Survival: A Young Adult Dystopian Novel (The Emergents Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  Survival

  The Emergents Trilogy, Book One

  K. A. Riley

  Contents

  A Note from the Author

  Summary

  Prologue

  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

  Epilogue

  Also by K. A. Riley

  A Note from the Author

  Dearest Fellow Conspirator,

  Survival is the first book of the Emergents Trilogy, which picks up where the Resistance Trilogy leaves off.

  What you have in your hands is one-ninth of what’s called an ennealogy, a rare and hard-to-pronounce word meaning “a nine-part series.” It’s basically three sequential, interlocking trilogies. (Think Star Wars or Planet of the Apes)

  Here is the Reading Order for the Conspiracy Ennealogy…

  #1: Resistance Trilogy

  Recruitment

  Render

  Rebellion

  #2: Emergents Trilogy

  Survival

  Sacrifice (Coming in November 2019)

  Synthesis (Coming in early 2020)

  #3: Transcendent Trilogy

  Travelers

  Transfigured

  Terminus

  Summary

  In the year 2043, with the nation destroyed by war, seventeen-year-old Kress—accompanied by her Conspiracy of friends and by Render, her companion raven—embarks on a perilous cross-country mission through a violent, dystopian land to locate and recruit Emergents, the scattered group of fellow teenagers who have begun to exhibit strange evolutionary abilities.

  Not all Emergents are ready to accept who and what they are, however. Some have even started using their abilities for personal gain or to commit acts of terror. Now Kress has to figure out who is friend and who is foe as she risks everything to expose the government’s lies and take down the tyrannical President Krug once and for all.

  Blending the best elements of sci-fi and fantasy and picking up where the Resistance Trilogy leaves off, the Emergents Trilogy follows Kress and her friends on a daring and dangerous quest to recruit allies, save sufferers, restore truth and freedom to their corrupted country, and, if at all possible…to survive.

  To the Survivors. Vengeance will be yours.

  “Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”

  — Carl Sagan

  Prologue

  Nearly a year ago, on the day I turned seventeen, the Recruiters came to my tiny, bombed-out and war-torn mountain town and took me and the other seven members of the Cohort of 2042 to a secret location where we were trained to be soldiers in the on-going war against the invading Eastern Order.

  We were nervous about going, of course. It’s not every day that a platoon of huge men with canon-sized guns rumbles up in a fleet of military trucks to take you away from your home and out into the middle of a war.

  But it was our duty. We owed it to our country and to all the people who died. And we thought we owed it to President Krug, who appeared daily on the viz-screen broadcasts to remind us about our duty, to warn us about the threat we faced as a nation, and to panic us into compliance.

  Which is to say that I grew up afraid. We all did.

  That fear followed us onto the transport trucks as the Recruiters took us on a two-day drive to a training facility in the middle of nowhere.

  Confined to the Processor—a campus of eight cube-shaped buildings surrounding a giant field with an enormous floating lab called the Halo rotating above it all—we spent months immersed for twenty hours a day in puzzles, mind-games, escape rooms, relentless martial arts instruction, and a wide variety of weapons and combat training. We were tested to our physical, emotional, and psychological limits. It was all carefully designed to prepare us for the ruthless enemy we’d seen terrorizing their way through our country for as long as any of us could remember.

  But then, our clear path and straightforward direction took a sharp left turn.

  Toward the end of our training, we got suspicious and uncovered a reality too mind-blowing to believe but too insanely credible to ignore:

  The Eastern Order—the so-called ruthless enemy—was a hoax.

  The Order was an invented enemy created by President Krug as a way to keep everyone afraid and the country in a perpetual state of war.

  Realizing we were nothing but subjects in a shadowy government experiment, the eight of us escaped from the Processor and went on the run. But not before two of our friends—Karmine and Terk—were brutally killed.

  Later on, our friend, Kella, distraught over all that had happened to us, fell into a deep pit of despair, and we had to leave her behind with another group of teenage runaways we found hiding out in the mountains of Colorado.

  Over time and through many encounters and adventures in the apocalyptic wasteland our country had become, my remaining four friends and I began to exhibit certain enhanced abilities.

  Brohn, the unapproachable Mr. Perfect and, eventually, my boyfriend—although I’m still trying to get my head around that last fact—developed impenetrable skin and augmented strength. Cardyn, my best friend and confidante since I was six, had a way of hypnotizing people through a type of psychic persuasion into doing his bidding. Rain, five feet tall but with a giant brain and the fighting skills to match, had an unusually advanced gift for logistics and strategy. Our shy and enigmatic friend Amaranthine—we call her Manthy—evolved something called “cyberpathy” that enabled her to “talk” to certain kinds of digital technologies.

  Me? I had Render, the oddly intelligent black raven my father entrusted to me when I was six years old. Over time, we began communicating through what Cardyn dubbed our “telempathic bond.” Render and I began to immerse ourselves into each other’s consciousness, until many of his abilities—telescopic vision, acute hearing, predatory instincts, superior agility, and even a kind of prescience—started to become my own.

  Oh, and I can kind of fly sometimes.

  But this isn’t a story about superheroes.

  There’s nothing super or heroic about watching helplessly as your friends and family are slaughtered, about your tiny town getting burned to the ground, about living under the crushing weight of a colossal lie, or about being scared all the time, wondering if each day will be your last.

  Together, burdened with the new weight of truth—about who we were and about the deadly world we had so far survived—the five of us made our way west to San Francisco and fought alongside Brohn’s younger sister Wisp and her rebel Insubordinates in a battle against the Patriot Army, a branch of our own government, and, as it turns out, the real enemy. It was there that we ran into General Ekker, who captured me and Brohn and revealed some more of the truth about who
and what we were.

  He called us “Emergents.”

  According to Ekker, through a fluke of nature combined with a compromised climate and a culminating event in binary technologies, we were identified as some kind of next rung on the ladder of human evolution.

  I would have thought we’d be something to celebrate. Instead, the Emergents became sought after as human guinea pigs by an underground division of government-funded geneticists called the “Deenays,” pursued back and forth across the country, rounded up, tested, tortured, and, ultimately, killed if we didn’t cooperate.

  Now, the five of us are heading back east in a decked-out and fully-loaded government truck the size of a small house with our new cyborg friend Olivia, a Modified who is literally plugged into the remnants of a dying global digital network.

  Together, we’ve been tasked with helping to assemble an army that can liberate the country in the same way we liberated San Francisco. To do this, we’re first going to track down other Emergents and spread the truth about all the lies we’ve lived with for so long.

  Our victory in San Francisco ended with hints about who we are. We found out that our town and others like it—all at or near the 39th parallel—had been targeted deliberately. Anyone over seventeen had been killed to leave the rest of us to fend for ourselves in isolation and under a state of constant confusion and fear. We also discovered that our abilities are enhanced by our proximity: The closer we are to each other, the stronger we become.

  While we were being weeded out over the past eleven years, powerful men were plunging our nation ever deeper into chaos, violence, and injustice.

  Now, for the first time after a lifetime of helplessness, we have the ability to do something about it.

  We’re together, the five of us, and we’re determined to stay that way.

  Our personal survival—and the survival of our nation and everything it was supposed to stand for—depends on it.

  1

  When I was six years old, my father brought me into his lab on the fourth floor of Shoshone High School in the Valta, our small village of just a few hundred people tucked away in the mountains of Colorado. We called my father’s room a lab but really it was just an old classroom with chunks missing out of the exterior wall from one of the first drone strikes we were told had been orchestrated by the Eastern Order.

  The Eastern Order was the enemy back then, an invading army of merciless marauders, who thumbed their noses at God and shot on sight. They blew up buildings and schools. They attacked our infrastructure, bombed our food and water supplies, rounded up and imprisoned anyone they considered a threat, and they sadistically killed countless children and innocent civilians with the same casual callousness of someone stepping on an ant. They held nothing sacred, they hated our country, they were savages, and they lived only to destroy.

  Or so we were told.

  Long before my friends and I discovered the Eastern Order was a fabrication, my father already knew two things to be true: that President Krug had invented the Eastern Order and that one day, Krug would be coming after me.

  That’s why my father sat me down at his glossy white and glass lab table and had me roll up my sleeves. It’s why he told me to relax as he lowered one of the diagnostic magno-hydraulic articulating limbs he’d rigged to a power conduit running through the ceiling. And it’s why he spent an entire afternoon, bent over tiny showers of orange sparks, implanting a maze of circuitry and data filaments into my forearms.

  I watched as the inky dots, looping spirals, and arcs emerged until my forearms were decorated with a motherboard pattern of elegant rings and circles, curved lines, and swooping strokes of obsidian black.

  The procedure took a long time, and it hurt. A lot. But I trusted my father, and I loved him, so I sat still while he tinkered and fidgeted, his head tilted down as he peered into the holo-magnifier projected from the ocular emitter clipped onto his safety glasses. When he was done, he pushed his glasses up onto this head and gave me a big hug and told me how proud he was of me.

  “These are part of you now. Together, you are a bridge.”

  That confused me. I knew what a bridge was, and I knew I wasn’t one. But my father went on to explain how I was a “bridge across the Digital Divide.”

  When I looked confused, he laughed and told me not to worry about it.

  “The technology you see here,” he said, gesturing with a sweep of his hand at the assortment of holo-displays, viz-screens, and racks of delicate silver tools around the room, “it’s not all that different from what we have up here.”

  He tapped his temple and then mine. Then, he walked me over to his other long table on the opposite side of the lab.

  Under a purple thermal lamp, a single egg sat in a makeshift nest.

  My father said, “It’s time,” and on cue, the egg moved.

  I marveled at his magic trick. “How—?” I started to say, but he put a finger to his lips.

  “You are going to have many important moments in your life,” he said, “moments whose meaning might not seem like much at the time, but that you’ll discover later on mean everything in the world. This is one of those moments. Your first of many. Enjoy it for what it is. Cherish it while it lasts.”

  I was quiet after that, and my father and I sat on the lab chairs with the wobbly wheels and watched the egg hatch. Although I wanted to believe him, it was hard to imagine any scenario where the tennis-ball sized bundle of ugly gray fuzz that emerged from the speckled greenish-brown egg could ever qualify as important. My father assured me he was telling the truth.

  Then he said the craziest thing: “You and this raven have the potential to save the world.”

  He scooped up the quivering ball of fuzz and placed it into my cupped hands.

  “Kress. Meet Render.”

  It’s been over eleven years since that day in my father’s lab. Now, I’m on a road trip with five of my friends—we call ourselves the Conspiracy—to Emiquon National Wildlife Refuge in the northwest corner of Illinois. According to Wisp, who’s still running the show back in San Francisco, it’s where we’ll find the Processor we called both home and prison after our Recruitment.

  Brohn is taking the first shift at the helm of the enormous, rumbling truck. Most wheeled vehicles couldn’t handle this neglected highway with all its pits and dunes and with the waves of fused black asphalt roiling its surface. But this truck is top-of-the-line government grade and was specially commandeered for us back in San Francisco, a gift for our help in defeating the Patriot Army there.

  Actually, it used to be President Krug’s. He rode into town in this thing. But, thanks to us, he left town without it, his tail between his legs.

  Brohn and I sit up front in the truck’s cab and laugh at the irony of using President Krug’s own sacred vehicle to find and gather the very people we hope will help us take him down.

  As much as we would have loved to stay in the amazing city of San Francisco with its colorful buildings, relatively clean air, and its steeply slanted streets, our continued presence there would have set the whole cause back. Along with taking down the garrisoned Patriot Army, we captured General Ekker, and we sent a message to the world, announcing we were on our way to stop Krug and his made-up war.

  But sending a message across the remnants of the old info-net is one thing. This particular project, this “meeting” with Krug where we make him pay for what he’s done, we need to do that in person.

  So, we’re off to gather recruits for the cause before heading to Washington D.C. to get our country back. An ambitious task, to be sure. But like my best friend Cardyn says, “What’s life without a little impossibility to overcome?”

  2

  “Where to, Olivia?” Brohn asks into the intracomm holo-display projecting out into the air from the cab’s front instrument console.

  Olivia’s voice, in all of its oddly mechanical cheerfulness, hums into the cab.

  “We’ll continue heading back the way you came.
East on Interstate-80, past Reno and Salt Lake City.”

  I haven’t gotten used to hearing her voice come at us like this. It’s like the truck has an A.I., only it’s not artificial. Well, not totally. As a Modified, Olivia has a lot of synthetic and manufactured parts. But she’s still, at her core, an organic human being like the rest of us. She’s stationed in the Pod, the small security apartment in the back of the truck. She’s not artificial. But she’s very intelligent.

  With Brohn at the wheel and with Olivia serving as remote navigator from her Pod, we’re soon out of the city, beyond the Oakland slums, and back on the ravaged highway heading east.

  The rest of us, along with Render, who has claimed a perch on a small shelf above the kitchenette, settle into the main cabin and marvel at our good fortune.

  Render watches us, his heavily-feathered head swinging side to side, probably wondering why our usually glum and beleaguered gang suddenly seems so celebratory and carefree.

  Calling this “a luxury apartment on wheels,” Cardyn has spent the last half hour twirling around on one of the loungers, which operate on a grav-pad system and are nearly friction free for a smooth ride. Revolving pointlessly in place, his coppery-red hair splayed out as he spins, he goes on and on about our victory from last night and about the thrill of combat.