The Enclave Read Online Free Page A

That had been another time, another life, one he’ d put firmly behind him. Why would he relapse now?
    His gaze fixed on the bloody palm print just visible on a fold of the coat.
    Please . . . help us. . . .
    “No!”
    He shoved himself away from the desk and went to the wooden cabinet, where he pulled out a clear plastic garbage bag. Weirdly unwilling to even touch the lab coat now, he picked it up with the bag, then shook the garment down into the bag’s plastic folds. Knotting the ends, he dropped the whole thing into the hazmat bin at the end of the left counter, dumped the dead frogs on top of it, and followed that with a tray of used plastic test tubes. From there he went around the counters straightening and tidying, throwing away the trash that had accumulated—as if in doing so he might purge the memories that were even now trying to creep back into his present.
    When the lab’s door lock clacked, he nearly jumped out of his skin. As he turned toward it, the regular night janitor entered, a swarthy-faced, elderly Hispanic with snow-white hair. The old man stopped in surprise to see Cam staring at him. Then he dipped his head, apologizing in a raspy, heavily accented voice for “disturbing the doctor.”
    “That’s all right,” Cam said before the man could back out the door. “I was just leaving.” And he did exactly that.

Chapter Three
    New Eden
    “Did you hear that the Enforcers took Andros away?” Terra’s voice came from the other side of the goat, barely carrying above the rhythmic hiss of the milk as it streamed into the bucket between Zowan’s knees. His hands, locked into the familiar cadence, squeezed and released in perfect alternation, one teat allowed to fill as the other was emptied. Hiss. Hiss. Hiss. He didn’t miss the beat by even a hair, so if anyone was watching—always a possibility, particularly since it was Andros who’d been taken—they would not guess at the sudden sick lurch of his stomach, nor the wild acceleration of his heart.
    The goat did, though, for she stamped restlessly and tossed her head as much as the stanchion allowed. Zowan kept the streams aimed into the ceramsteel bucket, alternating evenly, and clamped down on his panic. As Miss Malpi settled back, he leaned his forehead once more against her soft brown flank and spoke with careful casualness. “No.” Hiss. Hiss. Hiss. “When?”
    “This morning after service.” Terra sat on her own stool, milking her own goat on the other side of Miss Malpi, the two of them alone in the small low-ceilinged milking room with the goats. Things had not gone well this morning. Three of their twenty-five milkers had developed early signs of bag fever, which necessitated isolating the sick trio and treating them, checking the others for potential illness, then sterilizing all the equipment and stalls. When the breakfast bell had rung, they still had fifteen goats to milk and all of them to feed. Zowan had sent his younger staff members to breakfast and morning Affirmation, staying on to finish up the morning’s work alone. He’ d been on the third to last milker when Terra had returned about fifteen minutes ago.
    “Gaias led them?” he asked, speaking of the Enforcers who’d taken his friend.
    “Of course.”
    “What charges?”
    “Blasphemy.” She paused, her streams of milk shortening and faltering as she coaxed the last bit of liquid from her goat’s udder. “He refused to say the Affirmation.”
    After what Andros had told him last night in the Star Garden, Zowan knew he shouldn’t be surprised. But he was. Part of him rejoiced at Andros’s courage and conviction; another part was horrified.
    Terra’s stool scraped as she stood. While she walked down to the cold room to pour her milk into the collection can, Zowan sought to express the appropriate words of shock and disgust for Andros’s affront. He knew the hidden Watchers would frown upon him for saying nothing; nevertheless, he could not force the words