by K A Riley
REBELLION
THE RESISTANCE TRILOGY, BOOK THREE
K. A. Riley
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Epilogue
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Also By K. A. Riley
To my brothers and sisters, ravens all.
“War does not determine who is right—only who is left.”
-- Bertrand Russell
“Ravens are the birds I'll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have to die at all. Instead, become ravens.”
-- Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
Prologue
This morning couldn’t be any more normal.
The five of us wake up, roll reluctantly out of our warm beds, and pad off—the three girls first, then the two boys—to the shower room just off of our sleeping quarters. Once we’re clean and dressed, we straighten our white sheets and green army blankets and sit at the foot of our low cots that we’ve arranged in a circle like the spokes of a wheel. Stretching our arms and arching our backs to work out the knots in our muscles, we compare notes about the dreams each of us had last night. With his dark hair still wet and with a soft yellow towel draped around his neck, Brohn says he had a dream about running through the woods. “Only I couldn’t tell if I was being chased or if I was chasing someone else,” he tells us. Behind her cowl of wavy brown hair, Manthy’s dark, brooding eyes perk up at this, and I ask her if she had a similar dream. She shakes her head and mumbles something about how she never has dreams anymore. I can’t tell if she’s bragging or if she’s sad about that fact.
Leaning back on one elbow, Cardyn rubs his stomach and licks his lips. “I had the most delicious dream ever. I was stuffing myself with chocolate-covered yucca buds and rolling around in a juicy buffet of mountain sage and wild strawberries.” Pretending to bask in the satisfaction of satiety, Cardyn licks his fingers one at a time. “You can keep your terrifying dreams of being on the run in the woods,” he says to Brohn with a dismissive wave of his hand. “We’ve already done that for real. Mine is a dream I’d love to see come true!”
Sitting cross-legged and drawing her straight black hair back into a slick ponytail, Rain gives Cardyn a poorly-concealed eye-roll, which makes Cardyn scowl. “What about you, Rain?” he grumbles. “Let me guess. You dreamed about beating all of us in chess.”
“Better than beating all of us with her bare fists,” Brohn says, and we all laugh. In addition to being the smartest of our group, Rain has recently taken it upon herself to fight pretty much anyone who tries to cross us. In Reno, a stranger tried to grope her, and she responded by breaking his nose. Yesterday, she took down a soldier who was on guard duty for the Patriot Army. I didn’t get a chance to see her in action that time, but I saw the results: a cluster of perfectly round knuckle imprints where the guy’s face used to be. For such a small girl, she really packs a wallop.
“Actually,” Rain says, looking at Card like he’s a bug who just scurried out from under the floorboards, “I dreamed we were all back on the run when we decided to stop to assemble a giant jigsaw puzzle in the middle of the desert floor. It was a picture of the original eight of us from our Cohort of 2042, including Terk, Karmine, and Kella.”
We all go quiet for a minute and bow our heads at the names of our friends who aren’t with us anymore.
Rain still has her head down when she adds, “But the puzzle still had one piece missing.”
“Oh yeah?” Cardyn asks. “Which piece?”
Raising her head, Rain points over to the top of the big antique armoire where our clothes for the day are stored and where Render is quietly preening himself. “It was him.”
We all look over at the large raven who must sense that he’s suddenly become the center of attention. He lifts his smooth feathered head and cracks out a series of coarse kraas! which sound way too loud for this early in the morning, and I’m wondering if the Insubordinates, our fellow rebels who are sleeping in the dozens of other rooms on this floor, think we’re in here running an aluminum garbage can through a corn-thresher.
Manthy clamps her hands over her ears, and Cardyn puts his finger to his lips in a pointless effort to tell Render to be quiet.
Render barks out another string of raspy kraas! and then spreads his wings and suddenly seems gigantic, like a prehistoric flying dinosaur or something. I don’t need to activate my psychic connection with him to know what’s on his mind: he’s hungry, and he doesn’t like being cooped up. It was comforting for me to know he was in here with us all night but having lived his life in the boundless mountain air, he’s not a big fan of walls or ceilings. I hop up from the end of my cot and go over to the window. I’ve barely got it open when the familiar woosh of feathery purplish-black whizzes by my face, and Render is soaring out over the quiet city with the first pinkish rays of the morning sun lighting him up like a glistening missile.
This is our first time in such a big city, and I panic for a second as I watch him disappear into a forest of tall office buildings of reflecting black glass and synth-steel. I let out a long, soft breath when I spot him banking and circling as he happily scouts around the city for something he can scavenge for breakfast.
I turn back to Brohn and the others just as the door to our room creaks open on old-style metal hinges to reveal Wisp and Granden, and I’m suddenly shaken out of the illusion that we’re all just a bunch of normal teenagers in a normal situation getting ready for a normal day at school. There’s nothing normal about any of this or about any of us. We’re five homeless and parentless seventeen-year-olds who have been dodging death for nearly our entire lives. As we discovered over a month ago on our last day of captivity, we’re what’s called Emergents. Manthy and I are, anyway. And possibly Brohn. I don’t know about Cardyn and Rain. We have certain abilities we didn’t ask for and don’t completely understand. We’re hunted, hiding out, and one week away from war.
If ‘normal’ has an opposite, we’re it.
Shaking the last lingering bits of slumber from our heads, we all rise and greet Wisp and Granden, who inform us they’re going to take us downstairs to the Intel Room to begin our strategizing sessions in preparation for the battle ahead. In the happy commotion of the “Good mornings!” and gleeful, overlapping questions about how everyone slept, I realize I never got to tell the others about my dream.
In it, I was soaring over the city—confident and free. Then the clouds parted to reveal the world below in chaos and flames. I could have flown off and left it all behind, but something I couldn’t see or hear but only feel pulled me down toward the burning fields of battle and bodies. Unable to fly, but also unable to land, I hovered in the air, helpless, weightless, and I was forced to watch the world I hoped to save descend, instead, even further into a pit of apocalyptic violence. Buildings were twisting on their foundations and disappearing in
to dust, and people were running for their lives as the deafening crack of gunfire filled the air. There was a mysterious figure in a red cloak and a tall soldier with cruel eyes, and they were laughing as they killed the only people I love left in the world.
Back in the Valta, I once read a book where a psychiatrist claimed that humans have some sort of self-preservation mechanism in our brains that doesn’t let us die in our dreams.
Last night, the searing pain in my head and the sound of my own screams ringing in my ears just before everything went black proved that guy dead wrong.
Unlike Cardyn’s dream, mine is a dream I really hope doesn’t come true. The scariest part is that it didn’t even feel like a dream.
It felt like a vision.
1
Saturday
With Wisp and Granden looking on, we finish getting ourselves dressed in the form-fitting, five-button olive-sweaters and the multi-pocketed black combat pants from the armoire. I’m lacing up my boots when Wisp and Granden, waiting patiently and proudly in the doorway, remark about how nice and clean we all look. Wisp stands on her tiptoes and throws her arms around her brother’s neck, and I can tell it’s taking all of Brohn’s strength not to let her go. He finally releases her, though, and Wisp says how happy she is to see us rested and healthy. She scans us up and down. “Better than ever,” she exclaims.
“Well, cleaner, anyway,” Granden adds with a twinkle-eyed smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
I’m still astounded at the odd couple Wisp and Granden make: Wisp, short, rail-thin, and practically drowning in her baggy khaki cargo pants and lime-green hoodie; Granden, decked out in pleated black pants and a crisp white dress shirt under a tactical military jacket, towering behind Wisp’s shoulder like a vigilant bodyguard. He’s handsome like Brohn, but he has silvery eyes and a certain soldierly coldness about him that tends to mask what he’s feeling, which makes me a little nervous around him. Wisp, on the other hand, exudes a happy, positive, and almost mystical energy, which makes me imagine what a prancing baby unicorn might be like. Together, the two are quite the pair. There’s something sweet about the image, but there’s something scary about it, too. Like they’re a unified entity with twice the power to kill you if you dared to threaten either one of them.
It used to be Wisp and Brohn who were never apart with Brohn standing guard over her like this. When we were growing up in the Valta, he was her protector, the one always within reach to lend a helping hand, an arm to lean against, or a shoulder to cry on. If he’s feeling any jealousy or weirdness about being replaced by the same man who taught us how to kill, he isn’t showing it. Instead, he strides confidently out of the room with me, Cardyn, Rain, and Manthy right on his heels.
Wisp with her sprightly steps and Granden with his determined strides escort us down the long, wide hall past a series of closed doors on either side. Outside, this building, affectionately called the “Style,” looks old. A former office building housing the legal headquarters for a team of immigration lawyers, it’s five floors of cracked bricks and crumbling mortar under about a hundred years’ worth of age and grime. We only got glimpses on our way here last night, but there are some amazing buildings in this city. Tall towers and streamlined apartment complexes with green lawns on the terraces and everything. There are long, wide roads—clean and pristine. Silver mag-tracks, a hundred feet high, snake through parts of the city and connect the taller towers to each other. A lot of the businesses were closed when we got here, but some of the ones that were still open—a bakery and a bunch of bodegas—had glowing pink holo-ads shimmering out front that fizzled when we ran through them.
This neighborhood we’re in now, on the other hand, isn’t so nice. Since we got here yesterday, we’ve seen some dark rooms and some pretty creepy corridors. Fortunately, this fourth-floor hallway Wisp calls the Dorm is wide and long with at least twenty closed doors on each side. The floors and walls are illuminated by a gentle light glowing from thin halo-strips lining the ceiling. The light has a slight purplish tint to it, and it takes me a second to realize that it brightens almost imperceptibly as we walk down the hallway and then dims again behind us. I’m sure it was like this last night, too. I was just too tired to notice and way too happy to care.
I have faint memories of hallways like this in the school I went to before the drones destroyed our town and orphaned us. When I was six, school was a bustling throng of happy, jostling kids with our teachers, who seemed like benevolent giants at the time, constantly herding us between rooms and from one activity to the next. After the drone strikes, the only rooms left were in Shoshone High School, one of the few buildings left standing and the only one safe enough to live in. For the next ten years, we called that building home. We set up bedrooms, stocked supply closets, nailed scrap materials onto the windows, and even designated parts of the crumbling space as classrooms where we taught each other anything and everything we could from academics and sports to music and mechanics. Cardyn used to joke about how our studiousness and civility was all just a front and that we’d likely descend into a hostile and anarchic Lord of the Flies society before too long. But that never happened. Instead, our small community of survivors, bonded by a common fear but also by a common sense of compassion and by a stubborn refusal to surrender, managed to eke out a living and save ourselves from the brink of extinction.
When the five of us—me, Brohn, Cardyn, Rain, and Manthy—went back a few months later, the school had been destroyed along with everything and everyone else in the town. Except for Wisp, as we discovered only yesterday.
As we follow her and Granden past each door, I think about all the normal things I missed out on in those ten years. Things like going to classes, goofing around with friends, and enjoying each day without worrying it might be my last. I give my head a good shake to clear it of the distracting things that might have been but never were.
Wisp flicks her thumb toward the series of closed doors as we pass. “The others aren’t up yet,” she explains loud enough for us to hear her over the gentle echo of our footsteps on the tiled floor. “We figured we’d let them get one more night of solid sleep before we start them on their training this morning. It’s going to be tough on them. I don’t expect all of them to stick around. You, on the other hand, are kind of the key to everything we’re about to do, so it’s best you know everything there is to know. And that means lots of work and little sleep for the rest of this week.”
“We can handle anything you throw our way,” Brohn brags.
“I don’t doubt that,” Wisp says as she pushes up the sleeves on her oversized hoodie. “It’s what the Patriot Army is going to throw our way that worries me.”
Cardyn yawns, stretches his arms out wide, and says he wishes he could join the sleeping Insubordinates behind these doors. “I’m not sure which I’d like more right now, food or some more sleep.”
“Unfortunately, Cardyn, we don’t have a ton of time for either,” Granden says evenly, his voice resonating with the air of authority I remember so well from our time in the Processor. He may be on our side now, but he’s still military through and through. Everything about him—rigid posture, steely gaze, raised chin, unwavering focus, total lack of self-doubt—has been forged by his time as a soldier. I don’t think he could conceal it if he tried. As one of our trainers, he pushed us hard and turned us into the unyielding survivors and warriors we’ve become. On top of that, he has the dubious honor of being the turncoat son of President Krug, who is probably the worst person in the world. I’m still not one-hundred-percent sold on Granden as an ally, but it’s hard to doubt him right now. After all, he risked his life, twice now, to give us clues about where we needed to go and what we needed to do after our escape from Hiller and the Processor. It’s largely because of him we’re who and where we are. Whether that turns out to be a blessing or a curse remains to be seen.
Granden gestures toward a doorway at the end of the hall. “We’ll have a quick meal in the Mess H
all, but then we have to head straight downstairs to the Intel Room and get to work. We have a lot of planning to do. We only have one shot at getting this right, and failure could mean…”
His words linger in the air. He doesn’t need to finish. We all hear the barely-concealed urgency in his voice, and we know full well what the consequences of failure are. Not just for us, either. If there’s even a sliver of truth to what Wisp and Granden told us last night, we could be facing the total takeover of San Francisco, the permanent installation of a sadistic military dictatorship, a base of operations in the West for Krug’s government, and basically the end of everything we thought our country was and what we hoped it might still become.
Beckoning us forward and with her brown hair tied back in a jaunty ponytail, Wisp leads us into what turns out to be a large room set up with six rows of long metallic-blue tables arranged in orderly lines. The lights flicker on as we step into the room. Wisp strides over to an input panel on the wall and skims her fingers over its shiny red surface.
“I hope coffee and a tofu and spinach breakfast wrap are okay,” Wisp calls out to us over her shoulder.
Cardyn licks his lips and slides onto the bench seat of the nearest long table. “I can’t speak for the rest of you, but my dream is coming true!”