Free Survival Colony 9 by Joshua David Bellin Page A

mean. If they can copy our look, our voice, does that make them us? Do they think like us? Feel like us? Or is it all just counterfeit?” Her shoulders rippled. “I’ve really got to stop thinking about this.”
    She took a deep breath, let it out in a whoosh . She picked up a stone from beside the pool and dropped it to the bottom, where it landed with a soft poof on the pile of dust. I stole a glimpse at her arm, slim but sleek with muscle.
    “Did you ever wonder what the world was like before?” she asked.
    “Before when?”
    “Before now,” she said. “Before the wars, the warming. Before people destroyed it.”
    “What does Wali say?” I asked, and instantly regretted it.
    “He won’t talk about it.” I thought I heard a note of anger in her voice. “He says it’s a waste of time to think about how we got here. He says we’re here now, and that’s all that matters.”
    “Sounds familiar.”
    “Laman.” She smiled, then sobered. “He won’t talk about it either.”
    “Except to curse the fools who wrecked the place.”
    She laughed. It was a deep, melodious sound, and it startled me. You don’t hear laughs, real laughs, much in camp.
    I imitated his gruff voice. “Big cities, fast cars, instant gratification! It was like living in an amusement park!”
    Korah laughed again. Then she asked, “What’s an amusement park?”
    “I don’t know.” I felt a smile steal across my lips. “I don’t think he knows either.”
    We fell silent, swinging our legs in the empty swimming pool.
    “All the other grown-ups talk about it,” she interrupted the quiet. “Even though they never saw it.”
    “The old woman did.”
    “But the rest of them,” she said. “The ones born after the wars. It’s like they have this obsession with it. And no one even knows if any of it’s true.”
    I shrugged.
    “My mom’s one of the worst offenders,” Korah said. “She’s not even forty, but she talks about it like she lived there all her life. Like she’d go back there in a second if she could.”
    The anger had returned to her voice. She brushed hair from her eyes, swung her legs so violently her heels smacked the edge of the pool. They gave off a series of dull echoes, immediately stifled in the dust below.
    “The old woman told me she used to wake to the songs of birds,” I said quietly.
    “Birds.” Korah took a deep breath, closed her eyes. When they opened again, their blue struck me like something precious I hadn’t seen in years. “Now all we have are bugs.” She crossed her eyes, stuck out her tongue. It didn’t work. Still beautiful. “Dinner.”
    “Mostly they’re arachnids,” I said, then realized what a geeky thing it was to say. In the six short months I could remember, most of the animals I’d seen had been long-legged brown spiders that spun cone-shaped webs in the ground, scorpions black as the beetles they ate. Neither of them particularly dangerous. They could give you a bad stomachache is all. I’d seen them scurry out from inside my boots in the morning, looking for a new place to hide. “I saw a snake once,” I added. “I cornered it and tried to catch it.”
    “Ooh,” she said. “A gourmet meal.”
    “It got away,” I said. “Pretty anti-climactic.”
    “What did the old woman say about the birds?”
    “She tried to describe their songs,” I said. “But she couldn’t really remember.”
    “She told me about trees,” Korah said. “Green trees that changed color once a year and became a rainbow of red and orange and gold. Then the colors would all turn brown and fall off the branches.”
    “Trees that lost their needles,” I said.
    “Not needles,” she said. “Leaves.”
    “How’d they get them back?”
    She shook her head, and I was left to imagine trees that could die and come back to life every year.
    We sat in silence for a long time. I heard the wind whining through the empty rooms, and I knew we’d be up first thing moving dirt again, like a