around.”
“Those two know how to be quiet,” Bankole said.
“They’re little rabbits, fast and silent. That’s why they’re still alive.”
24
Respect God:
Pray working.
Pray learning,
planning,
doing.
Pray creating,
teaching,
reaching.
Pray working.
Pray to focus your thoughts,
still your fears,
strengthen your prupose.
Respect God.
Shape God.
Pray working.
EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2027
We read some verses and talked about Earthseed for a while this morning. It was a calming thing to do— almost like church. We needed something calming and reassuring. Even the new people joined in, asking questions, thinking aloud, applying the verses to their experiences.
God is Change, and in the end, God does prevail.
But we have something to say about the whens and the whys of that end.
Yeah .
It’s been a horrible week.
We’ve taken both today and yesterday as rest days.
We might take tomorrow as well. I need it whether the others do or not. We’re all sore and sick, in mourning and exhausted— yet triumphant. Odd to be triumphant. I think it’s because most of us are still alive. We are a harvest of survivors. But then, that’s what we’ve always been.
This is what happened.
At our noon stop on Tuesday, Tori and Doe, the two little girls, went away from the group to urinate.
Emery went with them. She had kind of taken charge of Doe as well as her own daughter. The night before, she and Grayson Mora had slipped away from the group and stayed away for over an hour.
Harry and I were on watch, and we saw them go.
Now they were a couple— all over each other, but at arm’s length from everyone else. Strange people.
So Emery took the girls off to pee— not far away.
Just across the hill face and out of sight behind a patch of dead bushes and tall, dry grass. The rest of us sat eating, drinking, and sweating in what shade we could get from a copse of oak trees that looked only half dead. The trees had been robbed of a great number of branches, no doubt by people needing firewood. I was looking at their many jagged wounds when the screaming began.
First there were the high, needle thin, needle sharp shrieks of the little girls, then we heard Emery shouting for help. Then we heard a man’s voice, cursing.
I died with someone else. Someone laid hands on me and I came within a finger’s twitch of squeezing the trigger once more.
Bankole.
“You stupid asshole!” I whimpered. “I almost killed you.”
“You’re bleeding,” he said.
I was surprised. I tried to remember whether I’d been shot. Maybe I had just come down on a sharp piece of wood. I had no sense of my own body. I hurt, but I couldn’t have said where— or even whether the pain was mine or someone else’s. The pain was intense, yet diffuse somehow. I felt… disembodied.
“Is everyone else all right?” I asked.
“Be still,” he said.
“Is it over, Bankole?”
“Yes. The survivors have run away.”
“Take my gun, then, and give it to Natividad— in case they decide to come back.”
I think I felt him take the gun from my hand. I heard muffled talk that I didn’t quite understand. That was when I realized I was losing consciousness. All right then. At least I had held on long enough to do some good.
Jill Gilchrist is dead.
