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

blankets, picked up the pack... and set it back down.
    I’d thought coming out here by myself would clear my head. It had seemed to last night. But now my mind was cluttered with uneasy thoughts again. I couldn’t blame anyone but myself.
    It should have been simple. Go back, get to work in the greenhouse, let the others do whatever they were going to do. So why did it feel so hard?
    I left the pack and went down to the river. The water was still sharp on my tongue. I looked out across the span of ice, seven or eight feet wide, stretching into the woods in both directions. Dark patches mottled the white-gray surface where the water threatened to break through.
    That was more like the truth than the ground I was crouched on. A thin solid layer suspended over a current that could wash it all away at a hike in the temperature or the crash of a fallen tree.
    I straightened up and edged over from my drinking hole. Carefully, I set one foot on the ice. Then the other. The ice held, emitting a soft creaking like the wind through the greenhouse vents as I eased toward the middle. I spread my feet apart and stood there, gazing down the line of the river. The trees along its bank bent toward it, forming a ragged sort of tunnel. The dark patches blended into the shadows they cast.
    This is it , I thought. This is where I am. So where do I want to be?
    A breeze tickled under my hair, across my neck. I left my scarf loose around my shoulders. I had no idea how deep the water just an inch or two beneath my feet might be. My attention drifted down to the shifting current, followed it along the curves and bends of the river—and came back empty. There was still just me, alone in the woods, adrift without being in motion.
    Alone. The ice creaked louder, with a crackling edge, and that one notion overwhelmed the rest. I could fall through and no one would see. No reaching hands would grasp mine and pull me out.
    Panic fluttered in my chest. I took a hasty step and a seam parted in the ice to the right of my boot. Water seeped up through it. I stiffened. With a tentative slide of my other foot, I eased away from the crack. The treads of my boots scraped over the uneven surface, one and then the other, like I’d done between the colony buildings for the last two months.
    My heel crunched through the ice by the bank, forming a geometric pool. I scrambled into the drift of snow, onto the firm ground, my heart thudding. As I glanced back the way I’d come, I gripped the low branch of a nearby tree, as if the river might try to pull me back.
    The crack looked like little more than a sliver from here. Not so threatening. I drew in a breath and released it. I’d been fine.
    Then I turned around and saw Suzanne in the clearing by my pack. Beneath the line of her woolen hat, her eyes were wide and worried. She took a couple of steps toward me.
    “I didn’t want to startle you,” she said. “You looked like... I’m so glad you got off the ice.”
    “Of course,” I said, confused by her intensity. “I wasn’t going to stand there forever.”
    “No,” she agreed. “I was afraid maybe you wanted it to break.”
    That I— Oh. The thought of plunging into that frigid water sent a shudder through me. “I don’t want to die ,” I said with a little laugh.
    But the way she was still studying my face, maybe that wasn’t obvious. I imagined what the scene must have looked like from her point of view. Remembered how I’d felt poised over the river and standing in the clearing just a little while ago.
    Nothing .
    I didn’t want to die, no. But how much was I alive? I was here, substantial enough to touch the earth, to blot out stars, but a rock could do that. Life put down roots and extended leaves. When was the last time I’d felt I could do that?
    Maybe a part of me was already dead. Maybe it had died like my parents, silent and unseen, and that was why I hadn’t noticed. Until I’d come to myself and looked inside and found nothing but