Free The Shelter Cycle by Peter Rock Page A

arms inside the body of his jacket, where it was warmer. When he twisted at the waist, the jacket’s arms swung loose and slapped his body; the sound was exactly the same as when he’d done this as a boy.
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    Much later, he awakened to Kilo’s claws scratching his rib cage. The dog wanted to get out, but Colville held him still, one hand over his snout. A strange whistling filled the darkness, a high-pitched and guttural call. The fire had burned down, out. Was it snowing? The moonlight shone faintly. Footsteps, silence, another call. And then, in silhouette, a long line of elk shuffled past, only twenty feet away. Colville could smell them, musty and sour; Kilo’s body tensed, his hair rose up. The calls, so sudden and strange, caught right under the skin, floated back even after they were gone.

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    We started the school day with twenty minutes of decrees, trying to visualize what the words said, trying not to think of anything else. We were taught that there was a secret-ray chakra in the center of each of our hands. We held our hands cupped when we decreed, so these chakras would hold more Light. Even the babies learned to decree; they were held in teachers’ laps while the teachers decreed and clapped the babies’ hands.
    We had regular classes, like reading, math, and geography, as well as the spiritual teachings. It was all Montessori, with plants everywhere and shelves of stones, felt animals and sandpaper letters and wooden blocks, art supplies. Our classroom was in the basement of someone’s house, but we called it an academy, treated it like an important place. Maya’s school was in someone’s attic, a half mile away from our school. My mom was our fourth- and fifth-grade teacher, and Colville was in class with me.
    Sometimes the books we studied had words or sentences or paragraphs blacked out with marker, things we weren’t supposed to know, and sometimes in the picture books whole pages were torn out or missing. That made things hard to follow.
    We had to avoid pictures of animals talking or doing anything like a person, since animals were incomplete expressions, still changing to be like us one day. If you looked at a talking fox, you might take on the qualities of being foxy or cunning or deceitful. That was the Teaching. When we watched a videotape of
Fantasia,
the hippos were dancing and we were all told to cross our arms across our hearts, and to cross our legs, so that we wouldn’t absorb what we were watching. It’s funny, we had a little television, and a VCR set atop a bookcase, and we all sat at our desks with our arms crossed, watching so carefully.
    One time we were watching another videotape. The digital numbers counting up on the VCR were as interesting to me as the movie, and I also watched the two windows up behind the television, two more squares of light, right at the level of the ground. A piece of sagebrush blew past, someone’s feet in heavy boots walked by, a black dog sniffed along.
    I felt my mom standing behind me, the pull of her body as she watched with us. She treated me like a regular student, and I wasn’t to call her Mom like I did at home.
    This videotape was all about how geography was going to change in the next five years. Our Activity had left California and come to Montana because the Ascended Masters had said California was going to break off from the continent and sink into the ocean. California, Oregon, even Idaho might sink away like that. Montana was all right; we were on good tectonic plates. A man’s voice told us this, and on the screen the colored map showed the continents crack and the shape of the edges change as those states sank away, all those people lost and drowned.
    Then the door of the classroom opened. There was no knock, no warning. The television was silent, switched off right away. The whole room got brighter.
    It was the Messenger. Standing in the doorway without