Tortured Read Online Free PDF Page B

asked.
    “Dead, back in the Enclave. My father was murdered. My mother died giving birth to my sister.”
    “I’m sorry,” the Matrarc said.
    Gaia stared bleakly toward the screen door. “Please,” she said. “Let me go to my sister. I need to be sure she’s okay.”
    “You can’t do anything more for her, and there’s something we need to settle,” the Matrarc said. She made a gesture. “Bring her a chair.”
    Chardo fetched one from farther along the porch, and Gaia eased down upon it. She gripped the edge of the wooden seat with both hands, hating how weak she was.
    “Tell me something,” the Matrarc said. “Why did you go into the wasteland with a baby? Why would you risk her life?”
    “I didn’t have a choice,” Gaia said.
    “Maybe you didn’t for yourself,” the Matrarc said. “But why couldn’t you leave the baby behind? Surely someone in Wharfton would have cared for her.”
    Gaia’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. She had promised her mother to protect Maya, and for Gaia, that had meant staying together as a family. “I couldn’t leave her.”
    “Even knowing it was likely she would die?”
    Gaia shook her head. “You don’t understand. I had to take care of her. I didn’t know it would take us so long to cross the wasteland.” Then she remembered that her friend Emily had offered to care for Maya, and she’d refused. Had that been a mistake?
    “Or what you would find on the other side, I expect,” the Matrarc asked. “It was a terrible risk. A desperate, suicidal risk, in fact. Were you persecuted in your home? Were you a criminal or a rebel of some kind? Did you leave to escape the law?”
    Gaia looked uneasily at Chardo and the others.
    “I resisted the government in the Enclave,” she admitted. “But I didn’t cause any rebellion. I did what I thought was right. That’s all.”
    “‘That’s all’?” the Matrarc echoed, and then laughed. She pensively circled her cane tip against the floor while her eyes grew serious again. “You have a decision to make, Mlass Gaia. Staying in Sylum is like coming through a one-way gate. You can enter, but anyone who tries to leave Sylum dies. We don’t understand fully why this happens, but we find their bodies.”
    Gaia’s eyes grew wide. “I saw a corpse,” she said. “At the oasis two days ago. He was only recently dead. I was afraid it meant the water was poisonous.”
    “A middle-aged man with a full beard and glasses?” the Matrarc asked.
    “Dressed in gray,” Gaia said. It had both frightened her and given her hope that she was nearing civilization.
    “There’s your crim, Chardo,” the Matrarc said. She turned to Gaia. “He escaped from prison here four days ago. It happens to anyone who leaves. We’ve had nomads pass through, but if they stay with us even two days, the same thing happens.”
    Gaia had never heard of anything like it. “What could cause that? Is there a disease here?” She had avoided the corpse for fear of infection.
    “We think it’s something in the environment,” the Matrarc explained. “There’s an acclimation period while your body adjusts to being here, but after that, there’s no harm to those of us who stay. Beyond the obvious.”
    Frowning, Gaia gazed at the gathered crowd, trying to see what was so obvious. Aside from the man in the stocks and the Matrarc’s own blindness, the people looked healthy and fit. There were tall people and short, a few chubby ones, and none very skinny. Old men and young lounged nearby, with a fairly even distribution of skin tones, from pure black to birch white. There were plenty of children, and attire suggested a mix of affluent and poor.
    “What do you mean?” Gaia asked.
    Laughter came from the women on the porch. Gaia turned to Chardo, puzzled.
    “We don’t have many women here,” Chardo said. “Only one in ten babies is a girl.”
    Gaia looked around again in amazement, seeing how few women there were, mostly congregated on the veranda