Those That Wake 02: What We Become Read Online Free Page A

Okay?”
    “I don’t need to see the counselor.”
    “It helped last time, honey, and if you’re not coming home, then at least do that. I know you don’t want my help, Laura. That’s a way you can help yourself. Please.”
    Laura was suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of how far away and helpless her mother must feel.
    “I love you, Mom,” she said softly.
    “I love you, too, Laura. So much. Go see the counselor.”
    “I will.”
    “Promise.”
    “I do.”
    “Okay. Tell Josh I said hello.”
    “I will. Bye, Mom.”
    The screen flickered out on her mother’s smiling face, leaving behind a scrolling advertisement for soothing, comforting hot chocolate mix.
    Without her mother’s presence, the room was filled with Laura’s growing unease. And that note wasn’t helping. She wished Kari, her roommate, were here, just so someone would be around when she read it.
    She walked over and picked up the note and held it, still folded, before her. What the hell was going on with her? It was just a goddamned piece of paper
. Open it
.
    She did. A silly, innocuous message; probably slipped under the wrong door for all it meant to Laura. It contained only one sentence:
    Where is the Librarian?

Rose
    MAL WOKE FROM A TWITCHING nightmare, his face crusted to the concrete ground with his own vomit, the glints of grim gray light pricking his brain like long needles. He was, by some way of thinking, fortunate to be waking up at all, though fortune felt as foreign to him right now as a smiling face and a warm embrace.
    He pulled himself to a sitting position, his stomach somersaulting and the dry matter on his face crumbling into flakes as he winced. The space around him reflected the tone of his thoughts just now: a large room filled with toppled wooden chairs and tables, a forlorn kitchen filled with rusting pots and pans seen through a long galley window. Once it had been a soup kitchen, when such things were allowed in the city. The homeless, though, had been shipped out of the city by ranks of MCT officers in riot gear, shuffled off, and dropped into neighboring cities, into hastily constructed and just as hastily disintegrating camps. City government had mandated a shiny, flawless façade that would present an inviting picture of a hopeful future to its inhabitants. Problems like poverty were more easily denied and coated over with gleaming new surfaces than actually addressed. So, what use were homeless shelters? This one, far past simple abandonment, had been forgotten. Like the forest Mal had once woken in to find himself trapped by a power beyond his understanding, this homeless shelter had been torn out of the memory of Man, interred in the graveyard of the past, lost to everyone. Except Mal.
    The walls of concrete and wood were seamed and cracked, long fissures running up to end somewhere Mal couldn’t track, and they made him think of the face in the shadows of the monster’s lair, its seams and cracks deep and old. The color here was old, too, old and washed out, eve-rything merely suggesting a color; its pigment worn away and inexorably moving toward a disintegrating gray, including the scraps of produce still lying on the kitchen counter, dried and withering like dead plants. Even the light here— pouring through a crumbling window that no longer contained curtains, pane, or glass—was dim and muffled, a dirty light that fell from muted clouds and felt like old dust on your skin.
    Mal wouldn’t look up at that sky now. Dim though it may be, its illumination was more than he wished to inflict on his aching brain at the moment. He knew it well, though; knew the muted colors and worn-out texture of this place as well as he knew his own scarred face. This place, places of its kind, had been a second home for nearly a year now. He was used to the sound, too, the way the thrum of traffic and quick
rat-a-tat
of thousands of walking feet blended together and Dopplered into this place in warped waves, one second far