Free Horizon (03) by Sophie Littlefield

and his stance said he was determined to hold his ground.
    Earl stepped out onto the porch and looked out at the crowd. Saying nothing, he put a hand on Phillip’s shoulder and pushed him back into the doorway. The boy went mutely, shuffling, and now Sammi could see that he was trembling. He didn’t look sick, though with that mask on she couldn’t see much. He just looked scared, scared as shit, and since his mom had died in the first round of fever and his older brother and his girlfriend had set out for Sacramento in December and not been heard from since, he didn’t have anyone to come to his aid.
    Except for Sage. They’d been together since before Sammi got to New Eden, and it was as serious as any couple she knew about, even if they were young. They sat together during Red’s crazy homeschool sessions, and both worked part-time in the laundry so they could spend their work hours together, too. Phillip was always trying to make her laugh, and he gave her the best parts of his meals and took her plate to the washtub. They had been close enough that occasionally Sammi felt left out, and on those occasions she just hung out with Kyra and told herself it didn’t matter, not everyone had to be her best friend all the time, except some days were so lonely that she would have traded everything to have a best friend and on those days she would have picked Sage, if Sage wasn’t obsessed with Phillip and didn’t already have someone more important in her life than Sammi, just like everyone had something more important to them than her.
    Like a certain parent who couldn’t even be bothered to be here now. If he was, he would know what to do, Sammi thought and then immediately felt angry. Well, her dad used to be in charge of a whole town or whatever, to hear the way Cass talked, and Cass said he was fair and brave and took care of things and even set up a whole system of commerce and laws and shit. Which, if she really admitted it to herself, Sammi had felt secretly proud of. But where was he now? When there was a real crisis, when Phillip needed him—when Sammi needed him—when someone had to step up and take care of things, and it was so stupid with New Eden having this whole collaborative-governing shit. No one was ever really in charge and whenever the least little thing went wrong it was like this with all the adults standing around staring at each other and no one doing anything that would actually make things better.
    “Let him go!” Sage screamed, her voice wild and unfamiliar. “He’s not sick, just look at him, he didn’t do anything, you just want to throw someone in there to make it look like you’re doing something—”
    But Sammi caught her breath, because Phillip was looking back at them, his hand on the doorjamb to steady himself, most of his face obscured by the white mask except for his eyes, which were frightened and beseeching—
    —and his pupils had almost disappeared.
    Tiny black specks in the sky-blue of his eyes. And his skin… Phillip was fair, so fair he wore a big straw hat to avoid getting sunburned during the day, and it looked like a woman’s gardening hat so that Shane and Kalyan sometimes called him Ladyhat.... His skin was not so pale today. It had a burnished-gold tone, and there was a sheen to the skin above his eyes, that faint perspiration that made a person seem to glow.
    A person with the fever glowed that way.
    Sammi dug her fingers more tightly into Sage’s arm and yanked her back.
    “Ow, Sammi, stop, you’re hurting me,” Sage wailed, as Earl spoke quietly to Phillip, and Phillip stepped back, disappearing into the house. Earl closed the door and Old Mike let go of Sage so abruptly that she fell against Sammi and they almost stumbled to the ground together.
    And Dana took the key out of his pocket and locked the door.
    Zihna did her best with Sage but in the end it was Red who finally got her to sleep, on the sofa in front of the fire. They almost never lit fires