EarthRise Read Free

white tag intended to reassure its new owner that it had been pressure treated and would last for the next twenty years, a fact the Fon named Mal-Dak was unaware of and unlikely to take much comfort from.
    Like most of his lowly caste, Mal-Dak had been forced to queue up for any number of things over the years—but the opportunity to be crucified had not been one of them. Not until now, as the line shuffled slowly forward and the unfortunate Sauron had a moment to reflect.
    The focus of his thoughts was the fact that insofar as he knew, based on the roughly two standard years’ worth of memory currently available to his mind, he had never joined or even commingled with the organization called the Fon Brotherhood and was therefore innocent of the charges lodged against him.
    Had Mal-Dak been acquainted with the now notorious Bal-Lok? Who, along with some twelve members of the nascent organization, had been foolish enough to attack a Kan checkpoint? The answer was “yes,” but knowing someone and belonging to their organization were two different things. Something he had explained over and over but to no avail.
    Assuming the Kan who arrested him had been truthful, and there was no reason to suspect otherwise, Hak-Bin had ordered his subordinates to identify and crucify “twenty guilty parties.” No less and no more. How could everyone ignore the obvious unfairness of that?
    Mal-Dak’s thoughts were interrupted as a Kan shouted an order, a cross was raised into the upright position, and a Fon hung upside down with his arms stretched to either side. The Sauron made a pitiful bleating sound which ended abruptly when a Kan kicked him in the jaw. Though conscious, and in pain, the Fon no longer had the capacity to speak.
    That’s when Mal-Dak felt graspers lock onto both of his arms, heard a Kan say, “Now it’s your turn,” and was wrestled onto a newly constructed cross.
    “No!” Mal-Dak shouted. “It isn’t fair! I’m innocent!”
    “That’s what they all say,” a warrior said unfeelingly. “Now mind the way you act—humans are watching. Here’s an opportunity to show them that even the lowliest and most insignificant members of the Sauron race can die without complaint.”
    Mal-Dak was about to object when an order was given, his cross was raised, and the world turned upside down.
    Then, his weight hanging from the plastic ties that secured his wrists and ankles, Mal-Dak was left for the crows. There were hundreds of the fat black birds—and they circled the morning’s feast.

     
    The few surviving members of the Fon Brotherhood had learned a thing or two during their organization’s short but tumultuous life.
    The first learning ran contrary to everything they had been taught since birth: Fon were as intelligent as the Kan and Zin . . . a fact many had proven by teaching themselves to read.
    The second learning was that humans, especially white humans, who claimed to be part of something called the “brotherhood of the skin,” were completely untrustworthy.
    The third learning was that even though the white humans had tricked Bal-Lok and sacrificed their brethren to the Kan as part of a complicated slave scheme, the Fon had proven their valor. Though dead, every one of their bodies had been found facing the enemy with a weapon at pincer.
    Now, having learned those things, the Fon Brotherhood was in the mood to teach a lesson of their own: the meaning of respect.
    Jonathan Kreider, a.k.a. Jonathan Ivory, a name he had chosen as a way to celebrate the lack of pigmentation in his skin, didn’t know he was being hunted until the trap had already closed.
    Flushed out of hiding by the Kan, the racialists had been absorbed into the steadily growing crowd and pulled toward the top of the hill.
    There were fewer of them now, after the disastrous assault on the Presidential Complex, and the loss of brave Hammer Skins like Parker, Boner, and Marta Manning, a hard-core racialist who, had it not been for the