Read Aurora for Free Online Page B

considerably taller than either Devi or Badim.

    Then she spends another stretch of days in the crèche, trying and failing to learn the geometry lesson for the week, over and over,and Devi too distracted to take her along to work, even on their regular days. So the next time Euan and his friends Huang and Jalil confront her in the park, she looks for a rock on the ground, can’t find one, bunches her fists and swells up to them, and is indeed much taller than any of them, and when Euan invites her to go with them into the closed section of the park, the wilderness where the wild animals live, one of the places where the ferals hide, she agrees to go. She wants to see it.
    She follows them up into a long narrow valley that seams the hills west of Long Pond, a valley closed to people by electrified fences running along the ridgelines and across the valley’s gorge of a mouth. There’s a gate in this fence of white lines running knob to knob on trees, and Euan has the code to the lockpad on the gate. Quickly they’re inside and up the valley on what might be an animal trail. The trail goes up the valley, next to a creek. They see a deer in the distance, its head up, looking to the side but regarding them cautiously, tail high off its rump.
    Then there is a shout, and the boys all disappear, and quicker than Freya can quite follow things she is being held by the arms by two big men, and marched back down to the gate. They are taking her back into town when Devi shows up and grabs Freya by the arm and drags her off. The men are surprised, confused, and as soon as they are out of sight Devi pulls her around and down so their faces are only centimeters apart, amazingly strong her hands, and Freya can see the whites of her eyes all the way around the irises, as if her eyes are about to pop out of her head as she shouts in a harsh, grinding voice, a voice tearing out of her insides, “
Don’t ever mess with the ship! Not ever! Do you understand?
”
    And then Badim is pulling her away, trying to get between them, but Devi holds on hard to Freya’s forearm.
    “Let her go!” Badim says, in a tone of voice Freya has never heard before.
    Devi lets go. “Do you understand!” she shouts again, face still thrust at Freya, shifting around Badim as if he were a rock. “Do—you—
understand
?”
    “Yes!” Freya cries, collapsing into Badim’s arms, and across Badim into Devi so that she can hug her mother, so much shorter than she is, and at first it’s like hugging a tree. But after a while the tree hugs her back.
    Freya gulps back her sobs. “I just wasn’t—I wasn’t—”
    “I know.”
    Devi strokes Freya’s hair back from her face, looking anguished. “It’s all right. Stop that now.”
    Freya feels a wash of relief pour down her, although she is still terrified. She shudders, the vision of her mother’s contorted face still vivid to her. She tries to speak; nothing comes out.
    Devi hugs her.
    “We don’t even know if that wilderness is important,” she says into Freya’s chest, kissing her between sentences. “We don’t know what keeps things balanced. We just have to watch and see. It makes sense that a wild place might help. So we have to make them and protect them. We have to be careful with them. We have to keep watching them. We have to watch everything as closely as we can.”
    “Let’s go home,” Badim says, herding them along with his outstretched arms. “Let’s go home.”

    That night they sit quietly around the kitchen table. Even Badim is quiet. None of them eats very much. Devi looks distraught, lost. Freya, still stunned by that look on her mother’s face, understands; her mother is sorry. She has had something burst out of her that she has always before managed to keep in. Now her mother too is afraid; afraid of herself. Maybe that’s the worst kind of fear.
    Freya suggests that they assemble her doll tree house. They haven’t done that for a long time. They used to do it a lot. Devi