Halo: Contact Harvest Read Online Free PDF Page B

of fresh Innie attacks in Epsilon Eridanus—a series of bombings that had killed thousands of civilians. As usual, the broadcast featured a UNSC spokesman who flatly denied the military’s campaign was faltering. But Avery knew the facts: The Insurrection had already claimed more than a million lives; the Innie attacks were becoming more effective, and the UNSC reprisals more heavy-handed. It was an ugly civil war that wasn’t getting any prettier.
One of the residents in the rec room, a black man with a deeply lined face and a crown of wiry gray hair, spotted Avery and frowned. He whispered something to a large white woman in a voluminous housedress, overflowing a wheelchair by his side. Soon all the residents that weren’t hard of hearing or too dim-sighted to see Avery’s uniform were nodding and clucking—some with respect, others with scorn. Avery had almost changed into his civilian clothes on the shuttle to avoid just this sort of uncomfortable reaction. But in the end he’d decided to stick with his dress blues for his aunt’s sake. She’d waited a long time to see her nephew come home all spit and polish.
The elevator was even warmer than the lobby. But inside his aunt’s apartment the air was so frigid, Avery could see his breath.
“Auntie?” he called, dropping his duffels on the well-worn blue carpet of her living room. The bottles of fine bourbon he’d bought at the spaceport duty-free clinked together between his neatly folded fatigues. He didn’t know if his aunt’s doctors were letting her drink, but he did know how much she used to enjoy an occasional mint julep. “Where are you?” But there was no reply.
The flower-patterned walls of the living room were covered with picture frames. Some were very old—faded prints of long-dead relatives his aunt used to talk about as if she’d known them personally. Most of the frames held holo-stills: three-dimensional pictures from his aunt’s lifetime. He saw his favorite, the one of his teenage aunt standing on the shore of Lake Michigan in a honey-bee striped bathing suit and wide straw hat. She was pouting at the camera and its cameraman, Avery’s uncle, who had passed away before he was born.
But there was something wrong with the stills; they seemed oddly out of focus. And as Avery stepped down the narrow hallway to his aunt’s bedroom and ran his fingers across the frames’ sheets of glass, he realized they were covered in a thin layer of ice.
Avery rubbed his palm against a large holo-still near the bedroom door, and a young boy’s face appeared beneath the frost.
Me, he grimaced, remembering the day his aunt had taken the still: my first day of church. Wiping downward, his mind filled with memories: the suffocating pinch of his white, freshly starched oxford shirt; the smell of carnauba wax, liberally applied, to mask the scuffs in his oversized, wingtip shoes.
Growing up, Avery’s clothes were almost always worn out hand-me-downs from distant cousins that were never quite big enough for his tall, broad-shouldered frame. “Just as they should be,” his aunt had said, smiling, holding up new pieces of his wardrobe for inspection. “A boy isn’t a boy that doesn’t ruin his clothes.” But her painstaking patching and sewing had always ensured Avery looked his best—especially for church.
“Now don’t you look handsome,” his aunt had cooed the day she’d taken the frozen still. Then, as she’d done up his little paisley tie: “So much like your mother. So much like your father,” according to assessments of an inheritance Avery hadn’t understood. There had been no pictures of his parents in his aunt’s old house—and there were none in her apartment now. Although she’d never once said anything unkind about them, these bittersweet comparisons had been her only praise.
“Auntie? You in there?” Avery asked, knocking softly on her bedroom door. Again, there was no answer.
He remembered the sound of raised voices behind