Free Shadows Have Gone by Lissa Bryan

showed Mindy the tangled, multi-colored scribbles she had drawn, and Mindy admired it before handing the board back to her.  
    “Have you seen Old Miz Marson?” Carly asked.
    “No, that’s why I came over here, actually. I thought if she wasn’t here, she must have spoken to you beforehand.”
    “No.” Carly chewed her lip and glanced over at Justin, but he was in conversation with Grady.
    “I haven’t seen her since last night,” Mindy said. “I’ll go over to her house after the meeting. Maybe no one told her about it.”
    “But she should have heard the commotion when we got back.” Someone should have spoken to her. Miz Marson was a cornerstone of their community. People were constantly tapping on her door to ask her advice about canning or sewing or any of the hundreds of other tasks the modern world had forgotten.
    “I know. It’s weird.” Mindy glanced toward the door. “Should I go now?”
    “No, wait until after the meeting. Justin’s ready to start.”
    Justin cleared his throat as Grady stepped back to take his seat, and the murmurs of conversation died down. The only sounds came from the flutters of the paper fans.
    “Well, we won,” Justin said. “I guess that’s the important part, but you already knew that. I think most of you also already know we lost Kross. Our victory came at a heavy price in that respect. He was a damn good kid, and we’ll miss him. Kaden has set up a memorial for him where he fell. Fitting for him.”
    “I move that today hereafter be known as Kross Day,” Pete said, standing up and raising his hand. “We can have some sort of get-together as a memorial to him every year. Make it sort of a holiday.”
    “Move?” Justin stared at him. “What?”
    “We’re supposed to have motions and vote on them,” Carly murmured.
    “Says who? Motions?” He crumpled his brow.
    “That’s the rules of order. Motions, and then a second, and then a vote.”
    “Can we just skip that shit? Anyone object?” Justin glanced around. “Okay. Passed.”
    “ So say we all ,” Pearl said.
    “What?”
    “Nothing. TV show.”
    Justin had the confused expression of a man who had just been dropped into a middle of a conversation in Farsi. Carly smothered a grin and wished she could kiss the adorable, confused crumple between his eyebrows. Justin just gave a dazed nod and continued with his summary of the battle.
    “We’ve eliminated the threat and added a small store of weapons and food to our stock. Not much. Those guys lived pretty close to the bone. Didn’t really save anything up or manage their resources wisely.”
    “The slaves?” This came from the Reverend, and his sad expression said that he was pretty sure what had happened but needed to hear it from them.
    Carly’s throat felt tight. “They weren’t . . . none of them were able to survive.” She thought of those poor, pathetic wrecks of human beings. Their minds burned away permanently by the Infection, used for brute labor and abused by the men of Clayton, and finally, locked in a building to starve when they were no longer useful. It made Carly physically ill to think of it—and what mercy had compelled her to do. “The condition they were in when we got there . . . I . . . ended their suffering.”
    She saw sorrow and pity on most of the faces, but perhaps a hint of relief, as well. She knew some of them had feared Carly’s soft heart would make her unable to resist bringing some of them to live here in Colby, straining their already meager resources. But Carly knew more than anyone the brutally hard choices leaders sometimes had to make. Choices they made and took on their own shoulders so their people would not have to bear them.
    She looked down at Dagny and wished she’d held the baby on her lap during the meeting so she could hug her now. Hold her close and pretend that her arms could shield Dagny from the knowledge of just how horrible the world could be.
    “We do have a new addition to