Read After Earth for Free Online

“Sorry about buzzing past you back there,” he said, and pointed in the direction of the ridge. “Sometimes I get a little …” He shrugged, apparently unable to come up with the appropriate word to describe his behavior.
    Obsessive? Competitive? Nuts?
    Since none of the words Bo was coming up with seemed any better, he just shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”
    Kitai leaned forward, ready to talk business again. “You think everyone passed the VR?”
    The VR was the Ventax Reactor test developed by Doctor Abigail Ventax decades earlier. It sensed degrees of fear that human beings experienced under conditions such as the tests the cadets had undergone. The would-be Rangers had been monitored scrupulously the entire time.
    “Everyone?” Bo snorted derisively at the notion. “Try ‘anyone’ and I’m pretty sure the answer is no.”
    Kitai stared at Bo in shock. “Wait.
You
didn’t?”
    Shaking his head, Bo said with a clear air of disgust and discomfort, “Spiders.”
    It had been during one of their high-speed chases through a cave. Everything had been going fine right up until Bo had charged through what turned out to be an entire mass of spiderwebs. He’d let out a startled gasp,which had only succeeded in making him inhale one of the webs. Then he had spent thirty seconds coughing violently to expel it from his lungs.
    “I hate spiders,” he admitted, and by coincidence, Kitai said the exact same thing at the exact same time. They looked at each other in mild surprise. Then they bumped elbows in a sign of camaraderie. It was an odd feeling for Bo, and he suspected that it felt the same for Kitai.
    But hey … spiders. What could you do about spiders? “What was the point of spiders? What function?” Bo asked.
    The arks that had carried humanity to Nova Prime had transported genetic samples of every species on Earth. Couldn’t they have left out the arachnid family?
    “I just don’t get it,” Bo said in frustration.
    Kitai was just about to respond when a female voice interrupted them: “I heard they captured an Ursa.”
    Both Kitai’s and Bo’s heads snapped around in response to that. The speaker had been Rayna. On the face of it, Rayna seemed an even less likely Ranger than Kitai considering that she was half a head shorter than he. But Rayna was extremely intelligent and a formidable hand-to-hand combatant. Bo had great respect for her, and so did Kitai. When she suddenly announced that an Ursa had been captured, naturally that was going to get immediate attention.
    Killing Ursa was not an uncommon situation on Nova Prime. It wasn’t an easy undertaking by any means, but it had happened enough times. Capturing one alive, however, was definitely unusual. A number of other cadets had overheard Rayna’s pronouncement, and they approached her to hear what she had to say.
    There were numerous cries of “No way!” and “You’re kidding!” and “Are you sure?”
    Rayna simply nodded her head, her arms folded. “Absolutely,” she said. “Heard it reported over the naviband.” She tapped the communications device strapped to her wrist. “You guys should pay attention to these things.”
    “Who?” Kitai asked. “Who captured it?”
    “Who do you think? The Ghosts,” she said.
    Kitai nodded, feeling slightly foolish. Any cadet worth his salt knew that when an Ursa was sighted, at least one Ghost was always called upon to dispatch it.
    Rayna continued: “And they’re going to move it to someplace they can study it.”
    “Ghosts. You mean like Kit’s dad?” said Bo.
    “Maybe him. Or somebody like him. It was out in the jungle somewhere. Your dad out in the jungle somewhere, Kitai?” Rayna asked.
    Abruptly a silence descended over them. They collectively waited for Kitai to respond.
    It was as if the utterly confident, overly aggressive Kitai Raige had vanished altogether. Instead, for a few moments, he just looked flat-out uncertain about anything and everything. Then he