Colonization Read Online Free PDF

read it wrong? I kept tracing my finger across the wallscreen, but every time it led me to the same name. Corvus was a perfectly fine boy, a little oafish, but he wasn’t Sirius.
    Scrolling down farther, I finally found Sirius Smith and connected the adjacent column: Nova Williams . My heart stopped—then it beat faster and faster until I feared it would burst out of my chest. I screamed, and Mom clicked off the food congealizer with a zap . I didn’t wait for her to console me. I slammed my fist on the portal panel, stomped my foot while the particles dematerialized, and then ran into the corridor.
    Tears blinded me as I pushed by people walking home from their jobs. I crashed into a service cart and toppled it over, sending tubes of liquid flying. The man behind it gave me an annoyed glare. “Watch where you’re walking, missy!”
    “Sorry, sir.” I picked up a few of the tubes, replaced them on the cart, and stumbled forward. I had to find out what Sirius thought. I had to convince him to change the system.
    There had to be a way.
    When I reached his family’s cell on the lower deck, I pressed the portal panel and waited in agony until his dad paged me on the corridor’s wallscreen. An older version of Sirius’s face flashed on the pixels.
    “Andromeda. Is there something wrong?”
    Everything. My life, Paradise 21, the stupid Guide book. My entire world was wrong. “I need to speak with Sirius, please.”
    Silence. I wondered if he knew why I was there. Then his dad’s voice came on again through the intercom. “I’ll get him.”
    An eternity passed before the portal dematerialized. A few people gawked at me as they walked by. I must’ve looked crazy, hair pulled out of my braid and tears streaking my red-hot cheeks. Wiping at my face, I tried to compose myself.
    Finally, Sirius emerged from the inner rooms. His face was set in serious lines and his arms were crossed. I wanted to part his arms and squeeze him, calling him mine.
    He wasn’t. He was Nova’s. “Did you read the message?”
    Sirius nodded, and his face clamped up. “I’m sorry, Annie.”
    “We can request a change—”
    He shook his head and waved it off. He’d already come to terms with it, and his reaction infuriated me. How could he throw away what we had in a handful of milliseconds? “You know they don’t honor requests.”
    I was falling, plummeting into a dark and scary black hole, and he wouldn’t reach down to save me. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.”
    “I thought it’d be different as well.” He glanced down as if he couldn’t stare into my eyes, black hair falling across his face in a shield. “I was stupid to believe we’d be together. Every question I answered correctly on that test brought me closer to the job I wanted, but I didn’t realize it also took me further away from you.”
    My whole body trembled and I felt I’d fall into pieces on his doorstep like a broken DNA model, beads tumbling everywhere. I stepped forward and moved to touch him, but he drew back into his family room. “I can’t.”
    “Sirius, please.”
    “We can’t continue this. Now that the assignments have been given, people will talk if we’re seen together. There may be consequences.”
    “Since when have you cared about consequences?” I’d followed him on every adventure. He’d slanted the results of the test in his favor, and now he wanted to play by the rules?
    Sirius kept shaking his head. “It will just hurt both of us.”
    As if I wasn’t hurt enough? I grasped out and clutched thin air. Sirius disappeared into his family room and the portal rematerialized, shutting me out of his life.
    One thought outweighed all the others: I should have kissed him when I had the chance. Maybe then, if he’d felt what it was like, he would have argued for both of us.
    Staring at the portal in disbelief, I collapsed against the far wall, crumpling as though he’d blasted me in the stomach with a laser. My world fell