Free Guardian of the Storm by Kaitlyn O'Connor Page B

word, he handed her the water skin, hefted his pack and started the climb down the rocks.
    He wasn’t the talkative type, but there was something about him that seemed different. He didn’t seem to be angry—exactly. He seemed withdrawn, she finally decided, as if his mind was elsewhere. She dismissed it after a while, following her own thoughts, allowing her imagination to run wild with plans for a future with the other survivors of the disaster.
    Even if there was no longer any sign of the disease that had killed so many, or if, by some lucky chance, she and the other survivors had built up an immunity to it, it was going to be hard, emotionally speaking, to go back to the colony, bury the dead and take up the lives they’d had before. She felt certain, though, that that was what they should do. As many times as she’d heard the adults bewail the loss of so much of their technology in the crash, it was still vast when compared to what the Niahians had, and more than that, a part of the people that needed to be preserved.
    It was mid-afternoon before they stopped to eat again. Tempest, still caught up in her own world, was surprised when Kiran stopped, and tempted to try to persuade him to keep going since she now had her own reasons for seeing that Kiran finished what he’d set out to do as quickly as possible. He seemed rather disinclined to talk, though, and she realized that she needed to pace herself, despite her impatience, so she kept her thoughts to herself.
    They stopped only briefly in any case, since they’d had a late start to begin with. Tempest felt more than a little guilty about it. He’d emphasized how important it was for him to reach his destination in time. It didn’t matter what she thought about it, or that she couldn’t see what difference it made when they got there. It was important to him, and because he’d been kind enough to allow her to tag along, he might not reach this sacred place he’d told her about, not when he was supposed to, anyway.
    Realizing that, Tempest made an effort to keep pace with him, pushing herself as much as she dared to try to make up the time he’d lost. He glanced at her curiously several times and finally spoke. “You cannot keep this pace. You will exhaust yourself.”
    Tempest shook her head. “No,” she said a little breathlessly. “I’m used to it now. And we need to make up the time you lost waiting for me.”
    “We will not make it up if you faint and I have to carry you,” he pointed out.
    Tempest chuckled. “Good thing I’m not prone to fainting. I did once, though. The first time I killed something to eat, I puked and then I passed out cold when I cut its throat and it bled all over the place.”
    His brows rose questioningly and Tempest shook her head.
    “It’s the difference between knowing how and actually doing it. Like I said, I learned a lot, but actually doing it is something else altogether.”
    “You had not prepared food before you were forced to leave the place of the star people?”
    Tempest frowned. “Actually, nobody had had a lot of experience with it. When we crashed here—well, not me. I was born later—they managed to retrieve a lot of our supplies. It was a controlled crash, you understand—damaged the ship beyond repairing it, but they managed to set it down without killing many people. Naturally, they rationed supplies, but they mostly lived off of them while they were building the colony. They knew, eventually, the supplies would run out and they’d have to start growing, or catching, food, but nobody really had much of an idea of how to do that—they had to learn. On Earth, you see, everything was processed, packaged, ready to add water or heat or eat just as it was, right from the package. And then, too, they had to test everything to see what could be eaten by humans that wouldn’t kill them.
    “Luckily for me, they’d figured all of that out before … before everybody got sick and started dying. I’d