Those Who Lived: Fallen World Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

from the full blow. It just hangs over you, waiting.”
    “I accept it,” I said. Crunch. Crunch. I ripped the edge of a leaf. “I accepted it before I even knew for sure.”
    Did she think it was the same? She’d seen April’s body, helped them carry it into the woods, and said a final good-bye. I’d gotten silence from the phone and an empty room. But I’d known. I knew .
    “I just wonder, the way you keep to yourself, if you’ve given yourself a proper chance to settle in...”
    I was on my feet, spinning toward her in the same motion, before I felt the flare of anger inside me. “I’m here,” I snapped. “I wouldn’t be here if I thought there was any chance they were out there for me to find. Why can’t this just be the way I am?”
    She was looking at me now, hurt and concerned. My skin crawled at the thought of the reassuring words she might try to offer next. I jerked off my gloves.
    “I’m going to get some fresh air,” I said before she could speak, and went out.
    It wasn’t just fresh air I needed, I thought, standing behind my cabin and gazing into the stretch of pines. A fresh space. A fresh atmosphere. Suzanne hadn’t done anything wrong, really. I was just getting wound up by all the debating. My head was too cluttered.
     
    While everyone was eating lunch, I went to one of the cabins that held our supplies. I took a tent, a few blankets, a box of granola bars, a jar of peanuts, and a backpack. I didn’t need much. Just to leave, let my mind clear, and return after they’d decided. Maybe it’d all be back to usual. Or maybe I’d walk up to the cabins and find them cleaned out.
    A chill passed through me at the image. But it didn’t make much difference, did it? The things that mattered to me would still be here.
    I waited to leave until it was getting dark, around dinner time. Jon passed me on his way to the gathering house as I left the greenhouse with a ripe tomato in my coat pocket. He nodded in greeting and said, “You’ll be coming?”
    To dinner, he meant. Which meant, to the vote. “In a minute,” I said.
    When the last few residents had headed in, I hefted the backpack over my shoulders and set off.
    There were patches of bare earth amid the snow that ringed the bases of the trees. I walked on them as much as possible, to avoid leaching away the warmth in my boots. The evening air was crisp but not sharp in my throat. I found a comfortable rhythm, stretching my legs with long strides, pushing off the ground I crossed and left behind.
    I judged it’d been about an hour when I reached a small clearing, the yellow grass dusted with frost. It was completely dark now. Stars glittered in the circle of inky sky that was framed by the treetops. Here , I thought.
    Before I set up the tent, I followed the edge of the clearing the entire way around, peering into the forest in all directions. I spotted no sign of anyone living nearby. At the opposite end of the clearing, a small river ran past, its banks snow crusted and its surface solid with rippled ice. I broke away a small chunk—it wasn’t very thick—and brought the water beneath to my mouth with my cupped hands. The cold stung my fingers and my throat and seemed to trickle right down to my toes. It fixed me to the snowy ground.
    I was here. Just me. The comments, questions, looks, and everything else that had been heaped on me in the colony over the last few days sloughed from my skin like autumn leaves.
    After a couple of mistakes, I got the tent up. I unfurled one of the blankets outside it and lay down in the middle of the clearing, staring at the stars. There were so many I lost track when I tried to count them. I held up my arm and watched them being blotted out by my hand. Still there, just unseen.
    The ground beneath my back was firm. Stretching out on all sides, all the way around the planet. For a second, the thought of the vastness of it took my breath away. I was held by it, by the world and its pull.
    Somewhere out