The Gamble (The Gamble Series Book 1)

by Kathryn Jacques

  “Open your mouth one more time, Sub, and I’ll cut out your tongue,” he snarls before kicking me a final time in my lower back, causing me to writhe on the floor in blinding agony before he steps over me, locks the cell door and storms away.

  I can’t move, I can barely breathe, and I don’t know how many bones are broken. It feels like all of them. It hurts so bad I don’t even know what to do to alleviate the pain. I can’t see out of my right eye anymore and each breath is an inferno in my chest. I want to cry, but the tears won’t come and the room swirls around me. The edges of my vision begin to fade away to nothing. I want the darkness to consume me because it means the pain and the fear will finally disappear.

  The last thought I have before I slip into the twisting embrace of blackness, is the realization that despite everything I have been through, all I have survived… in the end, I will die underground anyway.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I guess it's been nine days. In the cold, poorly lit, windowless cell it's impossible for me to tell how much time has actually passed. Twice a day someone brings me a pathetic excuse for a meal; enough stale, spoiled food that I won't die of starvation, but not enough to ever dull the pangs of hunger stabbing in my stomach or quench the thirst coating my tongue like sand. My baggy clothes now hang off my already small frame and I barely have enough energy to do anything other than sleep, which is fine because there's nothing else to do anyway.

  I've talked to Nadia a little bit. I really like her because she's smart and strong and well beyond the maturity of most adults let alone a young child. However, we're both so scared of the red-haired man, who she says is named Elijah, that we only manage a few sentences at a time.

  I haven't seen Elijah since my arrival, but I still wear the bruises he gave me as a welcome gift, and I can't take a full breath without pain in my broken ribs. It makes sleeping on the hard floor considerably more difficult.

  Carefully rolling over, wincing against the aches in my body, I re-bunch Jax's jacket under my head. I've slept with it as a pillow every night because it smells like outside and fresh air and freedom.

  Or maybe it smells like Jax. The longer I spend down here, the more I find that I miss him. I tell myself it’s dumb and I’m not even sure why I miss him in the first place because he’s just a giant, arrogant jerk, but somehow in those last few days, he had started to seem… different. Like someone I could actually be friends with. Maybe even something more if I dare to think that way.

  Then the guilt sets in because Rey has only been dead a few weeks and if I ever loved him at all, I shouldn’t be thinking about Jax.

  But I guess none of it matters anyway. Rey is dead. I doubt Jax even cares that I'm gone because by now the entire compound thinks I killed Daniel and Ashlynn and went back to ROC. I feel sick thinking about how they must believe I betrayed them, how Jax thinks I murdered the only person he had left in this world. I promised I'd take care of Jax and now he's alone. The one person he truly cared about is dead and I wonder what will happen to him, if he'll self-destruct the way Daniel feared.

  I miss Daniel too; his wrinkled face and sparkling eyes, his dumb jokes that I didn't quite understand and the way he always laughed as if joy were the best remedy for anything bad in the world. I could really use one of those jokes right now.

  And I miss my father and Elsa and around all of that, I still deeply miss Rey too because his absence tears at me like the claws of a savage beast. It leaves a growing void in my heart that threatens to consume me from the inside out. I hear him when I drift off to sleep and I see him in my dreams and sometimes I wake up with wet tears clinging to my eyelashes like raindrops. Other times I'm so hungry and exhausted, I forget we aren't still twelve and he isn't in the next bedroom down the hall. It's those moments, inside the realm of my imagination, where I am actually happy. When lucidity eventually returns, I feel broken and detached, as if my body is present by my soul has drifted somewhere else.

  Metal clanks together and I look up to see someone enter my cell, a stocky woman with dirty blond hair and the start of age lines decorating her forehead. She closes the gate, strides around me to lean on the opposite wall and then fixes me in her sights. Cowering in the corner, I watch her warily.

  “Why did you leave ROC?” she demands, arms folded over her chest. I know better than to speak and choose to clamp my jaw tighter, bunching Jax’s jacket in my arms as though it can save me from whatever torture this woman has planned.

  She lifts one eyebrow. “I see Elijah has taught you well, but it’s time for you to talk again because I have some questions, so if you refuse to speak, I’ll need to use more drastic measures. Now, why did you leave ROC?”

  I weigh my options. Either way, someone in the League will hurt me. Licking my cracked lips, I turn my gaze to this woman. “My father was forcing me to marry someone I didn’t want to marry. I figured I’d rather die instead, but I wanted to see the sky first, so I left with the intent of dying from radiation sickness.”

  She cocks her head to one side. “Interesting. You must have been A Sector.”

  “How do you know that?” I demand warily.

  “Some of our prisoners are happy to talk to me. If your parents were arranging a marriage, you must have been a high-level sector citizen. I’ve heard it’s usually only Councilmembers and A level families who do that, so this is very interesting. We might actually be able to get some use out of you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She snorts and strides a little closer. “I’m sure you don’t. Tell me, did anyone you love ever get selected in the Gamble.”

  My chest constricts and a lump of lead forms in in my stomach. Bile rises in my throat, causing me to cough to keep it down.

  I say nothing, it’s none of her damn business, but apparently, I don’t need to because she smiles; a devious, disturbing expression. “I guess so. Now if you could get back at ROC leaders for taking your loved ones from you, for lying to you your entire life and holding you captive in their world, would you?”

  “I don’t care about ROC anymore,” I say, because I don’t. I left and, willingly or otherwise, I’m never going back.

  “Sure you do,” she scoffs with a flick of her wrist. “You can’t expect me to believe that you wouldn’t take a chance to make them pay for what they have done to you, done to the tens of thousands who are trapped there.”

  “So what are you planning?” I ask, flinching away as she moves to stand only four feet away.

  “Like I said, that is where you might be useful. I imagine someone in ROC would be willing to agree to anything to have their Sector A citizen returned.”

  “You’re holding me for ransom?”

  “That’s what we’re holding all of you for.”

  I scoff. “ROC will never pay money for us, for any of us. The more of us who disappear means less numbers drawn in the Gamble. Besides, they don’t have any real money anyway. It’s all electronic. Most people survive with barters or by selling their number for more food or supplies. Ransom won’t do you any good.”

  She laughs as if I’m an idiot. “In case you haven’t noticed, money doesn’t really have much use up here either.”

  I stare in confusion. “Then what do you want?”

  “God, they really are making you all stupider and stupider down there. Guess that’s what happens when they control the echo chamber. It’s not about money, it’s about getting them to open the exterior door. In order to rescue their precious citizens and return you people to ROC, they have to open the one door to the Occupied Zone.”

  “It’s about you getting inside ROC?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? After what they have done, you have to ask why? To destroy them, that’s why. To kill the Protector and the Councilmembers and every last Gendarme who has made it their mission to try to exterminate all of us still alive on the surface.”

  As she goes to leave, reaching for the cell door, she turns
to me one last time. “If you really are Sector A, you’re in a unique position right now. Elijah may give you a choice. If I were you, I’d start re-thinking which side you’re on, before we decide for you.”

  The gate clangs and she retreats down the hall, leaving me to stare after her in disbelief.

  This is what the League is planning? To use their prisoners to destroy ROC? How? How many O.Z. Citizens are truly up here and how did I never know? How could I have spent my whole life believing the lies and being so blind?

  And it’s reached the point where I can no longer hold to the belief that my father has no idea. He’s the Protector. If this many people have escaped the O.Z, he knows. He has to. Hell, they’ve been tracking every one of us since we were born. They can’t have believed we vanished into thin air. Which means my father is a part of this, a part of the lies and deceit.

  With a piercing stab in my heart, I’ve begun to realize I hate him because he held me prisoner underground, he allows the Gamble to continue… he allowed Rey to die.

  I should want them destroyed, the Council and the Gendarme and whoever else did this to us. I should be glad to join the League’s mission, but I don’t trust them any more than I can trust the leaders of ROC. Whatever the League plans, whatever goals they have in mind, I can’t agree with the methods they are using; locking people up like animals, beating them and letting them die, going after the citizens of ROC who are as oblivious to the truth as I was. The League is no better than the world from which I fled.

  Of course, there’s still the problem of my imprisonment. I have no weapon, no means of escape and no idea how to get out of the building without being seen let alone where to go should I manage to accomplish such an impossible undertaking. I certainly can’t go back to the compound. They’ll never believe me if I try to explain the truth. My life will be in more danger there than here.

  And I can’t leave Nadia behind. She deserves so much better.

  I refold the leather jacket, stuff it under my head and cry because I don’t know what else to do anymore.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Shouts and the sounds of a scuffle startle me upright. A door bangs against a cement wall, reverberating down the hall. I crawl to the bars of the cell to squint into the near darkness. I hear voices. One is definitely Elijah, but there are at least three others.

  “Subs are practically falling out of the sky lately,” Elijah says, coming into view. Four more men follow, dragging two struggling bodies between them. In the dim light and with their faces turned the other way, I can’t make out any features, but judging by their size, Elijah and his cronies have captured two men.

  “You think this will be enough for Sawyer to start the next phase of the plan?” one of the League men asks, twisting the arm of his captive.

  “I hope so. I’m getting sick of waiting and rounding up Subs, especially now that we have this little princess,” Elijah sneers, kicking at the bars of my cell. I start to recoil away, but at that moment, one of the captors lifts his head. Our eyes meet and I nearly faint.

  Jax.

  Casting a quick glance at the second prisoner, I recognize the dark hair and round face of Randolph. I go to cry out, but as I look at Jax again, his eyes bore into mine, intense and focused, as if to tell me something… as if to plead for me to stay silent.

  As they are drug past, Jax angles himself slightly toward me. It looks like he’s fighting against the League members, but then I realize he’s trying to show me something on his arm. Pressing against the bars of my confinement and straining my eyes, I can make out a tattoo. A barcode on his right wrist. One that wasn’t there the last time I saw him.

  Then he and Randolph are gone, hauled away by the League and flung into cages farther down the hall. I continue to sit in stunned silence, unable to process anything I just witnessed. How are they here? And why? It can’t be for me. And why have they made themselves out to be Subs? They hate Subs. I’m pretty sure Jax would die before letting someone paint a barcode on his wrist.

  Elijah and his men march past again and I flatten myself against the back wall because I am so afraid of him I want to be invisible, but they don’t afford me so much as a second glance. Once they have disappeared from the hallway, I rush to the cage door, shoving my cheek against the gate to see. Cool metal presses against my skin as I grip the bars, my hands quivering.

  “Jax!” I hiss softly. “Jax! Randolph!”

  A rustling comes from father down the hall and then I see an arm wave out the bars of a cell about fifteen feet away, the fake barcode standing out like an ugly scar against the tan skin.

  “Kelsey?” Jax calls and my heart quickens in excitement at the sound of his voice. “Are you ok?”

  “Yes,” I gasp, relieved and wishing I could see his face again. “I mean, I’m mostly ok. Why… what… how are you both here?”

  Someone laughs. “Who did you think was going to save you?” Randolph asks, though I can’t see him.

  “I didn’t think any of you would bother. I thought you’d think that I killed…” my voice trails off. I can’t bring myself to say Daniel’s name, that he’s dead, not with Jax here.

  “I was there, remember?” Randolph replies. “I got a glimpse of Ashlynn right before she smashed me over the face with a damn rock. When I woke up and saw what happened, I knew she’d betrayed us to the League and you’d been kidnapped. Sorry it took so long to get here but we had to come up with a good plan.”

  “What exactly is the plan now that all three of us are locked up? Are more coming?”

  “More are waiting at an old house about five miles north. We couldn’t risk too many getting caught and dragged down here or the League would get suspicious. Jax and I volunteered, and Charlie had us tattooed like Subs, sorry, like ROC citizens so they would think we were more escapees.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if they figure out we’re from the compound instead of ROC they’ll just kill us,” Jax replies with his cool, composed tone, completely unflappable even in the dismal situation. “And I don’t know about Randolph here, but I’m far too good looking and intelligent to be dying any time soon and robbing this world of my talents.”

  I almost laugh, giddy with the knowledge someone came for me and I might actually survive this. “So now what?”

  “You have a knife,” says Jax.

  “No, I don’t. They took all my weapons when they kidnapped me.”

  “I promise they missed one. In fact, I’ll bet you another kiss that I’m right.”

  “Jax! Get it through your thick skull that I am not kissing you! You might be attractive, but I swear sometimes I wonder if your head is filled with rocks.”

  “Ah, you admit you find me attractive?”

  “That isn’t… that’s not… I don’t-“ Warmth flows up my neck and into my cheeks and now I’m glad that I can’t see him.

  “Is this really the conversation you both want to be having right now?” Randolph demands in annoyance.

  I groan. “Fine, where is this mysterious knife?”

  “In my leather jacket you were using as a pillow,” says Jax.

  I blush again because I never in a million years expected Jax to see me sleeping with his dumb jacket. I snatch it off the floor, then kneel and lay it flat on the tiles.

  “Where?”

  “Inside the bottom lining. I stitched it in there years ago for just such an occasion,” he replies sounding quite proud of himself.

  Searching along the inside of the coat, I see a set of crude black stitches along the bottom hem. Taking hold of the fabric, I pull, ripping open the thread. A tiny Swiss Army knife tumbles to the floor with a clatter.

  “By all means, be a little louder over there,” hisses Jax. “I’m not sure those thugs upstairs heard you.”

  “Sorry,” I say, seizing the object. “Am I supposed to like, pick the locks with this thing?”

  “No. You’re going to wait until whoever brings the next meal opens your cell door.�
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  “Then what, hold them hostage?”

  “Then you kill them.”

  I choke on my next breath. “Are you kidding? I can’t do that! I can’t kill someone!”

  “You have to, Kelsey,” Jax says. “Or eventually they kill us. And I’ve already given my stance on dying.”

  “But I… I can’t.”

  “Have both your arms fallen off or something equally as catastrophic to render you physically unable?”