The Treemakers (A YA Dystopian Scifi Romance Adventure) Read Online Free PDF Page A

vision to see through things . . . . But nothing he’d wished for had ever come true.
    “When he’d asked his daddy why the stones didn’t work, his daddy said, ‘They’ll work when you need ’em most. You have to believe.’ Billy thought it was stupid, that his momma and daddy were treating him like a baby. He’d thought every day about throwing the stones in the garden, not that anyone would notice. They were just stones. Plain ol’ ugly brown rocks. Nothing special about them.
    “Still, he kept them in his pocket every day, until the storm came. They were all he had left. That, and his washtub. On the third day, he was so parched from the sun, and surrounded by saltwater, leagues deep—”
    “Momma Joy?” Chloe tugs my pant leg. “Is that the ocean?” she asks.
    I wink down at her and nod.
    “And Billy knew his time had come to die,” I resume. “Angry, he took the stones from his pocket and hurled them into the sea—”
    “I thought it was the ocean,” Chloe says again.
    “Chloe, shh,” says Aby. “It’s the same thing.” She waves at me to go on.
    “He threw the magic stones into the sea,” I continue, “and a second later, a great green-and-blue dragon shot up from the water with a splash and flew over him. At first, Billy was scared; he’d never seen a dragon before, and it was enormous, it could very easily eat him up if it wanted to. But it didn’t. ‘Hop on my back,’ the dragon said, ‘and I’ll take you to Paradise . . . . ’”
    Twenty minutes later, as I finish the story, half of the girls and boys are asleep on the thin floor pallets. I told it a little longer than usual tonight because I was lost in it. In my mind, Toby was Billy, living happily ever after on his dragon’s back, flying through the heavenly blue skies, dipping down into the crisp blue ocean and back up again. I desperately want to believe my brother is there now.
    Sometimes I wonder, though, if it’s foolish to think that there’s some kind of paradise after death. Mother never believed it, but Daddy did. And I’m torn. I don’t know what to believe. I know what I want to believe, yet I hear my mother’s voice as she argued with my daddy from her deathbed behind closed doors: “There is nothing left. No happy ending,” she said.
    No happy ending on this Earth, I believe. Except in my stories. But what comes next, after the dead Earth, and the tragedy of death before life has even been lived? What then?
    Aby and some of the older girls help me get the little ones tucked away safe in their beds, and I meet Jax at the hole. Sliding the metal cover up and affixing it to the latch, I peek in to scope out the boys’ side. Jax sits on the edge of the twins’ bunk, talking softly to them. Their sad eyes hit me like fists to the stomach. Toby was a big brother to them more than most.
    If I could shut off my brain and never think again, I might.
    “Hey.” Jax’s voice startles me from my daze.
    “Hey.”
    “Ready?”
    “Yeah.”
    I flip the cover back over the hole, and find Aby braiding her hair in the greenish-yellow glow from a liqui-light lantern on our shared bedside table. “Hey,” she says. “ You leavin’?”
    I nod.
    “Humphrey’s gonna let you go, after what happened last time?”
    I shrug. “I guess he’s over it.”
    “Where’re you going?” She ties off the braid’s end, then gives the lantern a shake. The light intensifies to illuminate her face in a sickly green color that clashes with her red hair, making it dark-brown. “You gonna need one?” She taps the safety glass.
    “I don’t know. I think Jax still has a few light sticks. They’re easier to manage down there.”
    Aby stretches and tilts her head until her neck pops in three spots. She repeats it on the other side. “Yeah, true.”
    A sniffling in the corner of the room grabs my attention. Someone’s crying. Maybe one of the little ones. I start to go to her.
    “No,” Aby says. “You go. I’ll take care of