The Awoken (New Unity Book 1)

by S. M. Lynch

  The Awoken

  New Unity – Book One

  S. M. Lynch

  Copyright © S. M. Lynch, 2021

  The moral right of Sarah Michelle Lynch to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. You must not circulate this book without the authority to do so.

  All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  http://smlynchauthor.wordpress.com

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part Two

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Author Note

  DEAR READER,

  This story is aimed at readers fifteen and older, follows the adventures of a seventeen-year-old and is a slight departure from my other S. M. Lynch novels.

  The adult novels I wrote which precede this series add a lot more detail and context to the story you’re about to read, but by no means is it necessary to have read them prior to reading this story—though I suggest all eight novels in the connected series be read, eventually.

  The Awoken is Ariadne’s journey and all you need to know is that her voice is what matters most in this story. Forget everything that may have happened in another book years or decades previously and join Ari on her journey and see things through her eyes. However, if you are interested in the series that are connected to this one…

  The Collective Series tells the story leading up to the events of the Unity Series. Each series deals with a different generation of characters and so each series can be read separately and stand on its own. And as you guessed it, yes, New Unity deals with the generation facing the terrible repercussions of what came before.

  The order to read the books in if you want to read them chronologically is Chimera, Panacea and Exodus. Then move onto The Radical, The Informant and The Sentient. The two New Unity books, The Awoken and The Rising complete the set.

  If you’re an adult and want to read the books in the order I wrote them, well, Unity came first and features a few predictions that have actually come to pass. Call it maternity making me more sensitive to the world around me, or the warning signs that were clear to me all the way back when. Unity was the first ever series I wrote, ten years ago. Now, here we have her follow-up… it was time.

  Anyway, go forth… and explore.

  Sarah x

  For those who loved

  Seraph & Ryken

  “Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up, or who, still asleep, realizes that what is taken to be real is a ‘dream’ is going crazy.”

  ― R.D. Laing

  Prologue

  2081

  IT HURT FOR HIM TO move. The ground was unyielding, holding him in the cruelest way; no comfort and yet seemingly no escape either. In the fetal position, for a moment he even contemplated going back to sleep, despite the craggy edges of the makeshift womb he was contained within.

  Then, there was light. It broke through and entered his retinas, shattering his vision, until eventually he blinked and was able to cope with the blinding revelation he was awake. The light urged him on, made him curious of his surroundings.

  He realized he possessed the ability to wriggle and the hard ground crumbled around his sides, gave him a way out. He crawled up and out of his human-sized crater, peeking his head just above the surface before leaving the cradle of his hole in the ground. People walked right past him along the sidewalk and were careful to avoid the crater, as if the nature of his arrival and the crater itself were nothing but normal. As his eyes continued to adjust, he saw other craters nearby, but those were empty. His counterparts obviously hadn’t hung around—and he decided nor should he.

  He looked down into the crater into which he had just been delivered to Earth. He then looked up at the sky, somehow aware that’s where he’d come from. He’d been sent down here, to be born. It all seemed normal. The teleportation… created these holes in the earth.

  He looked around, as though expecting someone. When nobody came, he panicked. He’d finally arrived but to be welcomed by no purpose. He had to have a purpose. In that moment, he couldn’t remember what his purpose was—the reason why he’d been sent down. He knew there must be something—a task he was here to carry out—but for the life of him, he couldn’t think of it, at least not yet.

  He brushed the dust off his clothes and realized, without having to look in a mirror, that he must appear to be one of them—otherwise they wouldn’t be moving around him without alarm. Then the enormity of his surroundings suddenly registered, as if his brain was finally uploading.

  The River Thames and its foul, acrid stench made itself known, then he noticed the Houses of Parliament up ahead, the architecture brittle and in disrepair, but ever dominating.

  He took one step forward and almost landed flat on his face. A defense mechanism forced him to throw out his hands so he didn’t injure too badly. His legs weren’t ready to move yet. He needed to let them become accustomed to being in use. After all, this was his birthday.

  Eventually, after staring at the busy people flitting about, and feeling discombobulated by the ugliness of the never-ending neon sky, the light from up above diminished, he finally managed to take his first step.

  Then after walking as far as the Houses of Parliament, he proceeded to sprint around Westminster, seeking a guide or someone who might help him.

  Once he’d exhausted his fruitless exploration of Westminster, he ran across the bridge, ending up at Waterloo station, seeking someone who could put him on the right path.

  After he got zapped several times for trying to enter the Underground without scanning his U-card, his dejected frame sank into an abandoned sofa outside of what used to be The Old Vic.

  The adrenalin wore off and he felt dizzy and tired. He didn’t yet understand the signals of hunger and thirst, nor fatigue or sadness. Everything was new. Everything was uploading, all at once.

  “Hello,” came a voice.

  “Hello,” he replied, without looking up.

  “I’m Ariadne.”

  “The information…” He rubbed his temples, trying to cope with an overload. “None of it is correct. The maps inside my head, out of date.”

  “What do you mean?” Her voice was soft; somehow, he trusted it.

  “The
parks, none of them remain. I ran around the Houses of Parliament ten times and nobody was there. It was empty.”

  “The parliament buildings haven’t been in use since 2023. That’s a long time ago now.”

  “What year is it?”

  “2081.”

  Somewhere, in the back of his mind, everything made sense. He didn’t know how, but it did.

  “What is your designation?”

  “Oh, my serial number…? It’s KY-23-2003.”

  “No, I mean your name,” she said, and knelt so their eyes could meet.

  He saw the most mesmerizing girl. He didn’t know about an overload. It was something else.

  “I have no name,” he said.

  She pinched her lip between her teeth. “You must have a name. Come on, name yourself, or I shall name you.”

  “I don’t know any names.”

  She frowned, as if she found his reticence displeasing. He felt extremely uncomfortable being around this girl, only now that he could see she didn’t seem to appreciate him. It wasn’t the way she sounded or her physicality, it was her expression. It made him feel inept.

  “Call me Kyle,” he said.

  “Kyle it is.”

  She held out her hand and he took it, standing up again. They walked away, he with the assumption that Ariadne was obviously his task; his mission; his purpose for being sent down to Earth.

  He had no idea that in actual fact, he was her task.

  Part One

  Awakening

  Chapter One

  THE MOMENT I MET HIM, I knew he was different. An anomaly. Less robotic than the others, more bearable than I’d anticipated.

  “I’m right about this one,” I told my father, as I drove my hydrocar through London’s desiccated city streets while Kyle slept in the back. We’d met only half an hour ago and I’d brought him directly to my vehicle. Within moments of him lying across the back seat, he had fallen asleep. His journey had taken it out of him.

  “Ariadne, please. Be cautious,” came my father’s warning.

  “I always am.”

  “You’re not.”

  “You’re being overprotective, Dad. Haven’t I proven I can take care of myself?”

  “You listen to me. You’ve got too much of your mother in you, that’s your problem—”

  I hung up on him. I could tell just by the tone of his voice that he was in a mood. That wasn’t unusual. He was always in a stinking, foul mood.

  I checked over my shoulder and Kyle still lay asleep. He was sort of cute, but not my type. My type was human and what this guy was remained a mystery. Sure, they looked human, but they never were. Not by a long shot.

  I sighed, wiping my weary face. Some days, like today, I wished my mom were still here. She’d have known exactly what to do.

  Still, this fellow I’d picked up… I had a hunch he was going to turn out to be the closest thing to a human that had ever dropped out of the sky.

  AT A DRIVE-THRU just outside Doncaster, he sat on the back seat surrounded by a mountain of garbage. I knew it was wrong of me to have brought him to a fast-food place, but in truth I was tired and hungry myself, and I hadn’t had the energy or the foresight earlier that day to pack food. He’d already devoured eight cheeseburgers and I wondered if he was going to try for a ninth, but finally he sank back against the seat and drew breath.

  “I was hungry?”

  “I would say so.” I looked at him over my shoulder, gesturing at my one empty food carton.

  I could only afford one burger, in fact, but it seemed like Kyle had been equipped with his own funds; he had a U-card which he’d found buried in his jacket pocket after my suggestion that he check his clothing. He kept plugging it into the self-service panel of the drive-thru and it hadn’t run out of funds, yet. All the others I’d picked up previously had run out of funds pretty quick. So, why was he different? Why’d he have a ton of cash on that thing? Fast food didn’t come cheap.

  It was usually at this stage—after they’d eaten their weight in food—that I’d discover whether they were going to be a problem or not. With food in their bellies, these guys either became happy… or something else.

  Clones might have appeared to be as human as the rest of us, and yet the manner of their birth often determined how easily they might fit in. If the growth process was rushed, their psychological characteristics were often botched, and sometimes their cells broke down quickly if some part of their DNA was left incomplete.

  I was fairly surprised when Kyle gathered up all his trash and went to a recycling unit outside the car, sorting his trash into the various compartments. He seemed sweet, I don’t know… caring. Still, I had to remind myself, it was usually right about now that I’d have to pull out my stun-gun on one of these guys.

  He popped his head through the open passenger window and asked, “Are you finished?”

  I looked down at myself, wondering if I was. “I guess.”

  He grabbed my trash and recycled that, too.

  Once done, he returned to the car, albeit throwing himself into the passenger seat next to me this time, no longer content to take the back seat.

  “How old are you?” he asked, sounding more confident with some food inside his belly.

  “Seventeen.”

  He turned and frowned, his jaw angled sideways as he regarded me. “Seventeen?”

  “Got a problem with that?”

  “So young,” he decided. “I didn’t think humans were mature until eighteen.”

  “Yeah, well most girls my age don’t have the father I do.” I regretted what I said almost as soon as it came out.

  “Your father,” he whispered, turning and looking out of the window.

  “My father served as World President for two terms. Now he’s… well, he’s him.” Kyle glanced at me sideways, as though already aware who my father was. “When my mother died, he decided not to run for a third term, but he hasn’t stopped working. Now he’s in charge of a special research project and I serve under him. He’s been given his orders to stay out of trouble, you see.”

  “Special project?”

  “My father is a virologist.”

  “Oh, so he…”

  “Yes, we’re still working on a universal vaccine.” We were still working on it, but my father’s project also encompassed many other areas of research…

  Still, I wasn’t about to say anything about any of that to Kyle… at least not just yet.

  “Why did they send you to get me?” he asked, still pressing for more.

  “They didn’t,” I told him, restarting the engine. “I came to get you of my own free will.”

  I wasn’t lying about that. I was the only one who believed his particular breed of clone might one day yield some sort of answer to our universal woes.

  “My father doesn’t agree with what I do.”

  “What you do…? What is it that you do?”

  “I pick up people like you in the hope you may be a viable candidate.”

  He moved away from me, shifting across his seat to be closer to the exit. “Viable candidate for what?”

  In my bid to be diplomatic and not scare the crap out of the new guy, I decided to tell him, “To become a facilitator of peace.”

  He contemplated the prospect during a few minutes of silence, then began nodding his head unrelentingly, until I touched his shoulder and assured him, “I’m not allowed to kill you. My father has forbade that I kill anyone until I’m eighteen. We’re just going for a car ride, that’s all. I’ll tell you when there are things you need to know.”

  “You expect me to trust you?”

  “Yes.”

  “With no evidence yet of your sincerity except that you brought me to this drive-thru and haven’t yet killed me?”

  I turned in my seat to stare at him. “If I hadn’t rescued you from London, you’d be dead already. The new World President has a price on the heads of people like you. I’ve already risked my life to save you, and my father�
��s research project, too. If Madam President Roche knew I had acquired you, my father’s funding would be cut.”

  “Madam President?” he asked, as though the information did not marry with his installed memory.

  “Yes, we have a woman president,” I growled, shifting the car into reverse and setting off out of the car park. “In fact, she was US president before she… took over the world, so to speak.”

  “My data is behind, that’s all.” He looked around himself, as though expecting a few more surprises along the way. Maybe our reality didn’t fit with his preconceived notions, not even a bit.

  “Yeah, that’s all.” It was clear a lengthy journey of some sort had resulted in his information being out of date.

  He turned his head and stared out of the window as we got back on the road. The view on either side of the motorway wasn’t much to look at. There was still trash everywhere and the polytunnels protecting crops from pollution were unsightly, too.

  “It’s not what you expected, is it?” I queried.

  “No,” he replied, “which is odd, because it’s still better than where I came from.”

  “I see.”

  He said nothing more, but it was important for me not to pester and irritate him too much, so I didn’t probe any further.

  “Where are we going?” he finally asked.

  “We’re going to my father’s labs in Manchester. We’ll be safe there. I’ll find you somewhere to stay. Don’t worry, everything will be fine.”

  “Okay.”

  It was normally the thought of being taken somewhere and locked back up that scared off these clones. Clearly their minds were addled by early memories of quarantine and enclosure. It was normally at this point I’d be forced to let the auto-driver take over while I stunned my passenger into submission. However, Kyle merely wrung his hands in his lap and accepted what I had suggested.