Total pages in book: 182
Estimated words: 171288 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 856(@200wpm)___ 685(@250wpm)___ 571(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171288 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 856(@200wpm)___ 685(@250wpm)___ 571(@300wpm)
Well, option number one was to go back to the ship and hope the bubble passed through it and left silently the way it had come, allowing time inside the shuttle to go back to normal.
But that didn’t seem like a very good option to Penny. Y’lla had said the bubbles could pass in seconds or take years to move on. What would she live on if it took months or years for the anomaly to pass? And how could she be sure it wouldn’t engulf her while she waited?
She supposed she could try to gather enough stray objects to keep throwing ahead of her and see if any of them got frozen in mid-air, the way the fork had back in the corridor of the ship, but it just didn’t seem like a workable solution. After all, she couldn’t stand outside the shuttle tossing objects at it constantly for however long it took for the time-bubble to move on. If it took too long, she could starve to death waiting!
“Well, what’s the other option, then?” Penny murmured to herself, making sure to keep her voice low so it wouldn’t echo in that spooky way that had freaked her out before.
If she couldn’t go back, she would have to go on ahead. That meant walking down the long, empty metal corridor, lit only by the dull, flickering overhead glows and devoid of any life. Maybe somewhere she could find someone who would help her—or some way to make an interstellar call and contact the Mother Ship. At the very least she wouldn’t just be sitting there, waiting for the slow-time bubble to get her.
It was a grim and scary choice but Penny didn’t see any other option—she started walking.
Eight
Hours later Penny was still trudging along the same metal corridor with her boots making the dull thump, thump, thump with every step.
At first, the sound had bothered her, the way it echoed in the empty space. She’d taken the boots off and tied the strings together to hang them around her neck for a time as she shuffled down the corridor silently in her sock feet.
But she’d found that the boots got very heavy after awhile and her feet got cold. In fact, the entire corridor was cold—it felt like a winter’s day back on Earth and Penny could see her breath puffing out in front of her.
Luckily, the warm-skin kept her toasty, just as Kat had promised it would. Penny pulled her hands inside the long, tight sleeves and tugged the hood over her head, leaving only her face visible. So though the tip of her nose felt numb, the rest of her was pretty comfortable.
Well, except for her feet. She stopped and put the boots back on and kept plodding.
After a while, her stomach began to growl. It had been a long time since breakfast—a reconstituted food cube which had yielded scrambled eggs, hot buttered toast with jelly, and crisp bacon. The memory made her mouth water uselessly.
Penny didn’t know how long she’d been walking because the chronometer on her wrist seemed to have been affected by the slow-time bubble, when her hand had gotten engulfed by it. It had stopped and though she shook it and tapped it, the chronometer wouldn’t start again.
But though her watch was broken, her stomach wasn’t. It informed her that it was well past lunch time and almost time for dinner or “Last Meal” as the Kindred called it. She thought longingly of the dusty pack of snack food she’d seen at the start of her strange journey—why hadn’t she grabbed it when she had the chance?
Sure, it was old and doubtless way out of date, but it had been vacu-sealed which meant the contents—whatever they had been—were probably still good. Or at least edible. And there was nothing to eat here, in the empty corridor. Nothing but dust and a few discarded items here or there.
Penny was just beginning to wonder if she ought to go back for the dusty snack bag even though it was far behind her, when her eyes fell on a welcome sight.
Up ahead, in an abandoned storefront, she saw a full shelf—and the items it was filled with all appeared to be edible.
Putting on a burst of speed, Penny reached the empty store and stared eagerly at the shelf at the front. It was filled with colorful bags of the same kind of snack mix she’d seen earlier as well as some vacu-sealed packets of energy-jelly and even something that looked like either a candy bar or a jerky stick. Either one would be welcome to her empty stomach.
Best of all, none of the items looked compromised. None of them was even dusty. They sat there on the empty shelf, as colorful and bright as the day they’d been made, calling to her to come and try their delicious contents.