Santos two parents I didn’t know and a cook who was in charge of preparing all our meals. On the hot Friday morning in May when we gathered in the Founders’ Hall parking lot to leave, I wasn’t surprised to count five adult chaperones-our two science teachers, Ms. The Hunter Glen School did not take chances with their charges, especially when their parents paid so much to make sure they were safe. There were all these stories about kids wandering off in the mountains and falling down hidden ravines in the dark, but I suspected it was a bunch of crap. As far as her US government employers knew, I didn’t even exist.Īt Hunter Glen, the end-of-eighth-grade camping trip was kind of a legend. I was at the Hunter Glen School then, a private academy outside Flagstaff, because I couldn’t exactly live with Ama at Project Plato on Area 51. When I was thirteen, at the end of eighth grade back on Earth, I went on a school-sponsored camping trip to the Coconino National Forest near Sedona, Arizona.
Who do I think I am? I will have to know by then. I’m turning fifteen in a few days, and then I will have to make a choice. She has plenty of time to decide.”īut Ada’s wrong. He’s never said flat out what he thinks I should be, but I know he wants me to be like him: a diplomat. “Within the confines of her duties, our daughter can choose how she can best serve,” Ada says. “I don’t see why we need to impose that on her,” Aba objects. “Only within the confines of her duties,” Ama says. Ama wants me to be a scientist-preferably a geneticist-like her.
#READ ASH BY MALINDA LO ONLINE FREE FREE#
He always says he wants me to be free to do what I want, but I know he really wants me to be a painter, like him.
“We have to let her follow her interests,” Aba says.
I think they like arguing about it they don’t even seem to notice I can hear them. My parents have started in again on what they think I should do with my life. “I only want what’s best for her,” Ama responds. “… remember what it was like when you were her age?” Aba says. On Earth, I had to keep all that secret, but here on Kurra, it makes me sort of a celebrity. We Imria have been going to Earth for so long, but I’m the first one to be born there, to grow up there. I realized soon enough, though, that my Earthsider status was exciting as well as strange. I looked like a freak, dressed in my clothes from Earth that are totally weird here. It’s startling to realize that I miss them, that I’ve become part of their world- this world.Įight months ago, when Ama and I returned to Kurra after four years on Earth, I felt like a freak. I’m so isolated up here, cut off from my friends and their lives. I haven’t been to Isina’uru in a week, and I wonder what’s been going on at school. I see the bright sheen of it on the mountainside below, the buildings gleaming in the sun. I sigh but pull back from the edge a bit as I look down toward the city. Ada has heard Aba and Ama argue over this too many times to count, and lately he’s been siding with Ama.
#READ ASH BY MALINDA LO ONLINE FREE HOW TO#
She has to learn how to watch out for herself.”Īda, my other father, glances over at me. I think all her years on Earth have dulled her Imrian sense of adventure.Ība-one of my fathers-reaches for Ama’s hand as he says, “She’ll be fine. Ama’s always telling me to stop doing things. “I’m not going to fall,” I say, irritated. I look back at my parents seated at the table behind me. They call me an Earthsider: as if I’ve crossed a line, chosen a side. My people, the Imria, think I’m a little unusual because of that. But there aren’t any birds here-not exactly. I imagine I’m a bird soaring high above the water, the islands tiny dots below. I stand at the edge of the deck, leaning against the glass and steel railing, and look out and away. It’s perched on the edge of the mountain called Isi Na, a ten-minute cable ride from Isina’uru, Isi Na City , which is anchored to the mountain with long metallic ropes like a spider’s web. My mother told me that her great-great-great-grandparents built our house. My family comes from the mountains, and that’s where we live. Out on the water, floating cities spread like silver lattices over deep blue. Kurra is a planet of oceans and mountains, all vertical ascent or plunging drop to rock-strewn waves. It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.
0 kommentar(er)
