The Enclave Read Online Free Page B

past his throat, so instead, he busied himself with milking Miss Malpi dry. Then he stood and slid out of the narrow space between the stanchions to carry his own pail down to the cold room, which stood at the far corner of the narrow chamber in which they milked the goats. The roughhewn, cement-plastered ceiling hung but a foot above Zowan’s head, and two rows of wooden stanchions stood end to end with a narrow walkway between them, six on one side, three on the other. A bundle of cables and pipes ran along the top of the wall just under the ceiling, bringing power and water to the cold room.
    The cold room had a raised concrete platform for a floor, so when he stepped up through the doorway, he had to duck his head. Inside, the fifty-gallon cold can stood to his left, adjoined by a narrow counter and cabinets that ran around two and a half sides of the small, dim-lit room. The odor of disinfectant tickled his nose.
    Terra stood at the double ceramsteel sink in the middle of the counter across from the doorway, washing her bucket in the soapy water of the left sink. She was a slim girl, her curves lost in the baggy green cotton tunic she wore over white cotton pants—the regulation uniform, with minor color variations, for all members of the Enclave. But even the baggy clothes could not diminish her beauty. Her red-brown hair fell in twin braids to her hips, and her heart-shaped face held a sweetness that belied her quick, strong mind.
    He dumped his pail of milk into the fifty-gallon refrigerated ceram–steel collection can, careful to keep his distance from her—not easy in a chamber that barely accommodated one person. She helped by stepping to the right as she rinsed her bucket in the empty sink. Being only half an arm’s length away from her, he felt her nearness with a keenness that made him realize belatedly that they probably shouldn’t even be alone in the milking room together, much less this tiny cold room.
    “I can’t believe he would do such a thing,” Terra said woodenly, shaking the last drops of water from her rinsed pail, then setting it upside down on the counter beside the others. “How could he be so ungrateful? So unthinking?” Her tone was so insincere, Zowan cringed. But she kept on, tension creeping into her tone. “Here, Father gives him life and he can’t even offer simple thanks?”
    Zowan said nothing. Better to keep silent. As she stepped away from the sink toward the door, he moved into the space she’ d left and plunged his own pail into the sink of soapy water.
    “He deserves the Cube, of course,” she said from the doorway. “Which is surely what he’ll get.”
    Zowan shuddered as he pushed the lever to turn on the water and rinsed his pail.
    “Zowan?” She’ d hesitated in the doorway, looking back at him, her tone one of question and of warning.
    “Of course,” he agreed. “Of course he does.” But he sounded no more convincing than she had. He set his pail on the counter beside hers and turned to follow her through the narrow doorway back into the milking room. Like many of the outlying sections of the subterranean enclave in which they all lived, its walls were concrete-sealed, roughhewn stone. Two long tubes had been bored into the ceiling rock, equidistant from each other and topped with sky prisms at the upper ends, through which the sun’s light was magnified and channeled. To his right, an opening led into the paddock chamber, where the goats were kept in one of two paddocks. To his left, beyond the rows of milking stanchions, another doorway led down to the Enclave’s central complex of living and common areas.
    Now he stood in the cold-room doorway as Terra unhooked her goat from the stanchion and led her to the near paddock. Once she was past, he stepped into the aisle himself and headed for Miss Malpi. Barely had he reached the goat’s stanchion when a bald, dark-robed figure burst from the far doorway and strode toward him. Two others followed in his