Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2) Read Free Page B

cities
spread almost in an X across this part of the planet. He felt the weight of
every settlement, of every person in each one. He lingered for a moment on the
city that lay at the northwestern corner of the settlements: Coriol, where he
lived with his daughter, Kaia. Lumina, the city he was in now, was at the
opposite edge of the settlements diagonally: the most southwestern of the
cities. Between them lay the Azure Mountains, a range of folded mountain peaks
that divided the continent almost in half.
    Nile was at his shoulder, and Reagan saw the man
glance from the map out the window, where the peaks of the Azures fringed the
sky in the distance. Reagan felt a certain comfort in seeing the mountains. The
Azure range was the larger of the two major mountain ranges near the
settlements. Much like the Rocky Mountains back on Earth, they had been formed
by folding and faulting and they rose from the plains on either side of them to
elevations over 6000 meters. The other range was the Karst Mountains out near
Coriol, past the Eastern Plains. It had been formed from the dissolution of
Minean blue limestone into freestanding towers. It was as dramatic as it was
remote and largely unexplored. Reagan had heard that a new vein of Yynium
discovered underneath it was causing quite a stir among the companies. Both
ranges offered a certain amount of protection to their neighboring cities.
    Nile must have been thinking the same thing. “The
mountain cities will have a bit more cover than we have out here.”
    Reagan nodded. “Oculys and Kantara are in the
foothills and they have our best surface-to-air missiles. Minville, Sato, and
New Alliance are easily defensible from the ground because they’ve each got the
Azures on two sides. But the plains here in Lumina leave us a little exposed.”
He considered for a moment. “I don’t worry about Flynn. It has two advantages:
being surrounded by the Azures and being in the center of the settlements.”
    Both men glanced at Coriol. It was the outlier.
To reach it you had to cross the Eastern Plains, and it lay at the edge of the Karst
Mountains, which did not have the altitude of the folded mountains, but made up
for it in the sheer grandeur of its towers. They would at least offer a place
for people to flee if anything happened.
    Reagan found himself growing increasingly tense.
Coriol looked so isolated up on the corner of the map, so vulnerable. And Kaia
was there now, in their blue cottage, alone. These days away
from her were hard. Reagan missed her, and he worried about her. Even after
four years on the planet with her, he had still not gotten used to the fact
that she was older than he was now and that she was slowing down. Reagan feared
the day when he would get a call that she’d fallen or that her heart, which had
been beating so long now, had stopped doing its work.
     These last few years had been like his first
years as a new father, when he’d found himself worrying at odd times about the
myriad dangers the world posed to his new daughter. Only this time, instead of
becoming more able and more independent each day, she was moving in the
opposite direction, and the end of his worrying now would be very different from
end of his worrying then, when he’d dropped her off for her first day of
school.
    Reagan shifted, feeling the jagged weight that he’d
carried in his chest since the day he’d left the Treaty Cabinet Meeting on
Theta Tersica a lifetime ago. It was the weight of the knowledge that he should
have stopped the sale of Ship 12-22. He had voted against the plan that had
sold the ship to the Others of Beta Alora, and he planted information that he
had hoped David McNeal, the original Caretaker of the ship, would find. But he
hadn’t fought any harder. He had instead climbed on a stasis ship himself and had
done no more to stop the atrocity.
    He saw now—and had seen the moment he closed his
eyes in stasis, and for the next fifty-three years as he slept—that he