Crimson Sky: A Dark Sky Novel Read Free

it was drinkable or could be used for cleaning. To empty the worst of our sewage, we had to take the wastewater and chamber pots to a series of bolted dump-holes that had been drilled into the bottom of the tunnels outside the colony doors. It kept the colony relatively clean, though I couldn’t help but wonder what we would do when those dump-holes were filled.
     
    Under the vents were lean-tos made of cloth and held up by metal posts. Garnet’s arrangement with the South Junkers gave us access to all the metal we needed, but building decent homes for the two hundred people that lived here never seemed to be on Garnet’s mind. Not once in the seven years since this colony’s creation had he thought about improving the lives of those he “protected.”
     
    I didn’t know which was sadder– that he got away with it, or that the survivors simply assumed this was the best they could hope for now.
     
    The lean-tos were built around the edges of the tunnel intersection, and each one had a specific task. Survivors bustled through the colony, doing everything from blacksmithing, engineering, food drying or cooking, sewing, nursing, schooling, to weapons training. Illuminated by stuttering electric string lights crisscrossing over their heads, women held bundles of fabrics to be sewn into new clothes. Men sharpened blades and cleaned guns. Teenagers carefully tended the cooking fires, which smelled like the usual charred rat meat. Younger children ran around with bare feet and dirty clothes. Babies cried, hungry for the milk of mothers just as starved as they were.
     
    Along the back wall was one lean-to larger than the rest. Garnet’s tent. It spanned almost the entire length of the back wall, its tattered, patchy roof seeking elegance it would never have. Black wires snaked down the walls and slipped into Garnet’s tent, powering all his tools and generators. He barely worked any more, throwing down-on-their luck people like me into the fray so he could bask in fake luxury.
     
    But those wires going into his tent were a reminder that Garnet literally held the power. He could shut it off any time he wanted to, leaving the rest of us to go cold, starve, and die.
     
    The four guards from the door and the dirty one surrounded me. They were all big bruisers that had no problem hitting an eighteen year old girl nearly a foot shorter than them and half their weight. I marched with them through the intersection. The busy workers and traders all darted out of their path. Garnet’s men were known for roughing up anyone who didn’t give them exactly what they wanted, exactly when they wanted it.
     
    Sometimes they even did it for fun.
     
    I turned my face toward the ground, but was looking for Abby out of the corner of my eye. She knew that she was safest in our lean-to while I was above ground working, but she never liked being far from my side. I’d raised her in this world. She’d never known our mother.
     
    Some days I wasn’t sure I had either. Or maybe I was just feeling bitter because she’d left us.
     
    Garnet’s two personal bodyguards– bald, dark skinned twins named Tyson and Malik– stood up from the plastic crates they’d been using as chairs on the porch of the Garnet’s lean-to. They looked at me with cold dark eyes, then glanced over my head.
     
    “Where’s the escort?”
     
    “Dead,” the dirty guard answered for me. “She left ’em behind.”
     
    I wanted to protest that there was nothing I could have done, that it happened too fast, but he wasn’t the person I needed to believe me.
     
    Tyson and Malik glared at me. Gordon and Kevin had been their friends, and they were going to look for any chance they could take to punish me for their deaths. The twins stomped forward, each of them roughly grabbing one of my arms and dragging me out of the circle. I stumbled to follow them as Malik (who I think was the one on my right), yanked open the curtain door of Garnet’s abode.
     
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