Dead and Buryd: A Dystopian Action Adventure Novel (Out of Orbit Book 1) Read Free Page A

brother’s pleas that she stay away, that the Adveni would, at some point decide she was no longer useful and lock her in there as well. Whenever the tsentyl communication device she had been given lit up, however, she answered it, because she knew that no one else would. The Adveni didn’t care if a Veniche man died in the block in a fight over food. The body would lie in the block until count if the Adveni wanted. It was only her continued service that meant that someone saw fit to call for a medic at all.
    Turning towards the compound, Georgianna brushed an errant lock of hair out of her face, and walked the last couple of hundred yards towards the high metal gates looming in front of her.
    Inside the gate, two Adveni men stood watching for her approach. She was not even ten feet from the metal fencing before one of them pushed the gate forward to allow her entrance.
    “In the block,” one of the men explained bluntly. “Edtroka will take you.”
    Georgianna glanced at the other guard and nodded politely. Without so much as a word, the guard, Edtroka, turned and began walking away with long, purposeful strides, leaving Georgianna to hurry to keep up in his wake.
    Georgianna had met Edtroka many times before. He was the first guard to take her through the routine of being let into the block. He showed her the items she would not be permitted to take inside and showed her how to work the Adveni tsentyl device that would let her inform them that she was ready to leave. His Veuric at that time had been broken and difficult to understand. Over the two years since her first visit, however, his use of the language had improved dramatically. Unfortunately, Georgianna could not say the same for her Adtvenis.
    “Do you know what happened?” she asked, struggling to keep pace with him.
    “Fight,” he answered, his thick Adveni accent clear through the Veuric words. “We found him this morning.”
    “And what are his injuries?”
    Edtroka turned his head, glancing down at her with what she could only imagine was derision, though it could have been amusement, the way his brow quirked like that. Edtroka was always slightly odd. He wasn’t cruel or insulting to her like the other guards would be, but he had never shown her any obvious kindness either, only unreadable expressions that he never explained, even when she asked.
    “I thought you were the medic.”
    “Well, I am!” she answered. “But surely you’ve seen his injuries if you called me?”
    The guard shrugged, and she wondered if he had not seen the injuries on the prisoner, not paid enough attention, or not cared enough to remember what he’d seen. He didn’t pause as he led her through the drysta yard towards the doors, and though the sun was now high enough to make being outside uncomfortable in mid-heat, the Veniche people set to be sold as dreta were lined up along one side, a group of Adveni looking at them with interest.
    The Adveni were easy enough to spot even though in face and shape they resembled the Veniche in almost every way. Yet most Adveni stood almost a head taller than the average Veniche, and were also built better, with broader shoulders and longer legs, making them faster and stronger. It hadn’t taken long for the rumours to begin circulating through the tribes that the Adveni bred differently to them. Unlike the Veniche, who paired most commonly for love, the Adveni were put to numerous tests. If their tletonise—the Adveni way of referring to what the Veniche people knew to be the aspects of a person passed on to their children—did not pass these tests, they were forbidden from creating offspring. Georgianna had often heard the term they used for people with undesirable genetic qualities: Zsraykil.
    Most Veniche didn’t spend a lot of quality time speaking to Adveni, not when they didn’t have to, but they all knew that the Adveni considered most, if not all of them Zsraykil.
    The strength and skill of the Adveni was also due to