Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4) by Aaron Ritchey (best books to read for teens .txt) 📗

carried some more, and we passed by Silver Plume, Georgetown, Idaho Springs, which hadn’t been hit too hard by salvagers. We camped by the river, downtown next to a playground.

The next day we went up Floyd Hill and into Genesee. In the distance lay Denver, a wide metropolitan area, mostly salvaged, and at one time owned by June Mai Angel. But now?

Smoke drifted up from the downtown area, the skyscrapers partially salvaged. Even from a distance, the teeth of the buildings were cracked and jagged, like they’d tried to take a bite out of the moon and came away shattered.

We were headed toward Denver. Most likely I’d become a Gamma there and then go coco. Hopefully, I could get the chalkdrive to June Mai Angel before I lost my wits completely.

Afterwards? Didn’t matter a jackerin’ bit.

If I wanted to stay human, and that was a pretty big if, Alice was my only way out, but Alice, poor Alice was losing it. Part of me felt sorry for her, and I found myself wanting to help her somehow. Another part of me didn’t care. I was so high. Another blissful strip of the Skye6 and I’d be back floating above the ice inside me.

We camped there in Genesee, looking down at Denver that night, and the air was chill. From the hockey bag, she pulled out my X-Men comforter. One of the characters, Wolverine, stared up at me. My best friend Anju got me to a watch a few of those comic book movies, but I didn’t care much for him. I did know, however, that Wolverine could heal any wound, but he also went coco every now and again.

Alice was grumbling and cursing and couldn’t look at me.

She came back with the sizzling sausages I had grown to love like mother’s milk. I hoped they didn’t contain human flesh, but I wasn’t about to confirm my suspicions. I’d seen Gammas butcher deer and elk, so I knew they were mostly animal meat. The filler? I didn’t want to know.

Alice also had some other goodies for me: flat bread cooked to a char, but doughy inside, and a plastic two-liter Coke bottle full of river water.

We sat and ate, watching the eastern horizon go dark. I wasn’t going to talk first. If I said the wrong thing, Alice would slap me, and then she’d get even more morose, which would make her smack me again, and so the endless cycle of abuse went.

After a while, such abuse becomes normal, which was a scary thing, ’cause being abused should never become a habit. Sad to say, though, it happens all the time.

After slurping down her sausage, Alice gnawed on a bone she kept in her pocket, from either a cow or buffalo. She went at it like a dog, with her big maws full of block-like teeth. She eventually bit through the bone, then licked and sucked the marrow.

We ate in silence—well, if you could call her smacking and lapping silence—until she spoke softly. “Dizzymona is in the church in Denver downtown. Dizzymona have the gas there. They took Sissy there. They took Sissy and made her smell it in the ritual. She get powerful, and she get the heal. Then she get bigger. Then she say, ‘Alice, you go now. You come and be Gamma.’ I said, ‘No, Sissy.’ But they made me. And it was dark, and Dizzymona gone coco, only no one talks about it. Then I become powerful and got the heal. And we go fight Devil Angel to get Burlington back and become Warlords of Denver. But Devil Angel evil and smart and armed, so well-armed, from her years gathering up the heavy guns. Hate Devil Angel. Hate her.”

I reached out and touched Alice’s bulky shoulder. Alice relaxed into my touch. I thought about what she had said and realized that the Gulo Gamma was a gas, not a liquid, not like the Gulo Delta Micaiah had given Wren. If one was a gas and the other a liquid, would Wren have turned into a Gamma? That didn’t matter anymore. Death had turned her into nothing.

Alice let out a sorrowful sigh. “Sissy went coco. Begged me to put her down. Which I did. Gotta get more megs to fight Devil Angel. Hate her. Called us hogs and sent us away. We Gamma, and we try to be proud, but Alice not proud. Alice don’t have a command. And Alice wanna be a Beta again. Betas don’t go coco. I miss Sissy. Alice love ’Teeca, but Alice miss real sissy.”

She pressed a thumb into her right eye, jammed it in hard. I grabbed her arm. “No, it’s okay. Don’t.”

“I going coco, ’Teeca. Will you put Alice down when time come? Will you send Alice to heaven when she go coco and don’t come back?”

I leaned against her big, smelly body and put my arm around her, the poor wretched thing. She’d taken a whipping ’cause of me, and she’d fought to keep me as a pet so I wouldn’t have to walk with the megs. But then I was more than her pet; I was her surrogate sister. This monster who would hit me ’cause she couldn’t stop herself from doing it.

Alice put down her bone, reached into her pocket, and pulled out the slate. She showed me the picture taped to the screen. It was a girl, smiling, blonde-haired, laughing in the sunshine. She looked like me, without a doubt. What if I’d had darker hair, or what if I hadn’t resembled her sister? Most likely, Alice wouldn’t have given me a second glance. Once again, like with Eryn Lopez, another dead girl had saved my life.

Alice caressed the picture. “Sissy sign up for the Sino. I go, too. Always following after Sissy. We there for Battle of Hutongs. Everyone die but for us. We stay in China so long our family die in ’Braska. All die. We come to Juniper, and we know nothing ’bout farm