Read Elysium. Part One. for Free Online Page A

fingers through her hair in distress, ‘let’s not even mention the money involved!’
      ‘What else are we going to do?’
      Selina watched her sincerely. ‘Have you seen a border before? I don’t mean on TV or at the cine-house, I mean have you actually seen one with your own eyes? They’re like mountains. They’re like mountains with a thousand eyes! There was one a few miles away from our town and it was just enormous!’
      ‘I understand that,’ Priya replied tenaciously, her hands on her thighs. ‘I know Australia spends more money operating their walls than they do on healthcare and education combined; and if it’s anything like that here we’re going to have all kinds of difficulties getting anywhere near it, but the fact still remains that we simply can’t survive here!’
      ‘Are you sure this isn’t Wales?’ Selina argued desperately, still grasping to the hope they had merely missed the local populace and been wandering in circles. The population of Wales was still struggling to recover, she reasoned, the same as it was the world over. It wasn’t unheard of to travel days without meeting a soul. There might be a town just beyond the horizon, a refuge where they could shelter, where the residents might take pity on them. ‘Perhaps we’re not looking out of the wire,’ she said in anguish, ‘maybe we’re looking in!’
      She wiped her wrist across her eyes, knowing she was arguing a foolish point. Priya put her arm around her shoulders and pulled her tight. ‘Come on, we’ll see ourselves right. There must have been a reason for surviving the storm.’
      ‘So we can suffer an even shittier death!’ Selina replied sullenly, annoyed by Priya’s misplaced confidence.
      Priya smirked and ruffled Selina’s hair. ‘You’re full of…’ she began to say, before dragging her roughly to the ground. ‘Be quiet,’ she hissed, nodding toward a region somewhere out at sea. ‘Look!’
      It took a moment for Selina to focus, but after searching the horizon – expecting to see the coastguard scouring the area – she noticed a black sphere gliding a few hundred yards from the shoreline. It soared noiselessly through the sky like nothing Selina had seen before.
      ‘What the hell is it?’ she said, unable to take her eyes off its shining surface.
      ‘I don’t know what they’re called, but I’ve heard about them before. They’re full of cameras and instrumentation that scan for mutations of the virus. You wait, it’ll stop in a moment, see?’ They watched wordlessly as the sphere changed course and scoured the beach below, making small zigzagging movements before hovering over a seemingly innocuous patch of sand and remaining stationary for several minutes. Now Selina could see that it wasn’t a perfectly smooth globe, but instead covered in protuberances and blackened domes hiding a range of cameras, probes and apparatus. It continued to scour the beach, stopping momentarily until it disappeared beyond the cliff face.
      ‘Jesus,’ Selina exhaled, lying down in the long grass. ‘I thought we weren’t going to have to worry about being seen until we got near the border. I’ve never seen anything like that before.’
      ‘Didn’t you ever hear about iCDO [1] employees refusing to work in the field?’
      ‘Well yeah, but I didn’t know those things were the result of it.’
      ‘They’ve had thirty years to build those things…’ she stopped. The sphere rose into the sky and moved eastwards, picking up speed as it skimmed the coast on its return for analysis.
      Priya watched until it had evaporated in the haze of the afternoon. She stood and helped Selina to her feet, then began to walk in the direction of the dilapidated buildings further up the road.
      ‘I wonder how often they come,’ Selina said, brushing down her bare knees that were, after only a day, dark and grazed.
      ‘Come on,’ Priya said, gesturing to the houses on the rise of the