silence. And they are farmers, and their fields aren’t being tended, and one has to wonder about the ongoing impact. If you click on the link I’m sending you, you can see footage.’

Plissa clicked the link and watched on the tablet as a camera slowly panned across a small town. The buildings were all low, less than a storey, with small doors that people would have to bed over to enter. There were more than a dozen, and so there should be people around — some sitting outside, milling seed for flour. Children playing. She should be able to hear the sounds of work. She’d travelled as part of learning the business and had seen countless small towns like this. But there was nothing. No people. No sound.

The vision switched to inside one of the homes. The furniture was all there, but nothing else. No pots on the stove. No decorations. No family belongings such as children’s toys on the floor or people’s tablets for reading. The people who had lived here had packed all the things precious to them and then just walked away from their home. Judging by the layer of dust on the table, it had been a few weeks.

Plissa leant back in her chair, rubbing her eyes. She couldn’t imagine what it would have been like for those families, to realise that in order to survive they had to leave their homes.

‘Peace to Zagham,’ she said. ‘How did it get to this?’

‘Yeung isn’t making any deliveries.’

Plissa tapped on her tablet and called up the distributor’s figures. ‘He’s reporting that he is.’

‘Well, he’s not. Hasn’t been for several weeks.’

‘Why hasn’t anyone complained before Jose did? Why haven’t we heard about it?’

‘I think it’s linked to the battle between the two families. They seem to run almost everything here. Whenever you try to talk to someone, it’s like they’re constantly looking over their shoulder, worried about who might be watching.’

Plissa shook her head. It was unbelievable that a few people could cause such havoc. ‘Are there other towns in danger?’

‘They’ve all got to be. The larger ones may have more of a stockpile built up so they can last longer, but eventually, one by one, they’ll run out.’

Plissa thought it more likely they had resources that enabled them to ration the use of masitum, whereas a smaller community wouldn’t have as many options. ‘What about the extra masitum you organised to be sent to Hayden Blue?’

‘Already used up.

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