Remnants 14 - Begin Again Read Online Free Page A

his throat. “Then it is final. Echo and the child will be locked away.”
    Echo lay on her narrow bed, eyes open, staring into the middle distance. In a small crib by the wall, her baby slept fitfully.
    The room was reserved for the very ill. There was nothing personal about it. Echo’s thoughts momentarily turned to the blond-haired boy from the ship. Jobs. The one who’d given her a few crumbly crackers. It was the first and only gift Echo had ever received other than her life on this Earth. She wondered if he’d thought of her since leaving the Alpha colony with the Marauders. She wondered if he had any idea of how much his small kindness had meant to her.
    There is no kindness here. Echo reminded herself, sadly. She wanted to run away, right then, from the place that was no longer home. From the place that she’d once found simply boring but certainly never threatening. She could grab her child and go, slip up to the surface, take her chances on —
    Echo turned her head to the crib where her baby lay sleeping and knew she could never run away. Echo was petrified of leaving the colony. No matter that it recently had become a scary place, it was the only home she’d ever known.
    Besides, how would she find the Marauders? And if she did happen to stumble across them, who was to say they’d welcome two more mouths to feed?
    Anyway, the journey would be horrible. And the baby was weak. Echo would have to be strong for them both, but how could she be with absolutely no experience of life on the surface of the planet?
    A faint sound made Echo frown in concentration. What was that? Where had it come from?
    Echo listened hard but heard nothing more. After a moment, her thoughts wandered back to her dilemma.
    So, what were her choices? Did she really have any options? Or was she simply doomed to be a victim to the people who were supposed to protect her? Never love her. No, Echo had never known much about love, not before the baby, anyway.
    Echo bolted to a sitting position. The noise — it was louder now — from the hall?
    Footsteps? A shuffling … Coming closer?
    And then — nothing. Silence for at least twenty beats. Slowly, Echo lowered herself again and sighed. She was becoming a nervous wreck. Why would anyone be sneaking around the bunker? There was nothing to hide, nothing to steal….
    Echo’s eyes closed as a wave of exhaustion slammed her. The baby’s faint but now steady breathing lured her further into the abyss of sleep….
    She barely realized it when the hand clapped over her mouth.
    “Ahhh!”
    Sanchez was flung back into consciousness with all the gentleness of a man being flung aside by a Beast. He shot to his feet — and crumpled, dizzy and frightened and thirsty.
    He lay still for a moment until his head stopped spinning. Then, he rolled over onto his stomach, then up onto his knees.
    Frantically, he clawed at the ashy ground, searching, hoping to find — hoping not to find —
    the spiny green things he’d seen … but, no. Sanchez laid his hands flat. That ground, in the vision, it was — brown. Impossible! And moist, and when he’d taken a clump in his hand and squeezed, it had formed a lump. Sanchez grabbed up a handful of the gray ash. When he opened his hand the ash sifted through his fingers.
    Dry.
    He squinted up at the sky, afraid he’d be blinded by the sudden appearance of that too-bright ball. He didn’t think he’d ever really seen “yellow” before, though he’d heard that the sun, back before the Rock, was called “yellow.” In the vision it had hurt his eyes and frightened him — and yet, for some reason he couldn’t articulate, more than anything Sanchez wanted to find that bright yellow ball screaming down at him now.
    That and — water. Could those blue expanses have been … Blue? Sanchez didn’t really understand that word, either, and yet it came to him to describe the vast areas he’d seen in his vision….
    Sanchez grasped the small chunk of metal that