Transcendent (9781311909442) Read Free Page A

As much as his dad loved to tell him that crying wouldn’t do
him any good, it was the only thing he could manage.
     
     

Chapter 4
     
    Krys lay under the log, shivering long after
the sound of the advancing army faded. Distant booms rumbled in the
sky, reminding him of movies he’d seen with thunderstorms on Earth.
Venus didn’t have many storms. They learned in school that the
solar shield regulated the temperature of the surface and
atmosphere, preventing major weather patterns from forming. That
and the slow rotation kept the winds and buildup of charged ions at
a minimum.
    It still rained often enough but the storms
moved slowly and the rain that fell was mild. That meant the
colonies had to irrigate their farms and for the rest of the
planet, the rivers had mostly been man-made to maximize the
distribution of water from the hills and peaks of the massive
dormant volcanoes that dotted the planet’s surface.
    The thought of rain reminded Krys of his
tears. He’d stopped crying awhile ago. Now he huddled under the
fallen tree and shivered. It wasn’t cold out. It never got cold out
when the sun was up. But he was lying in a hole in the ground and
his stomach was pinched from not eating for hours. If ever there
was a time to cry, this was it.
    “Crying won’t get me out of this hole,” he
mumbled to himself. He shifted so his back was against the ground
and pushed up against the tree. It wouldn’t budge.
    Krys turned and used his hands to dig away
at the small opening between the tree limb and the ground. It was
slow going and before long, his fingers hurt, but he was making
progress. The dirt was soft at the top but was harder packed when
he cleared out the first few decimeters.
    He took breaks and studied his dirty
fingers. His nails were caked with dirt and had already started
cracking. Blood ran from his thumb when he’d tried using it to
drill into the dirt and yank it out. He thought about using some of
the stronger words the adults used but decided against it. Like his
dad always told him, cursing a hard job didn’t get it done any
faster or easier.
    He sniffed and used a clean spot on his
forearm to wipe the sweat off his forehead before he started
digging again.
    By the time Krys switched to using his feet
to try to kick the dirt out, he figured at least another hour had
passed, maybe more. He had a watch on but he was afraid to check
it. As long as he didn’t know, he could still hope that he had time
left. Time to run back home and find everyone still waiting for the
soldiers to come.
    Krys paused. The soldiers and the robots.
Those things had been huge! Like knights out of one of the netshows
he watched every Elthday. The ten days before Elthday were spent
working and going to school. Then again, today was the seventh
Elthday of the Venerian summer. Not that the two hundred forty-two
days of winter were much worse. Summer or winter, it got cold
midway through the fifty-nine-day cycles when the sun was warming
the other side of the planet.
    His dad told him stories of what life was
like back on Earth. Living in domed cities and working in giant
caves with rows of lights strung overhead to help make plants grow.
His dad said it was pointless; the only way to get things to grow
was on the ag stations orbiting Earth. That or moving to Venus. The
terraforming had made the volcanic crust of Venus full of nitrogen
and nutrients.
    So Krys’s dad had come to Venus to start
fresh. He gave up farming when they found out he could keep their
equipment running better than anyone else. That left him in charge
of keeping all the machinery running for the colony. That was
fifteen Earth years ago. Krys had been born on Venus and didn’t
know anything else.
    His foot broke through! Krys yanked it back
and panicked when he couldn’t pull his boot back through the
opening. He struggled until he managed to get it back in and stared
at the enlarged hole. It was his window to getting home. Now he
just needed to turn