by K A Riley
Along the way, they ground the unstoppable Army of the Unsettled to a screeching halt.
But they weren’t done with them. In fact, slaughtering half of the Unsettled was just the beginning.
The Devoted enslaved the other half and are using them, as Brohn and I speak, to erect a whole system of towering barrier walls around some of the major cities across their vast, inland territory.
Denver, Colorado. Indianapolis, Indiana. Columbus, Ohio. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
And those are just the ones we know about.
The Devoted didn’t use force. Instead, they brainwashed the Unsettled into believing this was their lot in life.
And they didn’t do it alone. They succeeded thanks to the giant Bendegatefran and his feral half-brother Efnisien. They succeeded thanks to Gwernna, their secret weapon of war with the Emergent power to raise the dead from the field of battle. They succeeded thanks to Epic and his eight Hypnagogic assassins. And, finally, maybe most chilling of all, they succeeded thanks to Sara, our former student, whose ability to gaslight people into doing her bidding while thinking they’re making the decisions on their own fits right into the playbook of the Cult of the Devoted.
Which is to say that the destruction of the Unsettled and the construction of more exclusionary, cloud-busting arcologies for the privileged behind towering rings of walls, was a team effort.
I’m part of a team, too, of course. Over five years ago, my Conspiracy and I led the effort to take down Krug.
Today, that looks easy by comparison.
At least Krug was just one man. One evil, manipulative, insecure, waste of a man. But still a man. A human mortal, who ended up as a moist splatter on the sidewalk at the bottom of the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C.
The members of the Cult of the Devoted—kind, reasonable, and hospitable on the surface—are a million times worse than Krug ever was.
Across from my desk, Brohn drums his finger on the arms of his mag-chair. “Epic’s out there, you know.”
“Yeah.”
“And he’s got eight Hypnaogogics with him.”
“So what are you saying?” I grumble. “That we should just quit? Let him find the answers before we do? And then sit back and watch as he sells off more superpowered assassins to the highest bidder?”
Of course, I know that’s not what he’s saying at all. And I know my getting snarky about it isn’t going to solve anything. It’s just that it’s bad enough knowing the odds are stacked a mile-high against us. Being reminded of that fact this late at night…well, that’s giving me a minor eye twitch that’s two seconds away from devolving into a permanent facial spasm.
“No,” Brohn assures me, using that calm baritone of his he knows is so good at blunting my worry and lightening my mood. “I don’t think we should quit.”
“What, then?”
“I think we need to track down Epic and stop him before it’s too late.”
“And the Devoted?”
“We need to stop them, too.”
“Oh. Is that all?” I do a quick scroll through the Academy’s latest weapons inventory currently projected in a holo-field above my desk. It doesn’t look good. Our supplies aren’t gone, but they’re getting seriously depleted. “This all sounds kind of…impossible,” I confess, turning my full attention back to Brohn.
“We’ve faced impossible odds before,” he says with a cluck of his tongue.
“Yeah. But this might be pushing our luck.”
This time, he offers up a hearty laugh. “We’ve pushed our luck before, too!”
I lean back in my chair, my fingers laced behind my head. “I thought getting rid of Krug would solve everything.”
“Me, too. But we were kids. We know better now. There’s no magic solution, no silver bullet that will miraculously put an end to despots.”
“Thinking that there was a magic bullet is all that kept me going.”
I stand up and walk over to one of the seven-foot-high sets of topographical maps glinting emerald-green in front of the side wall of my dusky office.
Pushing himself up and coming over to stand behind me, Brohn loops his arms around my shoulders. His voice is warm and soft in my ear. “Is that really all that kept you going?”
“No,” I laugh, spinning around and pushing him away with one hand but drawing him right back toward me with the other. I grip the lapels of his combat jacket in my clenched fists. “I’d be dead without you. Seriously, you’ve saved my life more times than I can count.”
“Eleven.”
“What?”
“That’s how many times I’ve saved your life.”
“You’re insane,” I laugh as I give him a playful push to the chest. “And how many times have I saved your life?”
“Eleven.”
“So…we’re even?”
“For now, at least.”
“What we’re about to do,” I say, suddenly serious, “it’s not like anything we’ve done before.”
“I know.”
“We’ve always fought our way out of messes. Now, we’re talking about jumping into the biggest mess of all on purpose.”
“Then we should do what we’ve always done with messes.”
I nod my understanding. I don’t need for him to spell it out. I know exactly what he means. From surviving recruitment to overthrowing Krug to saving Emergents all over the world from the Processors where they’d been imprisoned, we’ve always done the same thing with the messes left by others: we’ve cleaned them up.
“Of course, Denver’s more of a mess than any we’ve faced before,” Brohn reminds me.
“I know. I know. We’ll have the wall to get around.”
“Or over.”
“Or under.”
“Or through.”
“And if we manage that—”
“When we manage that,” Brohn says with a wink.
“There are still the slums. The Survivalists. The Plaguers and the Cysters. Not to mention the arcology they’re building. Ugh. It’s going to be a fortress.”
“Yep.”
“A heavily-guarded, armed-to-the-teeth fortress.”
“Yep.”
“Justin and Treva won’t give up easily.”
“Neither will we,” Brohn assures me before tilting his head back, his eyes on the ceiling. “What about Branwynne?”’
“What about her?”
“Should we take her with us?”
“On a suicide mission like this?” I half-laugh. “I don’t even want to take us with us.”
“Do you think all these kids we’ve got here in the Academy…do you think they’ll be all right?”
“If we don’t stop the Devoted now, their Cult will get themselves even more entrenched. And then they’ll be unstoppable, and there’ll be millions of good, struggling, desperate kids—and adults, for that matter—who won’t be all right ever again.”
“Okay,” Brohn says, taking my hand in his. “Ready to do the impossible?”
“As long as we’re together,” I grin up at him, “nothings impossible.”
Hand in hand, we walk out of my office and head downstairs, ready to embark on our mission.
“I know it’s just an infiltration,” I remind Brohn as we enter the huge vehicle hangar in the sub-basement of the Academy. “But it’ll still be just the two of us against a few thousand of the Devoted.”
“It doesn’t seem fair, does it?”
“No,” I laugh. “They don’t stand a chance.”
* * * * *
You can read all about Kress and Brohn’s adventures in Arise, the first installment of the Ravenmaster Chronicles available October 25, 2021!
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A New Conspiracy Series!
For Fans of Kress, Render, and the original Conspiracy: A new series is soaring your way!
In a spectacular crossover event of re-emergence inspired by Homer’s epic adventure The Odyssey, Kress and Brohn leave the Emergents Acad
emy on a daring mission to confront the leaders of the Cult of the Devoted in their nearly-completed arcology in the center of what’s left of Denver, Colorado.
Making their deadly mission even more impossible, Epic—the villainous, marble-skinned techno-geneticist—has turned his Hypnagogic assassins loose on them.
When Brohn mysteriously disappears in the middle of the night, Kress is forced to embark on a perilous quest through a dozen urban districts packed with brainwashers, gunmen, ghosts from the past—and even an entire neighborhood of one-eyed gangsters and their packs of wild dogs—to get him back.
Arise (Coming in October 2021)
Banished (Coming in January 2022)
Crusade (Coming in April 2022)
50
An Exciting New Dystopian Series: The Cure Chronicles
Before the Blight, becoming an adult was something teenagers looked forward to.
But now, turning eighteen means certain death.
Unless you prove yourself worthy of the Cure.
On her seventeenth birthday, Ashen Spencer is blindfolded and escorted to the massive, mysterious building known as the Arc to begin her year of training and testing in hopes that she can earn the Cure—a powerful drug given only to those deemed worthy to survive beyond their eighteenth birthday.
Ashen has a chance to rise up from her former life of squalor and be granted a place in society, if the Panel—the mysterious group of powerful men and women in charge of the Arc—deems her year a success.
She’s assigned to work for twelve months as a servant for a wealthy family whose son is the most alluring—and confusing—young man she’s ever met.
At first, Ashen is thrilled for the opportunity to earn her place in a society she’s always dreamed of inhabiting. But as time passes and she begins to learn the truth about the people she admires so much and the home she left behind, she realizes she has a choice:
Be part of the disease…
Or be part of the Cure.
Pre-order the books here, at a special discounted price:
The Cure (Coming in June 2021)
Awaken (Coming in September 2021)
Ascend (Coming in December 2021)
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Also by K. A. Riley
If you’re enjoying K. A. Riley’s books, please consider leaving a positive review on Amazon or Goodreads to let your fellow book-lovers know about them.
Dystopian Books:
Resistance Trilogy:
Recruitment
Render
Rebellion
Emergents Trilogy:
Survival
Sacrifice
Synthesis
Transcendent Trilogy:
Travelers
Transfigured
Terminus
Academy of the Apocalypse Series:
Emergents Academy
Cult of the Devoted
Army of the Unsettled (July 2021)
The Ravenmaster Chronicles:
Arise (Coming in October 2021)
Banished (Coming in January 2022)
Crusade (Coming in April 2022)
The Cure Chronicles:
The Cure (Coming in June 2021)
Awaken (Coming in September 2021)
Ascend (Coming in December 2021)
Athena’s Law Trilogy:
Book One: Rise of the Inciters
Book Two: Into an Unholy Land
Book Three: No Man’s Land
Fantasy Books
Seeker’s Series:
Seeker’s World
Seeker’s Quest
Seeker’s Fate
Seeker’s Promise
Seeker’s Hunt
Seeker’s Prophecy (Coming in 2021)
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