Those Who Lived: Fallen World Stories Read Online Free PDF

in the darkness Hilary and April’s bodies had been laid to rest. To return to the earth. Maybe the idea should have been unnerving, but it comforted me. If every one of us returned eventually, then no one was ever really lost. I had wandered off into the woods without a map or a clear destination, but I knew exactly where I was. I was in the shape of my hand against the stars and the hard surface pressing against my back.
    If only I could just stay here.
     
    In the morning I woke up bundled amid the blankets in the tent. I had a pain in my shoulder from lying on that hard ground and an ache in my stomach. Without shedding the blankets, I sat up and dug the box of granola bars out of the backpack. I ate a couple, and the last handful of peanuts, but the ache didn’t leave, only twisted into a mild queasiness. The food felt gritty in my throat. I was too used to hot oatmeal and pancakes from the colony’s kitchen.
    I’d have to get over that.
    The decision would be made now. The arguments presented and the votes cast, far from my spot in the woods. I tried to push the thought away, back to that other place. I got up, stretched my legs with a walk around the clearing, and scooped a drink from the river, but it stayed with me. An uncertainty, hanging over me. Waiting, the way Suzanne had said, although she’d been talking about grief.
    Just beyond the ring of pines stood a birch with icicles dangling in a jagged line down its branches. A bird or a squirrel or some other animal—Kaelyn might have been able to tell—must have scampered along one of those branches and jostled some free. Splinters of ice littered the shallow snow around its trunk. A slice of sunlight glinted off them.
    In my former backyard, on the island, shards from the smashed walls of my first greenhouse were probably still scattered in the snow, if the snow on the island hadn’t already melted, leaving the glass to mingle with mud and grass. The footprints of the boys who’d destroyed it would be long washed away. Their lives, the walls my dad helped build, the studies I’d started in cross-pollinating different strains of vegetables, my mom’s hands on my shoulders as she told me I was going to do great things for the world. The world she’d been talking about. Most of the things I’d planned to do, the future I’d pictured—the friendly flu had washed all that away too. Like an immense flood only the strong, the lucky, and the stubborn had withstood.
    I wasn’t sure which of those I was anymore.
    I’d seen the colony’s greenhouse and flung myself at it wide-armed, but maybe that had been foolish. Foolish to think I could replace even one piece of what I’d lost. That there was anything I could hold onto that wouldn’t be broken too.
    That greenhouse was still there, of course. Even if everyone else left, they couldn’t stop me from staying. I could keep to myself there and tend to the garden, the same as always. I saw it like a premonition: myself, red hair strung with as much gray as Suzanne’s blonde, a wandering benefactor. Walking the roads with a bundle of seeds and roots to pass on to whomever could use them, looping around in my journey to return to where I’d started from.
    My eyes misted up, a tear tracing a prickling line down my cheek before I’d realized I was crying. What was there to be upset about? I could have what I wanted. The garden, the work, and peace.
    Unless that wasn’t what would make me happy after all. I groped inside for a sense of it, of what I wanted—not just could tolerate or accept but actively wanted .
    Nothing , I came out with. I don’t want anything.
    That couldn’t be right. But no other answer offered itself up.
     
    I hadn’t meant to be gone for very long—and my queasiness had already circled back around to hunger with only two granola bars left in the box. I took down the tent, the poles rattling together and the fabric warbling against itself, stuffed it into the backpack with the