Arise: A Dystopian Novel (The Ravenmaster Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  ARISE

  THE RAVENMASTER CHRONICLES

  K. A. Riley

  Contents

  Note from the Author

  Summary

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1. Surveillance

  2. Delivered

  3. Spotted

  4. Marsh

  5. Hosted

  6. Luxury

  7. Stories

  8. Clash

  9. Discovery

  10. Code

  11. Liberate

  12. Introductions

  13. Kennel

  14. Arena

  15. Giant

  16. Injured

  17. Mauled

  18. Hope

  19. Blind

  20. Run

  21. Tiresias

  22. Kyrk

  23. Level 1 - Acheron

  24. Level 2 - Cocytus

  25. Level 3 - Phlegethon

  26. Level 4 - Styx

  27. Level 5 - Lethe

  28. Hades

  29. Ghosts

  30. Brohn and Epic

  31. Brohn and Aubrielle

  32. Brohn and Micah

  33. Brohn and the Kress Quartet

  34. Sirens

  35. Toilet Paper War

  36. Sylvia and Christopher

  37. Communicate

  38. Disguised

  39. Recognized

  40. First Feather

  41. Story Time

  42. Epilogue: Together

  COMING SOON!

  An Exciting Dystopian Series: The Cure Chronicles

  Also by K. A. Riley

  COPYRIGHT

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  © 2021 by K. A. Riley. All rights reserved for content text, characters, and images. No part of this book in its print, digital, or audio forms may be reproduced without the express written consent of the publisher and/or author, except for brief passages, which may be quoted in a review.

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  DISCLAIMER

  * * *

  Although certain geographic references may correspond with recognizable places, this book is a work of fiction. Names, geographic locations, and events should not be associated with actual places, living people, or with historical events. Any such resemblance is the work of the author and is purely coincidental.

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  COVER DESIGN

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  www.thebookbrander.com

  Note from the Author

  Welcome to a K. A. Riley crossover event!

  * * *

  The Ravenmaster Chronicles occurs immediately after the events of The Army of the Unsettled from the Academy of the Apocalypse series.

  * * *

  Like that series, The Ravenmaster Chronicles takes place in the same universe as Recruitment and the nine-part Conspiracy Chronicles.

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  Now that that’s settled, please keep your hands and feet inside the book at all times, sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight!

  * * *

  K. A. Riley

  Summary

  Kress and Brohn, a young Emergent couple with techno-genetically enhanced abilities, embark on a quest to infiltrate the Cult of the Devoted in the skyscraping arcology in the middle of what’s left of Denver, Colorado. When Brohn mysteriously vanishes early in their mission, Kress—accompanied by Render, her psychically-connected raven companion—is forced to undertake a perilous journey through a danger-filled, post-apocalyptic city to find him and get him back.

  In this high-stakes adventure, inspired by Homer’s epic The Odyssey, Kress must battle manipulators, gangsters, giants, and ghosts, and will literally go through Hell, to find the man she loves.

  Dedication

  To the ones who keep getting back up.

  Epigraph

  “These, my voice announcing—I will sleep no more but arise,

  You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you, fathomless, stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms.”

  * * *

  ― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

  “I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us, too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.”

  * * *

  — Anne Frank

  “There is nothing more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.”

  * * *

  —Homer, The Odyssey

  “Take courage, my heart: you have been through worse than this. Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier; I have seen worse sights than this.”

  * * *

  ― Homer, The Odyssey

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  “I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life. Some of them actually happened.”

  * * *

  — Mark Twain

  Prologue

  Hi. My name is Kress.

  It’s nice to meet you. Or, if we met already, it’s nice to meet you again. I can already tell that you’re a good person who sometimes enjoys the guilty pleasure of hearing about bad things.

  Don’t apologize for that. Stepping out of your comfort zone makes you human. Who knows? It could even make you an Emergent.

  That’s what I am.

  I won’t bore you with the details. And it’s really not all that complicated.

  Basically, at some point in time—my friends and I are still trying to figure exactly when—genetic code and binary code got chummy in a way no one expected, anticipated, or believed was possible.

  Like many couples, the two codes had their rough patches. They disagreed. They bickered. They fought.

  But, in the end and against all odds, they made it work.

  The Emergents…we’re their offspring.

  We have certain abilities. I’ve known Emergents who can navigate better than any homing pigeon, speak any language that’s ever been invented, disrupt electrical fields with a thought, and make people do their bidding with nothing more than a simple suggestion. I can share my consciousness with a raven. My boyfriend is bulletproof.

  Anyway, that’s our family.

  Like a lot of families, ours has some bad seeds. We call them Hypnagogics. If Emergents are the culmination of genetic code and binary code, Hypnagogics are the unplanned love child of that little tryst. They’re a small but deadly collection of assassins, and they have a chip on their shoulder, superhuman abilities, and access to the secret world of dreams.

  That makes them powerful, easy to manipulate, more than a little crazy, and—like any weapon—deadly in the wrong hands.

  Epic, the techno-geneticist responsible for creating the Hypnagogics…he is the wrong hands.

  And he’s determined to get those wrong hands of his on the rest of us Emergents so he can use us to enhance his army and kick start his vision for the future of humanity.

  Along the way, he fueled the fire for a war between the Cult of the Devoted—a paramilitary legion of history-obsessed brainwashers—and the Army of the Unsettled—a constantly moving caravan of mostly teenagers driving around the deserts in fleets of vans, flatbeds, and construction vehicles. The Devoted came out on top, the Unsettled came out as their slaves, and a hundred thousand others didn’t come out of it at all.

  If Emergents are a family, Epic would be our evil stepfather. And if he has his way, he’ll discover the secret to the Emergents, repli
cate us, control us, kill off the Typics (or pester them into killing off each other), and sit back as the first ruler of a new epoch.

  There’s one Emergent who has the ability to stop him, and you’re looking at her.

  I’m a survivor, a fighter, and, most recently, a teacher.

  At least I’m not alone. I’ve got my boyfriend Brohn with me, and I’ve got Render, the jet-black raven I’ve been telempathically bonded to since I was six years old. Unlike simple telepathy, Render and I don’t just share thoughts. When we’re at our best, we share emotions, experiences, and sensory perceptions, and, when we’re really clicking, he can lend me a wide array of enhanced physical abilities.

  Brohn and I grew up together. We were recruited together. We discovered the truth about the war together. And we started the Emergents Academy together.

  Ultimately, this will be the story about how I became a Ravenmaster and how my friends and I discovered a secret buried in our genes. It’s a secret that was destined to liberate some people and to piss off a whole lot of others.

  It will also be a story about how the world ended and what my friends and I decided to do about it.

  For now, though, it’s about me, Brohn, and a giant tower in the middle of what’s left of Denver, Colorado.

  1

  Surveillance

  His legs planted wide, his fists pressed to his hips, Brohn asks if I’ve ever seen one that big before.

  Whacking his shoulder with my open palm isn’t enough to knock the roguish grin from his chiseled, lightly stubbled, and annoyingly perfect face.

  “Honestly,” I tell him, craning my neck to gaze up at the Goldsmith Arcology—the sky-piercing tower in the distance, “No. I haven’t seen one that big. Not even close.”

  But he knows the answer before I say it. Hell, he probably knows me better than I know myself.

  Not surprising.

  We grew up in the same isolated mountain town. We were in the same recruitment class. We were side by side when we escaped from the Processor after learning the terrifying truth about the enemy and the shocking reality about ourselves.

  Nothing breeds intimacy more than two people who are always side by side, on the run, dodging danger, freeing the oppressed, and constantly picking fights with Death.

  Brohn and I have been everywhere together, and we’ve seen our share of arcologies—these vertical, tower-shaped worlds that have become home to the Wealthies. When we were only seventeen, we went overseas on a mission to find others like us. We saw two arcologies—one complete, the other under construction—in Paris, France. Back home, we came across one being built in the middle of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We were even imprisoned in an arcology in Chicago more than five years ago.

  That monstrosity of a building was bigger than any skyscraper in the city. Not that many of the other, older skyscrapers were still standing or even close to being fully intact. In fact, the city looked less like a traditional major metropolis and more like some giant, careless kid’s messy playroom full of fallen, dirty dominoes.

  This arcology in the distance—the one lording over the city of Denver, Colorado and casting its shadow deep into the surrounding desert—makes the other towers we’ve seen in the past look like a set of footstools.

  Climbing impossibly high, the Goldsmith Arcology is more than just scraping the sky. It’s puncturing it, disappearing into it. An assemblage of blocky, gun-metal gray columns, most adorned with stadium-sized silver domes like giant knuckles and hundreds of jagged, glassy spires, it’s ugly, beautiful, impressive, and grotesque all at the same time.

  And it’s not even complete.

  The top third on one side of the structure is mostly exposed synth-steel scaffolding, bare and discolored as an open wound. Another section is nothing but vertical struts like a quiver of five-hundred-foot-long black arrows. Close to a mile up, clouds of silver mag-grav construction drones, claw-shaped and strong as a freight train, buzz around in busy swarms. Through our long distance viz-scopes, we can see their segmented, spidery arms clench and unclench like angry fingers as they skitter in and out, high in the sky, welding, shifting, and securing an array of construction materials to the upper tiers of the colossal structure.

  Adjusting the focus-wheel on his viz-scope, Brohn makes a gagging noise in his throat and tips his head toward the imposing superstructure. “Why do you think they make them so ugly?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because the Wealthies all live inside the thing. So why should they care what it looks like from the outside?”

  Brohn sighs and admits that that’s a good point.

  “Besides,” I add with a jaded eyeroll, “if it looked good from down here, the rest of us would have something pretty in our lives, and I don’t think the Wealthies are interested in giving us hope or promoting our pursuit of happiness.”

  Lowering our viz-scopes, we stand side by side for a full minute, our heads tilted back and our hands shielding our eyes as we squint up at the imposing, self-contained ecosystem.

  It’s a lot to take in. We just got here, and I’m already starting to miss the comfort and security of home. The mountaintop Academy where we assemble and teach fellow Emergents is only a few hundred miles from here, but it might as well be a world away.

  Hidden behind a veiled refractor, the Academy sits high up in a pocket of crisp snow, healthy trees, and clean air.

  Down here, amid the constant reminders of the Atomic Wars and a centuries-old climate crisis, the desert air under the cloudless, red-hued sky is nearly too hot to breathe. The ground is blistered and crusted over with jagged ridges of rock and ankle-high fields of blackened weeds. What used to be a highway leading up to the city is now an impassable strip of buckled asphalt, gnarled road signs, skeletal human remains, and the scorched husks of hundreds of military jeeps, transport rigs, and civilian mag-cars.

  Sheltered behind an overturned bus and doing our best to stay cool in its shadow, Brohn and I take stock of our ammo, our position, and our plan.

  One by one, we pat our weapons—including our military field knives, Brohn’s crossbow, and my switchblade glove Talons—calling out “Check” each time to confirm that we’re as prepared as we think we are.

  We’re hoping we don’t need the weapons.

  This is a spy mission, after all, with maybe a little coercion and some possible kidnapping thrown in. It’s definitely not a two-against-an-army invasion. Our primary mission is infiltration and surveillance. If we’re lucky, we can get to Justin and Treva—the leaders of the Cult of the Devoted—and maybe, just maybe, pump the brakes on their Cult’s quest for absolute, unchallenged dominion over the country.

  If we’re unlucky, well, that’s when it’ll be nice to have our weapons handy.

  Not that this meager personal arsenal of ours is likely to do much good if worse comes to worst. Over the past twenty-five years—just a year longer than Brohn and I have been alive—the country’s unprecedented number of firearms has slowly found its way exclusively into the greedy paws of the Cult of the Devoted. While there’s still the occasional shotgun or automatic pistol out here in the world, the rest of the guns, rifles, and military-grade weapons have been scooped up and squirreled away by the Devoted.

  According to our number one spy, the Cult’s two leaders, their primary headquarters, and all those weapons are somewhere in the Goldsmith arcology right now.

  Fortunately, we have the best spy in the world: our own flying, feathered, living and breathing, totally organic “drone.”

  With the tips of my fingers, I swipe a pattern into the array of black dots, swoops, and swirls embedded in my forearms. Implanted by my father when I was six years old, my so-called “tattoos” are a constant, techno-genetic reminder of my father and of the expectations he had for me.

  I shouldn’t complain. All parents have hopes, dreams, and expectations for their children.

  Of course, his hope was that I would personally usher in a new evolution of bio-programmable techno-h
umanism, a stage of human development where natural and artificial intelligence learn how to get along.

  So…no pressure, right?

  The patterns my dad taught me amplify a part of my consciousness and send a signal to Render, the wise and impish jet-black raven who’s been my best friend for as long as I can remember. With a combination of taps and swipes, I can load patterns that call for help and ones that enhance my strength and reflexes by opening a channel between his neurophysiology and mine. There are patterns linking our ocular senses to allow me to see what he sees and, to a degree, experience what he experiences. It can all get pretty complex, and it’s taken me years of training and focus to get the connection just right and get the painful migraines that come along with it under control.