Swarm Read Online Free PDF Page A

them, leaning on my arm.
    â€œWhat’s that?” he said, poking the imprints of your toes with his stick. I held my breath. His eyes lifted to find my face and I saw the old shine in them.
    In June, Thomson had been well enough for us to bring two passengers home after the last supply ship had docked. We gave them a meal and a place to stay for the night before the boat left in the morning, heading farther up the coast into deeper wilderness in the north. They had come from a squat in a suburb on the edge of the city we used to live in. At night, they told us, they’d barricaded themselves in and waited for morning when a Baptist Church group sometimes delivered food and water. Once, they opened the door when they shouldn’t have. Men with guns took three young children and a woman. “Probably to be sold,” Marvin said.
    â€œMaybe that’s what she ran from,” I suggested to Thomson as we walked back to the house.
    Things like that happened. At times I was relieved that we’d escaped early enough, left the city before all the lights went out, or most of them. The majority of the population toiled now in the dark where violence flourished like a night plant. Our island was calmer, quieter, hidden away.
    Thomson pushed along the trail, wobbling over fat ridges of cedar roots.
    â€œMaybe she was taken and then she escaped from the boat,” I said. He stopped and put out a hand, curving it around the wrinkled trunk of a beech. I fidgeted, dancing inside the cloud of bugs while Thomson leaned his shoulder against the tree, breathing heavily.
    â€œShe?”
    Why had I said that? Because I know you by the slim indentations of your footprints. By your thieving sleight of hand. Lighter, more delicate than a boy.
    â€œI think.”
    â€œShe is the one taking our food?”
    I nodded.
    â€œAn orphan?” Thomson said. A shimmer moved across his face, like glee.
    â€œMaybe.”
    â€œDoes Marvin know?”
    I shook my head hard. That wasn’t what I wanted. “He’ll take her,” I said. I hoped to keep going: plan how we would catch you, talk about bringing you home, but Thomson interrupted me.
    â€œWhere?”
    I couldn’t answer that. “He doesn’t want her here,” I said, but my words were cut off as he sputtered, the ever-present cough ending our discussion. I wrapped my arm around his shoulders, relieved because I’d heard judgment in his voice, like he didn’t really believe me. “It’s not far now,” I said and led him along the last stretch of the trail.
    Thomson had taken to sleeping downstairs, saying his room was too cold at night. I brought him to the couch and slid his shoes off and tucked him in with a beige wool blanket that the supply ship had delivered last autumn.
    â€œHow is he?” Marvin asked when I entered the kitchen.
    â€œUp and down. Now he just needs to sleep.”
    A pile of cedar roots sat on the counter. Their thin red skin chipped by the shovel. I picked them up and draped them over a nail pounded into the wall.
    â€œDid you finish the fence?” I asked, playing with the dangling roots as if they were hair.
    Marvin nodded.
    â€œI’m glad nobody barricaded us out.”
    â€œCome on. That’s different.”
    How? I wondered.
    Marvin moved over to the sink as I pulled two beets from their bin of dirt in the cupboard. I turned away from him, thinking of the things I would have to teach you. Wild harvesting. How we use cedar for so many things. String for shoes and tying together stalks of herbs for drying. We make a tea from its foliage for vitamin C. Without that your teeth will fall out and your skin will turn black. Thomson taught me about Jacques Cartier, the early explorer. How he’d watched his crew drop dead from scurvy before the Aboriginal people showed him how to make cedar tea. That was in the 1500s. Back when people lived a lot like we live now except that