Survival Colony 9 Read Online Free PDF

jumped every time her dazzling blue eyes swung my way. And then Wali would put his arm around her shoulders or slide his hand down her forearm, and I’d watch the muscles flex beneath his shirt and I’d look somewhere else before he got any ideas.
    My dad had called this a recon operation, and there was something to that. Not only did we need to keep an eye out for Skaldi, but we needed to map this new terrain, to avoid the places so littered with drill pits and sinkholes you could vanish into the land, others so strewn with mines you could blow yourself into the sky. But like all our operations, this one’s unstated purpose was to hunt for food. The land farther east yielded just enough to keep us constantly hungry: tough roots that could be gnawed, tree bark that could be boiled into a watery soup, the occasional desert bloom. Termites afforded a rare delicacy, if by delicacy you meant anything that carried an ounce of protein. We came across their mounds every so often and battered them apart with gun butts to get at the swarming creatures inside. They tasted terrible, like everything else, but they were numerous and easy to catch and there was no telling when you’d have another chance at a meal that size. When you found them your stomach went to war with your head. Your stomach always won, even if your head wasn’t happy about it.
    We’d been stumbling around in the sun and dust for a couple hours, not finding anything except the distortion heat makes on the horizon, when Wali swore he saw something up ahead, a shape the color of the dust creeping on all fours. We froze, and Aleka scouted ahead with our one pair of working binoculars. I crept to her side.
    “Skaldi?”
    She strained into the distance, and for a second I thought I saw her go rigid. Then she relaxed. “False alarm.”
    Yov’s laugh broke the desert stillness. “When’s the last time you heard of Skaldi crawling around like babies?”
    “Laman told me they don’t always try to imitate you,” Wali said. “It depends on what they want your body for.”
    “Laman told you,” Yov sniffed.
    “He said if they’re only using it for locomotion they don’t take care of it. They let it get broken, dirty.” For once, he looked embarrassed. “Dirtier than usual, I mean.”
    “You sound like Space Boy,” Yov said. “Laman this, Laman that.” He turned to me, smiling cruelly. “That right, Space Boy? Daddy write the gospel?”
    “Then what do you think it was?” Wali demanded.
    “How should I know?” Yov said. “Could be an elephant that didn’t get the news the world ended. Or a figment of your overactive imagination.”
    Wali balled his fists and seemed ready to go for Yov, but Korah pulled him away. Her whispered words thrilled me even more than if I’d actually heard what she said. Yov smirked at the two of them, looking about as concerned as he would have if a beetle had dive-bombed his face.
    It was getting dangerously close to midday, and Aleka had just about decided we were wasting our time when Yov reported spotting shapes that looked like trees farther to the west. At first I figured he was still messing with Wali, or maybe he’d gotten sick from the heat and seen something that wasn’t there. But when Aleka trained her binoculars in the direction he pointed, she made out what looked like a row of stakes on a ripple in the land you might call a hill. A mile distant, possibly more. But she decided it was worth checking out. “Carefully,” she said. We pulled our caps lower on our heads and plodded forward, raising trails of dust that eddied around our legs before sinking back as if they’d never been there at all.
    In less than an hour we drew close enough to see that the shapes weren’t trees but the remains of buildings, perched on the only elevation for miles. Aleka called a halt at the base of the hill, and she and Soon conferred for a minute. He thought the structures might be the ruins of a survival colony, one of the