Blinded

by Teyla Branton

  Carefully, Reese turned the page of her sketchbook, hiding the transfer station. She concentrated on eating for a while, but before she could finish, the drawing she’d begun earlier that afternoon beckoned like a promise she had to keep. Before she could help herself, her fork lay discarded as she turned the pages to the quick sketch of the man who’d visited Jaxon’s house.

  She frowned at it. No, it wasn’t quite right. The face had been wider and more square. She erased the old lines and new ones began to form under her pencil. That was better—just as she had “sketched” him in her mind. She shaded in the too-smooth forehead that hinted at Nuface therapy. Next, she enhanced the deep-set blue eyes under the thick brows, followed by thinning the lips slightly and adding an oddly pointed chin that made him seem cruel. The nose wasn’t right either, but flattening it added the distinct toughness she remembered. To finish, she shaded in the shock of medium gray hair with a prominent widow’s peak.

  Perfect. The most telling thing about the man was the fleshy cheeks, rounded with rich foods, which meant he didn’t belong in the Coop. He was slumming. He wasn’t ugly, but something about him made her feel upset. Maybe it was because she knew how much his visit had bothered Jaxon.

  Cecelia brought her father’s meal and squeezed in between them at the table, cuddling up to her father as he began forking down his food. Feeling crowded, Reese arose to go to the other side, and as she did, her eyes were drawn by what was streaming on the Teev.

  She gasped. It was him! The man she was drawing. No mistaking those eyes.

  Both her dad and Cecelia looked in her direction. “What?” barked her dad, his tone annoyed.

  Reese tried to clasp the sketchbook to her chest, but he was already reaching for it. His strong fingers pulled the book from her. He stared at the picture and then back up at the Teev. “Where did you see him?”

  “I-I didn’t.” She pointed to the man on the Teev. “I mean, just now.”

  Her father’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Reese.”

  She shrugged. “It’s just a picture.” Even as she spoke, the man disappeared from the Teev.

  “Tell me. Now.” Her father’s voice was slow but sharp, reminding her of nails and broken glass. “Where did you see that clud-faced pus bag?”

  Pus bag? That meant he was an Elite who held an important job in the CORE, and that Reese was right about him slumming. She’d have to answer her father or spend the night regretting it. And what harm could there be in telling him anyway? “He was at Jaxon’s today.”

  “Did you actually see him?”

  Reese shook her head.

  “But he was there.” His words weren’t a question but demanded confirmation.

  “Jaxon saw him.”

  A smile curving his lips, her father tore the drawing from her precious sketchbook, and Reese almost felt that he tore out a piece of her soul. She had three other books, but they were crammed full of drawings already.

  “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?” Cecelia looked from Reese to her father. She didn’t know about Reese’s flashes or sketches or whatever they were, and Reese had hoped she’d never know. She wanted Cecelia to like her, not consider her a freak.

  “Later.” Her dad went back to eating, his eyes no longer on the Teev but fixed on her drawing. The intensity of his stare made Reese uncomfortable.

  Abandoning the rest of her dinner, she slipped away to her bedroom, the door barely clearing the bed as she pushed it open. Sinking to her mattress, she waited until her heartbeat slowed before carefully redrawing the man, this time adding better shading.

  Once it was finished, she relaxed. Good. Now she could rest and forget him. Eventually, the drawing would fade from her mind. She hoped it was the last time he’d visit the Coop.

  REESE’S RELIEF WAS short-lived. Barely a week later, she and Jaxon were swimming at the transfer station when he abruptly insisted that he had to go home. He’d done the same thing for the past two days, and Reese was a little annoyed, but she left the other kids and went with him because he was acting strange, and it worried her. Arriving on their street, they discovered a silver enforcer shuttle and an ambulance jammed into the space in front of his house. Two EMTs carried a sheet-covered form on a stretcher to the ambulance.

  “What’s going on?” Jaxon asked the nearest enforcer. Panic made his voice rise at the end, sending needles of fear into Reese’s gut.

  “Beat it, kid. Take your nose somewhere else.”

  Outrage filled Reese, overcoming her fear of the clipper. “He lives here.” She wanted to add some of her dad’s more colorful adjectives, but enforcers—or clippers as most disrespectfully called them—on the Coop beat were known to tag kids with their mood-altering temper lasers just for fun.

  “Not anymore, you don’t.” The man gave them an unpleasant smirk.

  “Leave him alone.” This from another enforcer, a wide-shouldered man with red hair, a freckled complexion, and a slight accent Reese couldn’t place. Obviously, he wasn’t from around here. He thumbed toward the shuttle, and the other cop left.

  “I’m Enforcer Tennant,” he said to Jaxon. “Look, I’m really sorry, kid, but your mom’s dead.”

  Jaxon’s mouth opened. “No, no . . . she can’t . . .” He looked as if someone had punched him in the gut, the color bleeding from his tanned face.

  “We think it was a robbery.” The clipper laid a comforting hand on Jaxon’s shoulder. “We’ll find the guy who did this. For now, you need to come with me. We’ll get you fixed up with a place to stay.”

  As the man led him away, tears ran unchecked down Jaxon’s face. Reese wanted to run after him, to put her arms around him and tell him it was going to be okay. But it wasn’t okay. Not for him or for her. His mom was gone. That meant he’d be taken away, and Reese would lose Jaxon. Kids whose parents died always left and never came back.

  Reese couldn’t find her breath. She couldn’t call out. She couldn’t even cry. She couldn’t do anything but watch as the enforcer closed the door of his shuttle with Jaxon inside and drove down the street.

  Blindly, Reese headed for home. Jaxon is gone, gone, gone. He promised we’d leave together, but now I’ll never see him again. She wept for him and for herself. Now that they’d finally come, she couldn’t stop the flood of tears. Why hadn’t she at least told Jaxon how sorry she was that his mom was dead?

  No one was home at her house. She sank onto a chair next to the table, staring at nothing. Her wet hair dried, but not her eyes. She was still sitting there in the dark when her father stumbled into the room and flipped on a light. She could smell the stench of sauce on his breath.

  He took one look at her, sneering a little as he said, “What’s wrong with you?”

  Inwardly, she cringed. “Jaxon,” she whispered. “They took him away. His mom’s dead.”

  For a full three seconds her father didn’t speak, but his eyes seemed to grow two sizes. “When?” he choked out.

  “A few hours ago. She was okay before we went to play. I think someone killed her.”

  “Get your stuff. We’re leaving.” Just that fast, her dad wasn’t drunk anymore. He grabbed a large duffel from the closet and began shoving in food.

  Reese jumped to her feet. “What? No! Jaxon might come back. I have to wait for him.”

  “Now!” He slammed a cupboard just as Cecelia walked into the kitchen.

  “Gerry,” she said, running to him, “what’s wrong?”

  For a moment Reese saw panic in her father’s face, but it was followed quickly with a hardening of his jaw. “Bethany’s dead. They killed her. We’ll be next.”

  Cecelia gasped. “I told you to leave it alone. You should have ripped up that picture!”

  Reese’s stomach dropped. Her picture? It had to be. She was the only one who drew around here. And the picture of the man at Jaxon’s house was the only one her father had shown interest in. What had her father done?

  “Leave the stuff.” Cecelia’s high, br
eathy voice sounded nothing like her usual self. “Let’s go.”

  Her father gave a curt nod. “Just gotta get something from the bedroom. We’ll need all the cash I’ve saved. Yours too.”

  “When are we coming back?” Reese hated the wobbling in her voice. She’d meant to sound determined.

  “Never.” His finger stabbed at her. “With or without you, I’m leaving. Your choice.”

  “Of course she’s coming! It won’t be safe here.” Cecelia gave her a sympathetic glance. “Get whatever you can carry, honey. Hurry!”

  This was insane. Where did they plan to go? There was no place but the Coop, not for people like them. Leaving a colony, even temporarily, was impossible without preapproval. And if they managed to sneak out using one of the breaches in the outer wall, how would they survive? They’d be picked up before long without the right kind of ID.

  Reese ran to her bedroom and shoved her three used sketchbooks into a bag, followed by her current one and a few clothes. The bag was only half full when she remembered the water skins under the bed. Those went in next, followed by her two spare pairs of underwear and a pair of sneakers that were missing parts of the soles.

  Had the world gone crazy?

  Jaxon! She wished she could talk to him, explain to him how much she wanted to take back her picture. To unsketch the man. Somehow she knew her picture had caused his mother’s death, that she was responsible for the devastation in his face.

  Before Reese realized she was making a decision, she was out the front door and running over the square of dying lawn to Jaxon’s house. But his door was locked, and all the enforcers were gone. No answers here—and of course no Jaxon.

  She heard a door slam and Cecelia calling her name. Then her dad, his voice loud and angry. She crouched by the edge of Jaxon’s house where an overgrown bush somehow thrived in a foot of dirt. Her father was cursing now, and Cecelia pleaded with him to wait, but their voices faded, floating down the street in the direction of the sky train.

  They’d really left her. Reese didn’t care. She had to see Jaxon. To make him understand that she hadn’t meant to hurt him.

  But Jaxon didn’t return, and neither did her father. After two days of hiding out at the transfer station, spying on her house and Jaxon’s, the endless hunger in her stomach forced her to break in and raid both houses for food. Packing all she could carry, she left the colony through the breach in the outer wall that she and the other kids had found during their explorations.

  Outside, barren land stretched as far as she could see, broken only by an occasional plant and a ribbon of road that cut like a scar across the terrain. She’d have to wait until dark to start down the road or the cameras mounted on the wall would catch her. At night, there were patches of darkness between the flood lights that might be enough to hide her escape. If she ran fast, she’d only be visible to the guards for a few seconds before she was beyond the reach of the brightest beams—if they were even paying attention.

  Her plan succeeded maybe too well. Days of walking and hitching several rides from kind strangers followed, bringing Reese into first one CORE city and then another. She moved on the edges, avoiding cameras and enforcers—or anyone who looked official. Finally driven to desperation and the hunger in her stomach, she dared use her CivID to ride the sky train, which miraculously didn’t bring enforcers down on her. By dusk of the seventh day, she arrived at her great-aunt’s place in Big Horn, where she collapsed on the beautifully manicured lawn. The gardener found her the next morning, chilled despite the heat of August, and brought her inside, where her great-aunt fed her mounds of the most delicious food in a kitchen so large that Reese felt she was still outside.

  It was then she learned her father and Cecelia were dead. A fall from a sky train platform—an accident, the report said. But Reese knew better. Her picture had killed them too.

  END OF SAMPLE. Click here to purchase a copy of Sketches (Colony Six book 1) on Smashwords. Or continue to the next page to learn more about Teyla Branton and her books.

  About the Author

  TEYLA BRANTON grew up avidly reading science fiction and fantasy and watching Star Trek reruns with her large family. They lived on a little farm where she loved to visit the solitary cow and collect (and juggle) the eggs, usually making it back to the house with most of them intact. On that same farm she once owned thirty-three gerbils and eighteen cats, not a good mix, as it turns out. Teyla always had her nose in a book and daydreamed about someday creating her own worlds.

  Teyla is now married, mostly grown up, and has seven kids, so life at her house can be very interesting (and loud), but writing keeps her sane. She thrives on the energy and daily amusement offered by her family, the semi-ordered chaos giving her a constant source of writing material. She grabs any snatch of free time from her hectic life to write. She’s been known to wear pajamas all day when working on a deadline, and is often distracted enough to burn dinner. (Okay, pretty much 90% of the time.) A sign on her office door reads: DANGER. WRITER AT WORK. ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.

  She loves writing fiction and traveling, and she hopes to write and travel a lot more. She also loves shooting guns, martial arts, and belly dancing. She has worked in the publishing business for over twenty years. Teyla also writes romance and suspense under the name Rachel Branton. For more information or to sign up for free books and subscriber exclusives, please visit TeylaBranton.com.

  You can also write to Teyla at Teyla@TeylaBranton.com.

  BOOKS BY TEYLA BRANTON

  Unbounded Series

  The Change

  The Cure

  The Escape

  The Reckoning

  The Takeover

  Unbounded Novellas

  Ava’s Revenge

  Mortal Brother

  Lethal Engagement

  Set Ablaze

  Colony Six

  Sketches

  Imprints

  First Touch (Imprint Series Prequel)

  Touch of Rain

  On the Hunt

  Upstaged

  Under Fire

  Blinded

  Short Stories

  Times Nine

  UNDER THE NAME RACHEL BRANTON

  Lily’s House Series

  House Without Lies

  Tell Me No Lies

  Your Eyes Don’t Lie

  Hearts Never Lie

  Broken Lies

  Lily’s House Novellas

  Cowboys Can’t Lie

  Finding Home Series

  Take Me Home

  All That I Love

  Then I Found You

  Noble Hearts

  Royal Quest

  Royal Dance

  Lisbon's Misadventures (Picture Books)

  I Don't Want To Eat Bugs

  I Don’t Want to Have Hot Toes