Slavemakers Read Online Free PDF Page B

had been determined, she thought, by her place in Refugia’s history, not by anything she’d done.
    Still, she was happy for the solitude provided by hercabin near the bow. It measured seven-by-nine feet, with a single small porthole that right now looked west, onto the open sea. Escape.
    Her bed was a mattress on a wooden platform that unfolded from the wall. The only other furniture was a single chair and a small dresser.
    But all she needed now was privacy. Glancing over her shoulder, which was unnecessary, she reached into the deep pocket of her cotton jacket and pulled out the small bottle. Holding it up, she checked to make sure that the thief inside was still alive.
    Of course it was. Still alive, patient, waiting. Waiting for its best chance to escape, once again to serve the hive mind, or—if things turned out differently—to jam its stinger into her.
    Its stinger and ovipositor.
    Kait replaced the bottle in her pocket, where the thief would remain safe until she needed it.
    *   *   *
    THERE’D BEEN ONLY two people she needed to say good-bye to. The first—and this was more a responsibility than a desire—was her brother, Jack. Her half brother, born here after the Fall.
    She’d found him with his teenage friends late in the night, when alcohol and emotions had begun to rule the party. Jack was holding a cup whose contents smelled like palm wine. His face was flushed, his eyes red at the edges, his expression blurred.
    He raised the cup, perhaps in a kind of salute, or perhaps to offer her some of the wine. Whatever the intention,when she shook her head, he rolled his eyes. His friends laughed.
    Kait ignored that. It was late. They were all drunk, and she wasn’t.
    But that was the least of the disconnect between her and Jack. The greatest rift, on the other hand, had proven impossible to overcome: the fact that she’d seen and lived in the Last World, and he hadn’t.
    It was a wall that couldn’t be scaled, the unalterable fact that some Fugians had known what it was like to live back then, while others—the natives—never would. Never see cars and airplanes and computers and, above all,
people
. A world with millions, billions of people in it, not merely a few hundred you knew too well.
    A world full of possibilities instead of the same old certainties.
    Kait would have traded her past for Jack’s in an instant—the killing of her birth parents by thieves, the terrors she’d lived through as the Fall approached—but there was no point in telling him this. For Jack, and all those born here, the Last World represented a kind of heaven. Dreams of heaven always trumped reality.
    Jack gave her a hug good-bye, which surprised her. But then he turned away and, without a word, went back to his friends and his drink, which did not.
    Some gulfs really were unbridgeable.
    *   *   *
    ONE LAST GOOD-BYE. With Sheila, Trey’s widow, Kait’s adoptive mother. Another of Refugia’s founders who’d chosen to stay behind.
    The only good-bye that meant much to Kait but, in the end, it was only a little more meaningful than the one she’d exchanged with Jack. In the end, what could either of you say when one was sailing off the end of the world and the other was not?
    You could mouth heartfelt platitudes, which was what Sheila murmured into Kait’s ear as they embraced. “Your father would be so proud of you,” she said. “Both your fathers.”
    Kait was quiet.
    â€œI want you to come home,” Sheila said next. Then she stiffened a little, as if the words had surprised her, and she was wondering if she’d said too much.
    Kait tightened her grip but still did not speak.
    She felt as much as heard Sheila’s sigh, which unexpectedly turned into a laugh.
    â€œBut as long as you’re out there,” she said, sounding a little like Trey would have, “for God’s sake,