Rose Eagle Read Online Free PDF Page A

a squirrel scooting up a tree!”
    Jeez.
    â€œWe’d better start moving before something else finds us,” I said.
    Aunt Mary nodded her head.
    â€œRose is right,” she agreed. “Let’s get going.”
    And, thankfully, before they could do any more lovey-dovey stuff, we picked up our packs and then got gone.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    P eople were pleased to see us when we got back to Big Cave. Or maybe they were just surprised to see us alive and all in one piece. It was not that anyone had doubted the power of Aunt Mary’s dreams. Not after her earlier dream had saved everyone’s bacon. If all of our working men and women had been down in the Deeps as they usually were in the middle of the day, they would have been as dead as the electricity that was cut off by the Cloud’s arrival. However, whether guided by a dream or not, just two people going alone up into the hills was seen as close to suicide since the coming of the Cloud.
    Our first stop was the infirmary, a roofless structure inside Big Cave that had once been a foreman’s office, but its several rooms had now been put to better use. The filtered silver light from the vent grate high above shone into the rooms brightly in the daytime.
    Lenard’s wound was deep, and he was a long time getting patched up. A whole heck of a lot longer than it took for Doc Bird to disinfect and bandage the scratches on my left arm.
    Aunt Mary had disappeared for a while to do something. What, I did not know, but she was gone for a whole hour while I sat there listening to the old windup grandfather clock in the corner tick.
    When she finally came back and sat next to me in the waiting room, she didn’t tell me where she’d been.
    â€œHe still in there?” she asked.
    â€œUh-huh,” I’d replied.
    Then, for another half hour we just sat there, neither one of us saying anything — me because, as usual, I had no idea what to say. Aunt Mary because she looked like she had something to say but was not quite sure how to say it. And that worried me.
    We both stood up when Doc Bird came out, wiping his hands on a towel.
    â€œHe’ll be fine,” Doc Bird said. “Nothing wrong with him that old-fashioned early-twentieth-century medicine can’t fix. Which is lucky seeing as how that is the only kind of medicine we can practice these days.”
    Doc Bird slid the fingers of his right hand along his left forearm and looked down for a moment before shaking his head. No lights responded from a med-app stick-on, no keyboard appeared, no holoscreen popped up.
    It’s a habit that most of us still had, even though the Cloud had turned things off months ago — trying to activate devices that none of us had anymore. Though some, like Doc Bird, did have little reminders of them in the form of scars where the small sub-cues that med-profs had been allowed to have implanted burned through tissue and hair. Because Doc Bird’s was not a deep implant, like those in the heads and internal organs of the most elite and powerful, the resulting wound had healed. All it left was a smooth, featureless circle of healed skin on his left arm.
    Doc Bird looked up with a wry smile and continued. “Just won’t be walking for a while. Not so much the wound, which was bad enough. More the muscle trauma from that bite. Must have been shaking him like a fox with a rabbit in its mouth.”
    Aunt Mary held up her hand.
    â€œSorry,” Doc Bird said. “Too graphic? I do tend to go on a bit more than I should. Long and short of it, our man just needs to keep an eye on it, keep it clean, get plenty of rest.”
    â€œCan we go in now?” Aunt Mary said.
    â€œSure.” Doc Bird stood aside and gestured toward the recovery room.
    Lenard was sitting up in bed when we came in. His face looked tired, but his grin was no smaller than before.
    â€œHey, little girl. Hey, Mary,” he said.
    No