by Tarah Benner
CONTENTS
Beginning
Copyright
Dedication
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
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
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Epilogue
End
The Last Uprising
A novel by Tarah Benner
Defectors Trilogy
tarahbenner.com
Amazon Edition
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This book is a work of fiction, and any similarities to any person, living or dead, are coincidental and not intentional.
Copyright 2014 Tarah Benner
To my earliest readers. You are the ones who kept me going and made the rest of this series possible.
CHAPTER ONE
The only thing worse than fear is uncertainty.
In the simulation room, familiar images flashed before my eyes. The pictures still made my stomach clench with nausea, but it was getting better.
Now, I could look at the twisted, bloody remains of men strewn across the battlefield. I could look at the melting skin of the children in the pictures. I remembered those pictures from a documentary I had seen about Hiroshima. Crime scene photos were mixed in with the images of war. The blood and the peeling, burnt, broken, and twisted human beings blended with the images of destruction. I’d seen these pictures over and over again so many times that I had the order memorized.
What bothered me more than the images themselves was the nagging feeling of déjà vu. Yes, I’d seen this sequence twelve times a day every day for thirty-five days, but I felt as though I’d seen it more than that. Where had I seen it before?
Such a dangerous world requires a new generation of soldiers . . . a force for good to keep ordinary citizens safe from evildoers . . . safe from the violence of rebellion and the abominations created by the modern age.
A carrier appeared, and something in the back of my mind — an old fear — made me recoil.
The Private Military Company of the United States is always working to protect and serve, and World Corp International is committed to rebuilding a future from the ashes in this the New Northern Territory, where brothers and sisters work side by side for the common good.
Order. Compliance. Progress. This is our credo.
There are those who seek to disrupt our harmony and destroy our world. These menaces don’t deserve your sympathy. They are the true plague upon our world, and they must be defeated.
Go forth and do your duty, citizen. The New Republic needs you.
The sequence ended, and a robotic feminine tone sounded.
End of simulation.
The screen went black, and that feeling of boredom mixed with relief began to sink in. As awful as the simulations were, the strange dread that I was missing something important tormented me more.
Reluctantly, I got up to exit the theater, knocking one of the hundred identical white chairs out of place. There were exactly one hundred. I’d counted every day that first week. It seemed odd that there should be a hundred chairs when there was only one of me.
“Now, Haven . . .” taunted a familiar voice.
I jumped when I saw the man sitting in the back row. He was so tan he was practically orange, and he wore crisply pleated white pants and a blazer. His hair and goatee were the lightest silver, and he had cold, steely eyes like a shark.
“That’s a little . . . passive aggressive, don’t you think?” His thin lips curved into a smile I didn’t like.
“Just stumbled a little,” I said lightly, hoping he didn’t register the fear that lifted my voice an octave too high.
This man had visited me before during my first behavioral adjustment. He had stood and watched me through the clear, cold water in my hallucination, flashing that same smile as I cried out in anguish.
“I doubt that very much. You’re determined, that’s for sure. It’s taken us a long time to get here. But you’ve made tremendous progress.”
My nostrils flared, but I didn’t say anything. Yes, I had made progress, but it had been painful. Within the first two weeks here, I’d learned that I could avoid trips to that horrible room with the cold metal table if I stayed within the boundaries, ate my meals, and “responded” to the simulations. I’d gotten sixteen new HALLO burns for my trouble. They stood out more sharply than my old ones. For some reason, I couldn’t remember where I’d gotten those.
I was used to the HALLO tags by now — so used to them in fact that they’d had to go up to five on the last session before I passed out. The worst part about adjustments was that they increased the settings on my CID. Although I’d memorized the boundaries of the atrium — how far I could go before the pain started — occasionally, I would still look away from the screen during my sessions in the theater and receive a sharp shock to the back of my skull.
They wanted me to look.
“You could be a great asset, you know,” the man continued lazily. “Probably my greatest achievement.”
For some reason, that made my chest swell with pride. Despite the pain, the horror, and the silence that stretched the hours of each day, I desperately wanted to be useful to the Republic.
Sensing my receptiveness, he stood up, stepped around the chairs without touching them, and stopped just inches away from me. “If I can take the Republic’s most defiant and turn her into a force for good, then others will see it is pointless to resist. You and I . . . we could fix all this.”
“All of what?” I breathed, trying not to cringe as the sharp tang of ginseng lozenges reached my nostrils.
The man turned away, seemingly lost in thought. “When I was a child, we lived out in the country. Fresh air, good exercise . . . it was a great place to grow up, as a young boy. My family lived so far out that we weren’t on city water. We drank well water. It didn’t taste very good, but what we didn’t know, of course, was that the water was tainted.”
I swallowed, willing myself to nod.
“Until, when I was twelve, my mother was diagnosed with cancer.”
He gripped the back of one of the chairs, and I watched his tan knuckles whiten. “A chemical company was dumping toxic waste illegally, and there was nothing we could do about it. We couldn’t afford to take the company to court. We could barely afford to keep our house.”
“That’s awful,” I said, just so he would know I was still listening. I wasn’t really sure why he was telling me this.
“The world is a terrible place, Haven. It always has been.”<
br />
“Unless we change things,” I said slowly, echoing what he had told me before, just wishing he would leave.
“Exactly, Haven! Exactly!” he said, clapping his hands together in delight. “When I was younger, I told myself I would never be so powerless again. I wanted to be richer than God himself so no one — no one — could ever ignore me again. I thought I could make them listen if I had wealth and power . . . if I created an American dynasty.”
He turned to face me. “But that’s not the solution, is it? There will always be people who get shit on. Maybe not me, but someone. The key to change isn’t money; it’s control. People need the Republic to tell them what to do — to tell them what’s right. Otherwise, given half the chance, humanity will destroy everything we have worked for.”
I nodded numbly.
“We’re doing it, Haven. You and me.”
I closed my eyes, fighting the nausea that was churning in my stomach. I hated this man with every fiber of my being, yet I had no idea why. Everything he said sent a ripple of sickness and wrongness through my body, and his voice filled me with a sense of dread.
When I opened my eyes, I was alone in the simulation room — alone as always. I dragged myself into the main atrium and headed for the dining room. I’d memorized where all the white doors went, and they no longer had to send a nurse to escort me. I knew what would happen if I tried to run.
Everything here was white: the walls, the chairs, the floor, my scrubs. Even the room where I slept and the room where I was allowed to eat was white. I hated it.
The food wasn’t supposed to be white, but the bland, muted vegetables turned to ash in my mouth. I’d lost a lot of weight in the first two weeks I was here, and they forced the white, flavorless food down my throat with a tube. I didn’t like that.
Now I ate on my own.
When I entered the dining room, my meal was waiting on a flimsy white silicon tray just as always. No one had to come serve my meals. The table was pushed up against the wall at just the right height to receive my tray through a tiny slot in the wall. Sometimes I waited by the slot to see the little window open up and catch a glimpse of the person on the other side, but it was completely dark.
By now, I knew there was no person on the other side — just a conveyer belt that ran the frozen meal through an oven, through the slot, and onto my table.
Today, dinner was a tofu brick with sweet potatoes and dark gray green beans. That meant it was day five. I had no idea what day of the week I first came here, so I considered my first day number one. I noticed they used the same seven breakfasts, the same seven lunches, and the same seven dinners on a repeated rotation, so that was how I remembered how many days I’d been here. I suspected that day seven was Sunday, because that was the only day I got actual meat: a lukewarm cube of meatloaf with bits of confetti inside masquerading as dehydrated onions.
I didn’t mind. The only thing that really bothered me was how my entire meal had to be either hot or cold, confirming my suspicions that a machine ran the entire frozen meal through an oven.
I glared at the clear, round pill sitting in its own little indentation on my tray — so harmless looking. They’d been giving it to me since I’d arrived. I couldn’t remember what they had drugged me with when I was in the hospital. It had been an endless parade of doctors poking and prodding, horrible sweating fevers, and nausea. I’d thought I was dying, but then they had cured me.
This little clear pill was almost worse. It made me tired and careless and foggy, but if I did not take it, they would send in a nurse with a syringe, and I would be sent to the adjustment room. I picked it up between my thumb and index finger, made eye contact with the camera pointed at my table, and dry-swallowed the smooth tablet dramatically. I could almost feel my willpower draining.
Just as I was about to stick my fork into the sharp corner of my tofu brick, I heard the bang of a door. I sat up straight.
Why were they sending a nurse? I’d been on good behavior today. It didn’t seem fair that they would haul me off for an adjustment when I hadn’t done anything to warrant it. I bent my head over my tofu, hoping that if she saw me contentedly eating as I was supposed to, maybe she would see that I didn’t need to be adjusted.
My back tightened as the quick footsteps echoed off the high walls of the atrium. They weren’t nurses’ shoes. Those made a squeaky noise on the shiny white tile. These steps were loud and angry.
“Haven!”
I jerked my head up at the familiar hiss. There, poking his head around the corner of the doorway, was a young man about my age with clean-cut dark hair and bright, sharp gray eyes.
“Amory,” I whispered. Without thinking, the name had slipped out of my mouth. Somehow I knew him — at least I knew his name.
“You’re alive!” He wore a look so beautiful and happy it took my breath away.
“How do I —”
“Come on! There isn’t much time.”
My mind was working furiously, but I couldn’t remember how I knew him. It was the same odd sense of déjà vu I got during the simulations.
“How do I . . . know you?”
The relief drained from his face to be replaced by hurt and confusion.
“Haven. It’s me. We have to go! Now!”
Something tugged at the edges of my memory, but it was like feeling my way through a dark room. “I don’t understand.”
“What?”
His eyes crinkled in distress, and he crossed the room to me and put his hands on my arms. I jumped at his touch, and a look of fear flashed through his eyes.
“You don’t remember me?”
“No. Not really . . .”
“What did they do to you, Haven?”
“Stop saying my name!” I was starting to panic. He knew who I was, and I knew his name, but I didn’t know him.
“What did they do to you?” he asked louder.
“Who?”
“Aryus Edric. World Corp International.”
“What do you mean?”
“We have to get out of here.”
“I can’t leave.”
“I know. It’s going to be hard, but I’ve done it. You helped me. Remember?”
Something stirred in the back of my mind. I pictured Amory in my white scrubs, and a memory flickered in the back of my mind.
“Yes,” I stammered in surprise. “I-I did. Why did I do that?”
“Because you don’t want to be here. These are bad people.”
“What? Where do you want me to go?”
Amory was shaking his head now, thinking hard.
“Just come on. I’ll explain when we get out of here.”
In the back of my mind, I knew I shouldn’t, but something about the way he talked ignited a feeling of excitement in my chest. So what if it would end in an adjustment? It might be worth it just to see what he was talking about.
I’d been trying to get through the door that led out beyond the atrium for weeks, but every time, it had ended in a very painful, humiliating shock to the back of the head.
“All right,” I said, hesitating slightly.
He grabbed my hand, pulling me out of the dining room. I wanted to protest, but his warm hand felt nice holding mine. Something about it was familiar. In fact, everything about him screamed familiarity, but I couldn’t quite access the part of my brain that knew him. It was all very strange.
My white, no-slip soles squeaked against the tile as we crossed the atrium. Watching Amory pull me along, I took in the black jacket that stretched across his broad shoulders and olive-colored pants tucked over dirty black boots. He didn’t look as if he belonged, and I liked it. Everyone here wore white scrubs and lab coats.
Under the cleanly shaven line of hair on the back of his neck, I could just make out a square scar that looked the way mine felt, but it was cut across the middle in a shaky line. By the looks of it, we had the same CID. Or we had. Somehow, I remembered he didn’t have his anymore.
He pushed o
pen the white door that the nurses used to enter the atrium and pulled me across the threshold.
Instantly, a sharp, familiar pain cracked across the back of my skull. It pulsated through my head, splitting me in two between the eyes and down the bridge of my nose. I tried to get back into the safe boundaries, but my legs wouldn’t move.
“Haven!” Amory’s voice sounded oddly fuzzy.
Blinking through the mist, I forced myself to focus on his face. His eyes were filled with apprehension. He remembered how it felt when it had happened to him. He pulled on my hand, dragging my feet incrementally over the floor. The pain intensified, and black spots erupted in my vision.
A sharp shriek echoed down the corridor, and I covered my ears. The sound reverberated, and I thought for a moment that I could see the waves of sound disturbing the air and rocking back toward me. The scream sounded again, stronger this time. Then I realized it belonged to me.
Someone was yanking me away from the safety of the atrium into the blinding white corridor. I didn’t want to go. Every step I took intensified the pain in the back of my head.
“Haven! Haven!” I squinted through the black fog unfurling around my eyes.
Amory.
“Haven! Come on. It’s all an illusion. It isn’t real.”
His face was fuzzy, but I could still make out the resolve in those gray eyes. They shone through the mist like two beacons of light.
As I concentrated, the mist lifted enough for me to discern the crinkles around Amory’s eyes and his distressed grimace as he watched me scream.
Why was he putting me through this? Every step I took just caused me pain.
I backed away, pulling out of Amory’s grip to return to the atrium. He grabbed both of my wrists, pulling me in the other direction. But it hurt too much.
I felt the hard shock to my knees as they hit the cold tile, and the pain reverberated up to my thighs. I couldn’t let him take me any farther. I screamed again, and a pair of strong arms wrapped around me and lifted me up against my will.