Survival Colony 9 by Joshua David Bellin

respond, didn’t acknowledge that I’d spoken a word. “It was Petra who killed it,” she said. “I’ve never known whether to thank her or not. And now it’s probably too late.”
    I realized I was staring straight at her. I also realized she was staring right back. My heart was a hammer trying to pound a hole in the wall of my chest. She rested on a single hand, her legs tucked underneath her, and for an unbelievable second I thought she had dropped her shoulder and was leaning toward me. Our faces came so close I could see every line and groove in her full lips. Up close, I could tell that they were ever so slightly chapped.
    Then her face fell away and she freed her legs to stand.
    My eyes rose to find Wali fifty yards behind her, in the space between houses. Moonlight shadowed his features, but fury radiated from his rigid posture and clenched fists.
    “I’ve got to be getting back,” she said. “You’ll be all right out here?”
    I nodded rapidly, keeping my head lowered.
    She stood above me. She took a step toward Wali then turned back, and I raised my eyes once more to hers. A steady breeze lifted her hair, surrounding me with her scent.
    “The old woman told me it was like everyone had gone crazy,” she said. “Like the whole world was determined to commit suicide. Like,” and her voice caught, “seeing what they’d done made them so sick they wanted to die.”
    I stared at her, unable to speak.
    “You’re lucky, Querry,” she said. “My mom always tells me I have to remember. But sometimes all I want to do is forget.”
    I watched her walk to where Wali stood, watched him grip her hand and pull her roughly toward the sleeping quarters, watched them vanish like wraiths into the darkness. I stared for long minutes at the spot where they’d disappeared, but she didn’t return. I knew she wouldn’t. I had the strange feeling she belonged to the dream I couldn’t remember, and when tomorrow came everything she’d said to me tonight would be gone with the rest of it.
    I wished I could erase her memory of whatever had come between her and Wali this night. I wished I could erase her memory of four years ago. I also wished I could bring back my own memory of what lay beyond that long lost game of catch, the days and years before the accident, the entire train of memories that tied me to my life.
    But I knew it didn’t work that way. You either remember or you forget, that’s all. You don’t get to choose.

6
    Thirst
    The next day brought rain.
    Hard, scalding rain. My head had barely hit the bunched piece of canvas I used as a pillow when the drops began pelting straight down, hard as pebbles. I felt ragged from my sleepless night and shaken by what I could and couldn’t remember of it, but I sprang up instantly and headed for the supplies. My memory might be full of holes, my feeling about this place might be getting worse by the minute, but I knew rain was one thing you didn’t waste.
    In the six months I could remember, this was only the second rainstorm, and like the first it arrived without warning, without what the old woman called thunder and lightning, and it fell, as she put it, in buckets. The grown-ups who’d seen these sudden storms three or four times a year reported that they were always the same: they came out of nowhere and saturated the land, turned dust to brown slop and the sluggish river to a raging torrent, then retreated as if they’d been scared away by their own ferocity. As soon as they were gone the sun resumed its work, baking the land, leeching the veins of water that formed in the ground’s cracks, crinkling the river like a scrap of paper in a fire. An hour later you’d hardly know it had rained at all.
    As long as the deluge lasted, though, we did everything we could to capture it. The river was unreliable: we couldn’t count on being able to travel there because our own movements depended on whether there were Skaldi in the area. Plus its water was filthy,