Sarah Tries to Save the World Read Online Free Page A

mouth. The other four stare at me, not even attempting to hide their surprise.
     
    “DEK341! DEK! DEK is to blame!”
     
    All four of them drop their jaws open suddenly, dumbfounded at this. The ‘puzzle pieces’ all fit. The only question is, what’s DEK to blame for? Maria immediately starts pacing back and forth. It’s a few minutes before anyone finally asks her what she’s doing.
     
    “Um, what’re you doing, Maria?” says Ben.
     
    She looks up at him with a panicked look on her face.
     
    “How could I’ve read those symbols?” Huh, so she can recognize them as symbols now. “They’re not English. I didn’t hear the message about DEK341 on the radio because my family never owned one. Why don’t I remember learning them?”
     
    We all look at each other, even more confused, but continue digging towards Lynin City. As I dig, I, too, wonder how she could’ve learned that language. More importantly, how could she have learned that language and not remembered about it?
     

Chapter 5
     
    We arrived in Lynin City around dawn, with Aria, Ben, and Lily all digging while I keep moving our possessions. Oh, plus, I was carrying Maria along every time the tunnel expanded. Well, to be more accurate, expanded enough that where ‘Sleeping Beauty’ was sleeping needed to be used for the dirt we were digging out to go into.
     
    Maria finally woke up at around 10 am, after we had expanded our little underground base and cooked a bit of breakfast. She rubs the grit out of her eyes, standing up slowly before gratefully eating her portion of breakfast. She said through a mouthful of fresh, homegrown bread, "I know there's a river here if we want to get a fresh supply of water."
     
    I eye her grimy clothing and face and nod vigorously. "Not to be rude," I start, "but you need a little bit of a wash, as do all of us. And we need fresh water.”
     
    Aria and Lily agree, but Ben shakes his head, rolls his eyes, and shrugs in rapid succession. It actually looks a bit like a dance move, and I begin imitating him until he cuts across me with what he must’ve been about to say.
     
    "Washing up isn't that important," he mumbles.
     
    I laugh. Of course he'd think that that. He is a guy, after all. All four of us girls shake our heads back at him.
     
    He spreads his hands, giving us some wide eyed and innocent looks from his eyes. "What? It isn't that important!"
     
    I roll my eyes at him, saying loftily, “Boys.”
     
    Then it’s all hands on deck as we grab our weapons, in case we need them to defend Aria when she surfaces. She climbs up to the surface, comes back down, and tells us that Lynin City is nice, semi-clean, not really destroyed at all, and ready for scavenging.
    I nod my head in satisfaction and we all go look for food. We find a decent haul, but not fantastically awesome (‘fantastically awesome’ is defined as ‘what we found in our last city, Mynton’ in our book, by the way).
     
    We come away with ten new cans of soup, corn, and other food before we walk into a semi-destroyed warehouse. I hear a sharp intake of breath from either side of me. Spray-painted on the walls, yet again, are the words 'follow the white' and 'DEK is to blame'.
     
    I feel torn between groaning and humorlessly laughing. Whoever spray-paints these walls is really serious about their message. Almost too serious, because who would be crazy enough to travel to all these places to do this? More importantly, why? Why would they leave the ever-enigmatic message I've grown sick and tired of here and those other places?
     
    We slowly leave as a pack, making the short trip back to the base quickly, tossing the cans of food into our base, and quickly refilling our water bottles from the nearby river.
    I lean over, tentatively placing a single foot in the water to check the temperature.
    The next thing I know, I’m forcefully pushed from behind and faceplant into the (luckily deep) river. I splutter in indignation as I stand,