Aurora Read Online Free PDF Page B

as far as Freya can tell. He peers across at them. “Hmm, well, maybe I don’t.”
    “That boy there is a jerk. He pinched me.”
    “Hmm, not good. Where did this happen?”
    “In the park.”
    He looks more closely at them. “Okay, I’ll see if I can find out. They live over there, I think.”
    “Yes, of course they do.”
    “I see. I hadn’t noticed.”
    This strikes Freya as unlike him. “Don’t you like our new place?”
    Their recent move was from Yangtze to Nova Scotia, a big move, as being from Ring A to Ring B. But everyone moves sometime, it’s important, it keeps mixing people together. Part of the plan.
    “Oh I like it all right. I’m just not used to it yet. I don’t know everyone here yet. You spend more time here than I do.”

    That evening as they eat a dinner of salad, bread, and turkey burgers at the kitchen table, Freya says, “So, are there really ferals? Can there be people hiding in the ship that you don’t know about?”
    Badim and Devi look at her, and she explains: “Some of the kids in this town say there are ferals, who live off by themselves. I figured it was just a story.”
    “Well,” Badim says, “it’s a little bit of a controversy on the council.”
    Badim has been serving on the ship’s security council, and was recently made a permanent member. “Everyone is chipped at birth, and you can’t get the chip out very easily, it would take an operation. Some people may have done it anyway, of course. Or managed to deactivate them. It would explain some things.”
    “What if the hidden people had babies?”
    “Well, yes, that would explain even more things.” Again he stares at her. “Who are these kids you’ve been talking to?”
    “Just ones in the park. They’re just talking.”
    Badim shrugs. “It’s an old story. It comes up from time to time.Any time a security case goes unsolved there are people ready to bring it up. I guess it’s better than hearing about the five ghosts again.”
    They laugh at this. But Freya also feels a shiver; she once saw one of the five ghosts, in the doorway of her bedroom.
    “But probably there aren’t any,” Badim says, and goes on to explain that the gas balance of the ship’s air is so finely tuned that if there was a feral population it would be noticeable in the changed proportion of oxygen to carbon dioxide.
    Devi shakes her head at this. “There’s too much random flux to be sure. It’s enough to disguise an extra couple dozen people, maybe more.” So to her the ferals are possible. “They could throw their salts out and grab some phosphorus and get their soils back in balance. In just the way we can’t.”
    No matter which way Devi sets off, no matter how they try to distract her, she always ends up in this same spot in her head, in what she calls the metabolic rifts. Like a place where cracks in the floor have opened up. When Freya sees it happen again, a little worm of fear wakes in her and crawls around in her belly. She and Badim share a look; they both love a person who will not listen to them.
    Badim nods politely at Devi; next time the security council meets, he says, he’ll mention to his colleagues that Devi feels there is no gas balance proof that ferals don’t exist. And strange things do happen in the ship, so one explanation could be that people who aren’t part of the official population are doing them. It’s more likely, Badim jokes again, than it being the work of the five ghosts.
    The ghosts were supposed to be of the people who died in the original acceleration of the ship, the great scissoring. Devi rolls her eyes at this old story, wonders aloud how it endures for generation after generation. Freya keeps her eyes on her plate. She definitely saw one of the ghosts. It was after they took a trip up to the spine and visited one of the turbine rooms next to the reactor, whenit was empty for repairs, and walked among the giant turbines; that night Freya had a dream in which the repair team