Free Shades of Earth by Beth Revis Page A

anything.
    â€œWho is that?” he asks, approaching the cryo chamber. Orion is caught mid-action, his hands clawing at the glass, his eyes bulging under ice.
    â€œThat’s the man who killed Juliana Robertson’s husband. And he tried to kill you too.”
    Dad turns to me. “There’s a lot that happened while I was asleep. I need you to fill me in.”
    I don’t have to ask why he’s asking me and not Elder. Still, I almost hesitate to speak. Am I undermining Elder’s position by telling my father what I know rather than insisting he talk to Elder directly?
    No . . . no. My father needs to know the truth about Orion, and I know Elder would hesitate to explain all his faults. Dad doesn’t need excuses—he needs to know exactly why Orion’s dangerous. I explain, as best I can, who Orion is and why he thought murdering the frozens in the military might save his own people. I don’t tell him that Elder’s plan is for Dad and the rest of the frozens to judge and punish Orion. I make it sound as if Orion’s punishment is being frozen—I don’t want him awake, not even for judgment. I want him to live for centuries trapped in ice, just as I had to.
    Dad shakes his head, trying to understand why Orion would let his friends melt to death. He reaches forward, tucking a stray lock of my red hair behind my ear. “You’ve been through so much,” he says, his voice cracking with regret.
    My right hand goes unconsciously to my left wrist, rubbing it, retracing the area that was once, three months ago, bruised from being forced down to the ground, pinned between the dirt and a man who reveled in the evil he committed.
    Dad wraps his arm around me. “The shipborns,” he begins gently, “they’re different from what I expected.”
    â€œThey’re different from what I expected too.”
    â€œAnything that can help me understand them . . . ”
    I release my wrist and swallow the words I want to say.
    Dad starts pacing—a habit that I picked up from him. “Those people,” he says, “they all look the same, and they have some kid as their leader, and there are fewer of them than we expected by this time.” He reminds me of a caged animal, turning sharply at each wall and stomping to the next. “And if the probe records are right, the journey here didn’t take three hundred years . . . the probe indicates that more than half a millennia has passed.”
    So that’s how long
Godspeed
orbited the planet under the tyrannical rule of the Eldest system: two hundred extra years. Six, maybe seven or eight Eldests? And one Elder who refused.
    â€œWhat happened in those five centuries?” Dad continues, but he’s talking more to himself than to me. “What have they done to themselves? Obviously some sort of genetic modification. But their societal rules have changed over time too . . . ”
    â€œThey have been playing with genetic modifiers,” I say. Dad’s attention zeros in on me; he’s listening to me with an intensity I’ve never seen from him before. “I mean, they did something to make themselves monoethnic, obviously, but I know that the babies are injected with gen mod material before they’re born.” Dad doesn’t say anything—his rapt attention is making me a little nervous, a little babbly. “I was told that it was to prevent problems. They took out race as a source of conflict—and religion, and anything else that would make them disagree or fight.”
    Dad’s look turns contemplative. “You sound like one of them,” he says finally.
    â€œExcuse me?”
    â€œListen to how you said that,” he says.
“‘Excuse me.’”
He throws the words at me accusingly. “You have an accent now.”
    â€œI do not!”
    He looks at me full-on. “You do.”
    I scowl.