Elysium. Part One. Read Online Free PDF Page B

ran straight down the street to the shore like the devil were on his heels… and then the next morning Kelly was found dead.’
      ‘He had a heart attack!’ Eryn said defensively.
      Boen shrugged as though he had reported all he knew. They shared fixed glances for a moment, and then he cast his eyes down and left her.
      ‘Didn’t you think it strange,’ he called back to her, ‘that no-one was allowed to see the body? Roger Hullenby had an open casket, didn’t he… and James Sooth? He had his head broke open by that rafter that killed him, and they didn’t shy away from displaying him !’
      Eryn stood for a long while gazing after him. She wondered if there could be any truth in it, and reluctantly conceded that it had indeed been strange that Kelly’s body had been placed in a casket and buried without anyone saying goodbye. Her father had told the community that he left behind no family and so the decision had been made to seal the coffin. It had seemed perfectly reasonable when he said it, and no-body paid it a second thought.
      It was a bizarre lie for Boen to invent, and a tasteless story to save for her alone. But if it weren’t an invention and he had indeed seen a stranger exit Kelly’s house on the night of his death then it begged the question of how his passing had been misdiagnosed and, most pressingly, why he had been murdered.
    *
      Selina stood at the summit of the cliff, peering across an empty beach and out to the quiet sea. A mass of wind turbines stood desolately in the distance, grey and motionless; several leaned askew, their blades missing or jutting from the waters below.  Priya stood by her, pointing out where the sun caught the uppermost wire of an impossibly high barrier that encircled the entire coastline.
      ‘There, see?’ she said, pointing out the small black dots that had once been red quarantine lights. ‘And there.’
      ‘Then there’s no doubt about it…’
      Priya ran her long fingers through her hair.
      They had walked aimlessly across fields for the entire day, stopping for the evening in a house on the outskirts of an abandoned village. Their stomach’s growled, for except the few blackberries they had found growing some miles before the village, they had eaten nothing and were deeply weary for it.
      As the night drew in they comforted each other with recollections of their childhoods; Selina spoke of New Zealand and the struggle her family had endured to afford an apartment of their own, while Priya explained the complicated relationship between her parents, and how she had been deported to India, then Australia, by the Red Cross when they had been imprisoned in Bahrain during the civil war.
      ‘When the Causeway was demolished my parents were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
      ‘They were insurgents?’ Selina asked, enthralled by the childhood that was as turbulent as any she had heard of before.
      ‘God no… They were loud and the government made an example of them.’ She pursed her lips and stared into the darkness. ‘Once I was out of the country there was no hope of ever returning, what with both my parents in prison. I couldn’t do anything for them.’
      ‘You’ve not seen them since? How old were you?’
      ‘About thirteen, so a good seventeen years…’ the thought sobered her. ‘I suppose it’s too late now.’ She appeared to be lost in thought for a moment, then said, ‘Can I ask you something?’
      ‘Sure,’
      ‘I’m a refugee, and it seems like there’s not a government on the planet that wants to grant me citizenship. That’s why I boarded a ship of illegal immigrants and risked everything for a new life in Norway, just in the hope of finding somewhere to anchor myself. You seem like a pleasant girl who’s had a hard but relatively normal life, I can’t for the life of me imagine why you would risk it.’
      Selina thought about it for a moment and decided there was nothing she