Second Wave Read Online Free Page A

you didn’t say what happened, I hoped you had. He’s mean, no, he’s worse than mean, he’s des-pic-able.”
    “Maybe so,” Khorii said. “But he’s not dead. At least not by my hand.” She stood again, taking Sesseli’s hand, and they turned the corner and stepped onto the sky bridge. Hail joined the rain in an attack on the geometrically patterned art of the colored glass forming the corridor. Khorii hoped the glass was as strong as it ought to be or the fist-sized balls might break it. Who would replace it then? Some elder experienced in the construction industry? How would the other kids know how to do anything they needed to do to survive without their parents or even business owners to teach them or do it for them? She really must speak to Abuelita about organizing the remaining elders to start teaching the youngsters their skills. While it was sad that the older kids most capable of working would lose the rest of their childhoods, the loss of their parents had accomplished that. Becoming more self-sufficient might let them stay on their homeworld at least instead of someplace like the school on Maganos Moonbase, or one of the horrible children’s camps still flourishing where her mother’s influence had yet to penetrate.
    Thunder boomed, rattling the windows in their panes, followed closely by a dazzling crack of forked lightning that briefly illuminated the campus and courtyard. Odd. The sheets of rain and hail almost seemed to assume amorphous shapes, silver-blue veils of mist drifting across the paved courtyard, rolling across the splashes and hailstones rebounding from the hard surface. The strobe of lightning was gone in an instant, and the outside was plunged into darkness again. Inside the tunnel, lights flickered in their overhead grids. Something white and silvery blew across the corridor from one side to the other ahead of them. Another silvery shadow capered ahead of them.
    Sesseli let out another squeak, and Khorii squeezed her hand, saying in thought-talk, because anything above a whisper seemed too perilous here, “Condensation, probably. Little localized clouds, carried by drafts.”
    Sesseli crowded close to Khorii’s thigh as the two walked across the bridge, cautiously and slowly at first, as if expecting at any moment that the glass would implode or the bridge would fall. Halfway across, Khorii quickened her pace until she was almost dragging Sesseli with her in her haste to cross. Finally, by unspoken agreement, she hoisted the little girl into her arms, set her on her hip, and galloped the rest of the way to the laboratory, her hard hooflike feet thudding against the thin carpeting.
    Khiindi sat yowling indignantly outside the closed laboratory door.
    Sesseli lifted him and rubbed her face into the soft fur of his side. He mewed in a pitiful tone. Wasn’t it terrible the way these people treated harmless cats and little girls?
    Khorii opened the laboratory door. With the soundproofing in the building, Elviiz would be the only one who could hear noises beyond that door.
    He was there, as was Jalonzo, staring at the floor.
    Beyond them, the door to a cooling container hung open. At their feet, shards of broken curved objects, liquids spilling from them.
    “The formula,” Jalonzo told her, not looking up. “Someone tried to destroy it.”
    “Tried to?”
    “I have my handwritten notes,” he said, shrugging. “I can make it again if I can find more of the right ingredients.”
    “I also have Jalonzo’s notes,” Elviiz said. “I uploaded them as soon as we returned from our mission, Khorii.”
    “It’s a good thing we came back when we did,” Khorii said. It helped her feel a little less guilty about not being out with the rescue teams, knowing that because of their return Elviiz was in time to back up research that might find a permanent cure for the scourge of the known universe.
    Hap Hellstrom came in, trailed by Sesseli, still holding Khiindi. “What happened here?”