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by K A Riley

  Cardyn is quick to follow her, and he spreads his arms wide and swan-dives, face first, into the second bed. He bounces high into the air, twists around, lands on his back, and kicks his feet up in a spasm of pure glee.

  Brohn, Manthy, and I are bit more reserved. Laughing at our friends’ uninhibited joy, we cross the room and plop down one at a time onto the next three beds.

  It’s been an exhausting adventure getting here. I’m tired all over. Eyes. Brain. Muscles. Bones. I’m a human yawn.

  “What’s wrong with this picture?” Brohn asks, his nose turned up in a disgusted scrunch.

  “Besides the fact that you’re clearly entrenched in an alpha male suppression of a powerful and well-deserved desire to giggle yourself silly?” Cardyn asks.

  Brohn holds up a tightly clenched fist. “I’m suppressing something all right, Card, but it’s not the giggles. No. Don’t you see? The beds are in a row.”

  We know instantly what he means, and we spring into action. Just like we did back in the Valta, in the Processor, in the desert cave, and every other time we’ve had the opportunity, we drag the beds into a rough star-shape with the heads together to form a kind of spoked wheel with a communal circle in the middle.

  After kicking off our boots, we each take a seat at the end of our bed. Rain and I sit cross-legged. Brohn sits with his long legs, muscular even through his pocketed pants, over the edge of his bed with his arms angled out behind him and his stocking feet planted firmly on the ground. Cardyn is on his stomach, facing the rest of us with his legs kicked up into the air, his feet twirling and tapping together like a giddy red-headed eight-year-old girl at her first sleepover. Manthy, as always, is lying on her back, her head at the far end of the bed, so we get the best view and smell possible of her stinky bare feet.

  We’re just sighing and settling in when Manthy clamps her eyes shut and presses her fingertips to her temples. “Still feels like elephants are tap-dancing in my head.”

  “That’s the drawback of connecting,” I remind her. “Doesn’t matter if you’re connecting with digi-tech or with a clever bird. It’s like you told me once: it’s a matter of sharing, not taking over. Whether we realize it or want it or not, we always give away a part of ourselves when we connect with someone—or something—else.”

  “I never thought I’d like either of those things,” Manthy says, sitting up abruptly with an ironic smile of realization spreading out on her face.

  “What’s that?”

  “Sharing and giving away a part of myself.” She blushes as she looks over at Brohn, Cardyn, and Rain before turning her attention back to me and finally to the floor. “I guess I was always…I don’t know…afraid of…”

  “Of…?” I ask.

  “Of being vulnerable. It never occurred to me that being vulnerable with someone is better than trying to be powerful all alone.”

  I reach across to Manthy’s bed and give her smelly foot a gentle squeeze. She doesn’t recoil, tell me to back off, or give me a dirty look. Instead, she just falls back into her sheets, her hands folded behind her head, and stares up at the ceiling.

  Brohn drops back onto his elbows and looks up at the tiled ceiling, too. “I still don’t know how you guys do that. The whole connecting thing, I mean.”

  “We’ll tell you as soon as we figure it out ourselves,” I laugh. “It does get easier,” I add, turning back to Manthy. “As long as we think of it as a partnership, not a parlor trick. And as long as we remember that being able to do something incredible doesn’t necessarily make us someone incredible. Although, in your case, I’d definitely say you’ve got a lot of both going on.”

  Manthy looks over at me out of the corner of her eyes and smiles again, something I don’t think I’ll ever get used to. The girl who used to walk around in the shadows with her head down now seems taller, more adult, more alive. She pulls her thick brown hair out of its tidy ponytail and is sporting what has to be the prettiest smile I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m happy for her. I’m happy for how far she’s come and for the amazing person she’s turned into. No. That’s not it, exactly. She’s always been amazing. I guess if I’m being honest, I’m happy with myself for finally recognizing her amazingness.

  “You do realize,” Cardyn says evenly, his giddy smile devolving into a somber frown, “we can’t possibly pull this off. I mean, I’ve been thinking about this since we got here. There’s us five. Rain and I can’t do anything special, and Brohn, well, we don’t totally know about you yet. Wisp, who, okay I’ll grant you, is pretty bad-ass. Granden. We know what he can do. Fifty untrained and scared-poopless Insubordinates. Olivia who’s awesome in theory but useless if the power goes out. And a roomful of Modifieds who don’t even know where or probably even who they are anymore.” Cardyn stops for a second and then starts counting off on his fingers. “And we’re supposed to take down a Munitions Depot, Communications Central, the Patriot Army Command Headquarters, and liberate the entire city of San Francisco?”

  “In a week,” I remind him.

  “I have an idea,” Cardyn exclaims, his finger in the air. “Why don’t we just cut out the middle-man and kill ourselves, so the Patriot Army doesn’t have to worry about wasting five of their precious bullets?”

  Brohn gives Cardyn a dirty look and a guttural grunt. “Cardyn’s brilliant alternative plan aside, I’m usually not the wide-eyed optimist of our little group. But the odds of us having made it this far at all are pretty astronomical. Technically, we should have been killed in the Valta. Then in the Processor. Then on the road. Or by Adric and Celia. Or in that little military base in the middle of the desert. Or in Reno. Or Oakland. Or sneaking into this city. The point is, we probably shouldn’t be here, but we are. Maybe there’s room for one more long-shot in our future. I say we roll the dice and take our chances. What’s the back-up plan? Surrender and join Kella, Karmine, and Terk as casualties of a pointless war?”

  Manthy sits up and corrects him. “Kella’s not a casualty. She’s going to be just fine.”

  I admire her optimism, but I don’t share it enough to agree with her out loud.

  “No,” Rain says to Cardyn, stretching her arms and then arching her back like a cat. “Brohn’s right. No matter how we weigh the options, it still comes down to fight or die or live the rest of our lives as lab-rats or slaves. It’s not a complicated equation.”

  Cardyn is just starting to resign himself to Rain’s unimpeachable truth when we’re interrupted by a sudden knocking and a voice that sounds like someone calling out, “Hello in there!” with a mouthful of caramel-covered marbles. We sit up, snap our heads around, and look at the door, but when the voice cries out again, it’s clearly coming from the opposite side of the room. Actually, it’s coming from the window. We look over and see the small black feathered face we’ve come to know as family. Render taps on the glass with his beak and cries out kraa! as I clamber over Cardyn’s bed and leap over to open the window for him.

  With me giggling hysterically and stumbling backward as I raise the window, Render bursts into the room in an explosion of dust and feathers. We all laugh and cough into the cloud as he alights on the tall cherry-wood chest of drawers against the far wall. He struts along the top of the armoire like a rock-star on a stage before fluttering up onto the decorative scroll-shaped ornament at the top. He preens the feathers under one of his wings and ruffles his hackles.

  “Nice to have our Conspiracy all together again and settled in one place,” I say, rolling back into my bed.

  Tipping his beak toward the ceiling, Render kraas! his agreement, and we all laugh again.

  “Is he going to stay in here with us?” Rain asks, a nearly-impossible-to-detect tremor of apprehension in her voice.

  “Don’t worry,” I assure her. “I won’t have him peck your lips off in the middle of the night.”

  We all share another good laugh. It’s nice to be wiping tears of joy from eyes for a change instead of tears of sorrow.

  “Did you e
ver figure out those visions of his?” Brohn asks almost absently, like he doesn’t really care one way or the other.

  Rain scratches her head. “Visions?”

  “From the military base,” Brohn says. “Remember? The soldiers. The dead girl.”

  “Yeah!” Cardyn chirps. “You mentioned something about that in the truck on the way to Reno.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know if the images I saw through Render were past or future. All I know—and I can guarantee you this—is they were real. Very real.”

  “I can’t speak for anyone else,” Cardyn says at last through a lion-like yawn. “But that is a heavier thought than I’m prepared to bear right now. I’m tired, and if what Wisp says is true, we have a very big week ahead of us, and we’ll likely be dead before it’s all over.”

  “I’m with you,” Manthy says, turning over onto her side and curling up into a cozy ball under her sheets. “Except for the being dead part. That, you can do on your own.”

  Rain asks me if I’m sure her lips are safe from Render. I grin and assure her they are. She gives me a thumb’s up before fluffing up her pillow and disappearing under her sheets.

  The five of us are quiet for a long time. Even Render has settled into sleep on the top of the armoire with his head tucked against his wing. Everyone’s breath melts into a seamless purr. Except Brohn’s. I hear him roll toward me in his cot, which is next to mine.

  “You awake?” he asks quietly.

  I whisper, “Yes.”

  “Worried?”

  “This is going to be a challenge,” I mutter into the near-dark.

  “The training?”

  “The being apart. Wisp wants me connected with Render and doing surveillance with Olivia and Manthy. You’ll be busy upstairs with Cardyn trying to turn a bunch of scared revolutionaries into an actual, functional army.”

  Brohn slides off his cot and slips in next to me on my own, putting an arm around my waist and pressing a kiss to my forehead. In so many ways we’ve grown up. We’ve lost our innocence.

  Yet we’ve still never done anything more than kiss. It’s as if we’re holding on to this last fragile strand of our youth as long as we can. We’re protecting ourselves from too much perilous closeness, because we’ve already lost so much that we can’t bear the thought of losing ourselves in each other.

  “We’ll still have nights together,” he whispers. “It’s not nearly enough, I know. But this isn’t the end, you realize.”

  “Of the war? I know,” I smile and stare into his bright blue eyes. “It’s just the beginning.”

  “No. I meant us,” he says with a gentle shake of his head. He takes my hand, intertwining his fingers with mine. “This isn’t where we end, Kress. We’ve always had to fight against the weight of this tragic past, dragging behind after us. But now, we have a future. For the first time, I really believe that. You and I have something to look forward to.”

  Even as I tell him I agree, I fall into a soft sleep, my hand still holding onto his.

  End of Book 2

  Coming Soon!

  The third book in the Resistance Trilogy, Rebellion, will be out soon!

  Aided by the Modifieds and led by Wisp in the Command Center and by Kress in the field, the Insubordinates wage a counter-offensive against the Patriot Army in an effort to liberate the city of San Francisco.

  Also by K A Riley

  For updates on upcoming release dates, opportunities to read for free, exclusive excerpts from upcoming books and more:

  K. A. Riley’s Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dsihB1

  Resistance Series:

  Recruitment

  Render

  Rebellion (Coming Soon!)

  Athena’s Law Series:

  Book One: Rise of the Inciters

  Book Two: Into an Unholy Land