The Last Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

even see her hand move.
    “You okay?” Meeka asks, handing the spoon back as the table begins to empty.
    “I’m fine,” Zoey says.
    They file back down the different hallways to their rooms. Zoey watches Lily and her Cleric disappear into the closest chamber to her own before scanning the strap on her wrist.
    She enters her room, leaving Simon to stand beside the entry in the hall, his hands folded neatly behind his back. His stance is a holdover from being in the military, she knows. She suspects that all the Clerics are former military, chosen for their assignments to the women for sometimes obvious, sometimes cryptic reasons.
    She recalls the night she knew for sure that Simon had been a soldier . . .

    She’d been no more than seven years old. The auto-guns woke her. Their chatter was muted somewhat by the walls and the building around her, but it was still loud enough to drag her up from sleep and send her halfway across the room, wide-eyed and staring before she’d even known she’d left the bed. A red glow had filled her room. It had been so beautiful, the color deeper than any she’d ever seen before, deeper than the most brilliant sunrise. She’d gone to the window and peered out, no longer flinching at the thunder of heavy gunfire.
    The night had been alive with color.
    Streaks of white phosphorus cut the air above the ARC, while a red falling star trailed down toward the compound, its light bathing everything below. The snipers on the wall began shooting then, their gun barrels spraying fire over and over at something below. She could hear screams too, long and loud. Bellows and curses that curdled her insides. But she couldn’t look away. She pressed her eyes to the glass and stared, finding the zips of light she knew must be bullets flying, but even then the fear was overshadowed by the awe of something beautiful in the chaos.
    An explosion shook the entire ARC, sending her vibrating away from the window. A ball of fire as wide as her room rose above the wall, flames licking over its side like water. The fire reached out and touched one of the snipers in his nest, setting him alight. He burned and spun, a sound coming from him that nearly made her clamp her hands over her ears. He had leapt from the wall then. Not inside, toward the track of concrete that surrounded the building, but out into the open air. He had jumped outside. And this fact alone somehow terrified her more than anything else she’d seen. Because at that moment in her early years, nothing was more frightening than being outside the walls.
    Simon had burst into her room, eliciting a short cry from her before she realized who it was. She ran to him, clutched at his waist, and he embraced her, one of the last times he had ever done so. His voice was low and calm, but there was something in it that made her look up into his face. He was scared, too.
    In the excitement she didn’t notice that Lee was with him until the boy touched her hand. Simon told them to go sit in the bathroom and not to talk, to be quiet. Lee led her there but she glanced back at Simon as he closed the door, one hand pressed to it as if to keep it firmly shut, the other holding a pistol like the ones that hung on the guards’ belts.
    They sat together in the darkness of the bathroom, Lee holding her hand, saying things that didn’t make sense at the time. Later she realized he was telling her a story to keep her calm, all the while his arm trembled beside her own. Only several months older than she was, and already he was trying to take care of her.
    They stayed that way as the night wore on, the red light coming and going as if the world were spinning so fast that the sun rose and set over and over. Slowly the gunshots lessened, the silences between them growing after each concussion. Soon there was only the quiet crackle of flames, barely audible over their breathing in the enclosed space . .   .

    Zoey catches herself staring out the window at the curving,