Free Tremors: A Stone Braide Chronicles Story by Bonnie S. Calhoun Page A

What did it mean?
    Tremors of fear scrolled up her back and across her scalp. Why did she have these dreams only when she slept on the beach? She understood the images . . . the Sorrows. A super volcano, earthquakes, nuclear explosions, and the tsunami had destroyed the country all in the space of one short week.
    But that had happened 150 years ago.

2

    S elah squinted at the sun still hanging low in the sky. Thankfully she’d slept less than an hour. Disoriented, she rose from her favorite comfort spot in the thick pampas grass and stood to stretch the sleep from her lean frame. Her eyes prickled with dried crust. She must have cried herself to sleep. Father was selling her into a life of bondage, slavery at its basest form, and her mother could do nothing to save her. No amount of reasoning or cajoling had worked because he was giving her, bag and baggage, in marriage to Jericho Kingston from Waterside Borough.
    Selah’s eyes widened. She’d nearly forgotten. She turned toward the sea. A motion at the shoreline caught her attention, and she dropped back to the cover of the tall grass. Good. She hadn’t lost them. Father and the boys were still at the water’s edge. The sun reflected brightly off the sea. They’d be burnt to a crisp if they stayed out there much longer. The boys took after Father with their fair skin, blond hair, and brown eyes, while she favored Mother with olive skin, dark hair, and green eyes. She could follow them everywhere all day in the hot sun and be no worse for wear.
    Father had told Mother he was meeting with Simeon Kingston today to talk details of the nuptials. Since she wasn’t allowed to have a say in the arrangement, she planned on being their shadow everywhere. She’d get to the bottom of this deal if it was the last thing she did as a free woman.
    Technically she wasn’t a woman yet, and that was the only reasonshe still roamed free. Her eighteenth Birth Remembrance was in two days. The wedding was set for ninety days later.
    Selah didn’t want to get married. She especially didn’t want to be married to someone she didn’t know. To add insult to injury, she hadn’t seen Jericho Kingston since they were seven years old. At the time he was gangly as a stick bug, with a big nose and bulging eyes. She shivered. A frown etched its way across her forehead as she tapped nervously on her knee. A fate worse than death awaited her with a man she’d never even kissed. For that matter, she hadn’t done a lip dance with any boy, but she’d have liked the chance to try.
    She peeked through the grass. Father and the boys were pointing to a boat at sea. A new Lander was coming ashore. The boat bobbed closer but was still about a hundred feet out.
    She glared as though Father could feel her animosity. She wanted a life of her own, to be a hunter, to be down there on the beach with them, as part of the family business. Why didn’t they want her? Sometimes she felt as though she belonged to a different family, like she was adopted.
    The boat drifted closer. She saw it clearly now. Large rowboat shape, high sides, probably able to transport a dozen men with no effort, but always carrying only one passenger—a man with a winged tattoo on the left side of his forehead. This country hunted these strangers, men her father called Landers.
    Father had disappeared from Selah’s view. She tried to peer over the edge of the dune but only succeeded in nearly slipping into the ancient rubble pit in front of her hiding place. It had once been a high-rise building much farther from the sea, but it now sat as a concrete corpse at the edge of encroaching waters. Rusty, twisted steel reinforcement bars tangled in the broken construction detritus threatened to impale her for a misstep.
    Her brothers Raza and Cleon still stood at the shore, then Raza began to wade into the water. What was he doing? No! That was a stupid move.
    Selah scrambled from her hiding place, running around the grassy dune and down