Rebel Rising: A Dystopian Romance (Cage of Lies Book 1)

by Susanne Valenti

  REBEL RISING

  Cage of Lies Book 1

  by

  Susanne Valenti

  Contents

  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

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  I slammed my palms against the cold glass wall that separated us, but they didn't even flinch.

  "Mom!" I roared. "Dad!"

  They didn't look up. No matter what I did, they didn't look up from their work. The white lab was cold and unwelcoming but they seemed at home in it. They didn't know what was coming, it was just like any other day.

  I banged my palms on the glass again, my heart thrashing with panic, but they couldn't hear me. They could never hear me.

  A blue light started flashing above their heads and they both turned abruptly to stare at it. My mom dropped the vial she was holding and it smashed into a thousand tiny pieces by her feet.

  "Mom!" I screamed. Tears were running down my cheeks. "Dad!" My throat was raw as sandpaper, but I kept screaming and hammering on the glass, desperate for them to listen, to run.

  Mom grabbed my dad's hand. Their eyes met and the love they held for each other shone in their gaze. They knew what was coming for them but they gave their final moments to each other.

  “No!" I yelled. "Please, run...please.” I sobbed as the too familiar scene played out, begging for it not to be true.

  Dad pulled my mom into his arms, burying his face in her hair. Their fingers dug into each other's clothes and they held on so tightly it must have hurt.

  I screamed again, agony pouring through me as the inevitable happened.

  The flames dove from the ceiling in a wave. They washed over my parents, kissing their skin and wrapping them in tendrils of orange flame. I lost sight of them as they were devoured by the inferno. There was only fire, burning and my screams.

  ***

  I woke with a jolt and gulped down a lungful of air as panic gripped me. My heart was pounding and real tears stained my cheeks. That nightmare had haunted my dreams for too long but the grief of it never lessened.

  I twisted my fingers through my sheets and pressed my head back into the pillow as I closed my eyes again. My breathing slowed as reality closed in and I tried to get back to sleep.

  I rolled over but light pressed against my eyelids as the panels on the walls slowly illuminated. They were designed to give the illusion of windows and reflected what was going on in the sky far, far above. Apparently today was a very grey day. Which was pretty much the same as it had been all month. Repetitive. Dull. Bleugh. Just like my life.

  The idea was to give residents the feeling that we weren't enclosed by layers and layers of stone, metal and human flesh. It didn't make me feel that way. It felt like someone had decided to take up most of my wall space with stupid light boxes that forced me to wake up at an unnatural hour. But maybe that was just me. Maybe everyone else in this city didn’t mind that the Guardians did the thinking for them. Why make a decision when someone else could make it for you? Oh yeah, because I had a personality, dipshits. Gah, sometimes I just wanted to break free of this place and make my own rules.

  "Good morning Maya. The time is now six thirty," a mechanical female voice spoke, breaking the silence.

  I groaned and threw an arm over my eyes. Six thirty still counts as the middle of the night as far as I'm concerned, you robotic early-rising bitch.

  When my parents were alive, we had a huge apartment on level one sixty two. We even had one real window, though it only looked at other buildings. After they died, I was relocated to a tiny apartment on level forty. The Guardians had wanted me to live with foster parents higher up. I’d told them where they could stick that idea. Sometimes I regretted that choice though. I’d chosen independence on a lower floor where people looked at me like I was basically a Dweller. But anything had to be better than sharing a home with some prissy top floor family who had sunbeams shining out of their asses. Right?

  The TV flickered to life and I pulled a pillow over my head. Why won’t the city let me sleep today, dammit?

  The news caster's voice filled the room but I tried my best to block it out.

  "...population is reaching such a high that more talks to extend The Wall are underway, in order to create desperately needed new housing. An area outside The Wall on the south side is being checked for air and soil quality and, if the assessment goes well, the construction could begin soon.

  Anti-extension groups are calling for population controls to be enforced rather than merely recommended, with compulsory sterilisation to be given to everyone after their first child if they live below level one hundred and after their second child if they live above. This measure is already in place for people who carry any genetic deficiencies. The discussions will start officially in two days time and the term for deliberation on this topic has been set at one month.

  In other news, there have been thrilling scenes in this week's Lawless Trials. Andre Ferez has entered into the eighty second trial of his lifer sentence for killing his neighbour three years ago. If he successfully survives six more trials he will be the longest surviving lifer since the infamous Thomas Peters-"

  I flicked the TV off as I opened my eyes and pushed the pillow away. I really didn't fancy waking up to shots of the Lawless Trials searing into my brain. Andre Ferez was slowly becoming a celebrity just because he was freakishly good at killing people. I wasn't about to join his fan club. Even though I had checked out his six pack two seconds before he’d slayed a dude in yesterday’s roundup. Like, only for half a blink, and only before he’d started chopping. But still, that was definitely going in Maya’s least proud moments box in the back of my brain.

  When The Wall went up seventy six years ago, it quickly became clear to the City Guardians that there wasn't room to contain criminals within a conventional prison. They would have been a drain on the city resources. So, as a kind of twisted solution to the problem and a discouragement to crime, the Lawless Trials were created. Criminals were given sentences in an amount of trials they competed in rather than time spent in prison. Pretty sick and definitely not my cup of tea.

  Murderers and rapists received lifer sentences which simply meant that they kept fighting until they were killed in a trial, their motivation to continue being little more than self preservation. A burglar might get a sentence of ten trials after which, if they survived, they could rejoin the population safe inside Harbour City.

  It was often shown in sickening detail on the TV which was supposed to serve as a constant reminder to everyone of what awaited
criminals. In reality, it had become a perverse sport with people placing bets on the survival of individuals. Hence the pseudo-celebrity status of Andre Ferez.

  I understood it. I was even in support of it. I just didn't like to watch uncensored footage of people trying their hardest to kill each other in every thinkable way whilst I was eating my breakfast. I’d once been eating cheerios while watching a man’s head get cleaved off. My favourite cereal had been ruined for me for life. How sad was that?

  I clambered out of bed and pulled the release catch beneath it with a sigh then pushed as the bed rotated up and over until it fitted snugly against the wall and gave me some measure of floor space.

  Yawning, I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and crossed my apartment in three steps which delivered me neatly into my tiny bathroom.

  The phone rang as I was getting out of the shower and I glanced at the name on the display as I answered it.

  "Taylor - hey." I didn’t know why I checked really, no one else would be calling me at seven in the morning. Thinking about it, no one else ever called. But I didn’t mind that. Taylor was the only person in the world who I cared about calling.

  "Hey Maya, are you up?" Taylor's irritatingly cheery voice chimed at me through the speaker. If I was the moon, Taylor was the sun by comparison. The only thing that made me shine was him.

  “No," I replied through another yawn.

  The shower had helped but I wasn't in a good mood. The nightmare hung heavily on me like it always did. It was a recurring bitch of a dream which just so happened to be my worst memory in living history too. Not that it was real exactly. I hadn’t been there so I couldn’t actually remember it, but my brain had stitched together the images of what I’d been told about it and made that horrifying reel to replay in my head night after night. The scars left on my heart by the loss of my parents felt like fresh wounds again and I drew in a breath as tears pricked my eyes and tried to break through the carefully woven mask I always wore.

  “Well you won't want to hear the news then." I swear I could hear him grinning down the phone at me and it helped to distract me from my thoughts.

  “No," I replied again to tease him. I ran a towel through my hair and wedged the phone between my ear and shoulder.

  “Okay, I'll just have to go outside without you then."

  I paused, the towel hanging limp in my hand as my heart did somersaults in my chest.

  “Outside? As in outside The Wall?" He was winding me up, I knew it, but my stomach flipped over all the same. I’d always wanted to go outside. To see a world that wasn't contained within concrete and steel.

  "Yeah. It was on the news earlier. The city needs environmental chemists to carry out soil and air checks for contaminants and they need a team of inferior science students like us to do the leg work. I just happen to know a pretty important environmental chemist-"

  “Your dad," I interrupted as my excitement spilled over. If there was one thing in the world that could break my sour mood today, it was this. The thing I’d been dreaming about since I’d even learned there was anything beyond this fortress of a city which contained us.

  “Yes, and this is your cue to beg."

  I barked a laugh. I was the top student in our class so if I wanted to be in the team I'd be in; no questions asked. Taylor was just lucky that his dad would be able to get him on the team too.

  “When?" I asked, adrenaline rushing through my blood.

  “Ten minutes. I'm at your door now."

  The screen next to my front door flashed a shot of Taylor standing in the corridor outside with his phone pressed to his ear and I grinned. I hung up, checked my towel was securely wrapped around me so he wouldn’t get any free tit flashes, then pressed my hand to the scanner. The door slid open to reveal possibly the smuggest looking face I'd ever seen. Taylor was taller than me by over a foot and his floppy brown hair hung into his grey eyes like always. He had the kind of face that people just liked. He could make you smile as easily as breathing. Or maybe that was just me. Whatever way, he was my favourite person in the entire world.

  “I'm getting dressed, keep talking!" I demanded, grabbing some practical clothes and heading into the square meter that I called a bathroom.

  My small sofa was quickly filled by Taylor. He was so tall that his legs dangled over the end of it as he sprawled out.

  "So, Dad says that the desired plot isn't far from the cable car landing zone on the south side of the city. We'll be helping scout the area which extends about five miles out from The Wall. There'll be fifteen groups, one of which will be led by him." It sounded like he was speaking around a mouthful of food.

  “Sounds great." I checked the mirror, grateful that my long, dark hair looked okay since there was no time to do anything else with it.

  “You haven't heard the best bit." As I reentered the room he grinned at me over a big bag of snacks that he’d pilfered from my lone kitchen cupboard. He’d grown about a foot in the last year and I swear that was entirely due to the stolen food he scoffed when he came to visit me. "The area includes old world housing and Dad reckons we should be able to get a look at it and maybe even go inside."

  “Really?" I gasped. I'd always wanted to see the way people used to live before The Wall. It was so hard to get a proper idea from the films we watched in Old World classes.

  My grandmother remembered the old world but she wasn't supposed to tell the stories about how it all ended. The City Guardians said it was too dark a time and that we shouldn't dwell on the mistakes of the past, but rather strive for a brighter future for the population. But maybe I wanted to dwell on dark times and lean into my morbid fascination with how the world had ended. Maybe I liked learning about the wild spread of the contamination and the rabid animals which had been born of it. Wasn’t everyone in this place sick and tired of hearing about the future? The future seemed pretty black and white to me. More houses, more people, less space. But the past? That was one colourful bitch I wanted to get to know.

  I’d only managed to gain small pieces of information from my grandma over the years. She would talk about the lost beauty out there, of a world that was green instead of grey. No amount of pestering would get her to talk about the end of it all and the rise of the walled cities though. Sometimes I wished I could crawl into her head and get a good look at all the memories she had stashed there. She was one of the few people left who knew what it was like to live beyond The Wall. And that made me envy her in the weirdest of ways.

  Taylor had switched the TV back on in my absence and as if on cue, our daily dose of Harbour City endorsement flashed up on the screen.

  “The world was once our friend," the booming voice of the narrator announced and the screen showed shots of animals running free across fields of grass. The picture changed and the camera swept across a jungle filled with trees as far as the eye could see. Next, it panned over a blue expanse of water with fish jumping above the waves.

  "We lived in harmony with it," the narrator continued and the shots onscreen were barely a second long, ancient buildings, mud huts, villages, towns, cities and people. As the shots continued changing, the population expanded and grew out of control until the faceless crowds stretched out into the distance without end.

  "But then we took too much." Ruined land, bombs exploding, armies fighting.

  "We tried to change the natural way of things." Scientists working in labs, altering plants and trying desperately to create enough food for the people who swamped the world.

  “But the world had had enough." Snapshots of huge plants growing out of control and taking over cities. Terrifying creatures roaming around unchecked. People dying and screaming and running. Finally, and worst of all, were the faces of the contaminated humans. Twisted features broken in snarls of rage, filth-covered and completely lacking in humanity. The contaminated ran rampant through the world, killing without mercy and laying ruin to everything in their path. My heart pounded wildly at the sight of it all. The pure chaos of it. I kn
ew it looked bad, it even frightened me on a wholly primal level. But it also set my instincts alight and filled me with an energy so pure I wished I could dive into that crazed world just for a moment.

  The screen faded to black and I blew out a breath as I waited for the boring bit to roll.

  "Then, out of the darkness, came hope." Slowly, from a pinpoint in the centre of the screen an image grew. The Wall that surrounded our city came into focus as it towered above the vantage point of the camera. A figure shrouded in shadow stepped into view and stood with hands on his hips as the wind whipped dramatically at his hair and coat.

  “The Guardians saved us from the devastation of the outside world and protected us from the contamination." The Guardian ushered an old woman carrying a baby towards the safety of The Wall.

  “Striving forward together," the narrator finished as the screen brightened until it was blank and white. Slowly, words scrolled across it in blood red script.

  “For the good of the population," Taylor and I both read out automatically. I sighed dramatically as I flicked the TV back off.

  "Are you ready then?" Taylor asked, grabbing my hand and throwing the now-empty snack bag in the general direction of the trash can. He missed and I scowled.

  “You know, if you’re gonna steal my food you could at least work on your aim.” I raised an eyebrow at him and he smirked as we headed out the door.

  “But then what would you have to do all day if you didn’t have my mess to clean up?” he taunted.

  “I could teach you to throw.” I danced past him with a mocking grin, pausing at the door to use the retinal scanner to lock up. The second the lock clicked, he towed me down the corridor towards the elevator.

  Taylor grinned at me like I was his favourite person in the whole world and I smiled back. It always amazed me that he'd stayed my friend after I was relocated to the fortieth floor. I'd been moved more than a hundred levels lower than him and his family, but he never mentioned it. He didn't even seem to have a problem with visiting me. I’d been embarrassed at first, but he didn't seem to care at all and I loved him for that.