Synthesis (The Emergents Trilogy Book 3) Read online

  Synthesis

  The Emergents Trilogy, Book Three

  K. A. Riley

  Copyright

  © 2020 by K. A. Riley. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Disclaimer

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, and events should not be associated with living people or historical events. Any resemblance is the work of the author and is purely coincidental.

  Cover Design

  www.thebookbrander.com

  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

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Epilogue

  Coming soon: Travelers

  Also by K. A. Riley

  A Note from the Author

  Dearest Fellow Conspirator,

  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, Planet of the Apes, or Yukito Kishiro’s nine-volume Battle Angel Alita cyberpunk manga series.)

  Here is the Reading Order for the Conspiracy Ennealogy…

  #1: Resistance Trilogy

  Recruitment

  Render

  Rebellion

  #2: Emergents Trilogy

  Survival

  Sacrifice

  Synthesis (You are here!)

  #3: Transcendent Trilogy

  Travelers (Coming in June 2020)

  Transfigured

  Terminus

  Thank you for joining the Conspiracy!

  Enjoy the revolution!

  Conspiratorially yours,

  To the ones who’ve got their act together.

  Summary

  Encouraged by happy reunions and with the lives of millions and the fate of the nation hanging in the balance, Kress and her Conspiracy—along with their new legions of allies—prepare for a final, all-or-nothing war against Krug and the assembled might of his Patriot Army.

  “Truth is found neither in the thesis nor in the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis, which reconciles the two.”

  — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (attributed)

  “And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

  On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door.”

  — Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven” (Stanza 18)

  Prologue

  For the last year, I’ve felt incomplete. Like my life hasn’t belonged to me.

  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

  I’ve been trained, tested, and tortured. Sometimes, all at once.

  After escaping from the Processor, my friends and I—the Cohort of 2042—went on the run along cratered highways, into wrecked woods, up the mountains, and through all the decimated and radiation-poisoned ghost towns along the way.

  After holding off the Patriot Army in San Francisco, we headed to Chicago to track down President Krug and bring an end to his reign of cruelty and violence.

  Then things went sideways.

  Kidnapped and taken to Krug Tower, I was locked alone in a cell for so long I thought I might go crazy. And who knows? Maybe I did. My mind was turned around and flipped inside-out until I didn’t know which way was up.

  I stepped out of that maddening isolation and was reunited with my Conspiracy of friends, only to find that we’d been slammed into a world of deceptions:

  Disorienting Virtual Reality missions.

  Vivid dreams that crossed the line into the world of the real.

  Horrifying illusions implanted in our minds by one of the Hypnagogics, a girl named Virasha who could make you think you were living—and then dying—inside of your own worst nightmares.

  My father’s cryptic revelation about how the implanted techno-tattoos in my forearms connect me with Render—my raven companion since I was six years old—and with my mother, whom I barely remember.

  It’s been a broken life of splintered pieces and fragments of truth scattered across a blood-soaked field of lies.

  I’ve been tugged at, knocked down, sliced through, and ripped apart.

  Now, at last, I know it’s time for everything to end.

  Whether it ends with me dying, returning to what I was, or evolving into something new remains to be seen.

  Either way, it’s time for all the loose and broken parts of me to start coming back together.

  1

  Several eternally long minutes and a lot of very deep sighs of relief after our narrow escape from the confines of Krug Tower, War and his crew of Survivalists, along with Mayla and what’s left of her army of the Unkindness, are in the cabin of our stolen heli-barge while my Conspiracy and I sit up front in the eight-seat cockpit.

  Clean and carpeted and with its six plush, high-backed passenger seats curved in a semi-circle behind the hovering captain’s and co-pilot’s seats, this is one of the nicer experiences I’ve had in a while.

  His head twitching side to side as he takes it all in, Render, my raven companion, is perched on top of a steel storage locker behind me.

  Brohn sits broad-shouldered in the seat next to me.

  On Brohn’s other side, Cardyn is fidgeting in his seat and staring out the small round window on the port side of the barge.

  Manthy looks unconscious, slumped in her seat over on the starboard side.

  Rain is in the captain’s chair, her hands a whir of interactive motion with the holo-controls floating above the barge’s navigational input panels as she pilots us away from Krug Tower toward freedom. But also straight toward the war we all know will have to happen.

  Olivia is in her mag-chair next to Rain, her thin, multi-colored tendrils extending in undulating waves from her upper arms as she integrates with the ship’s directional sub-routines. The twisted patchwork of flesh, steel plates, and exposed circuitry making up her face is reflected in the instrument panel, a sleek sheet of flat, black glass running the entire width of the cockpit under the long, narrow window looking out over the ruined world we’re read
y to risk our lives to save.

  An array of yellow and green schematics hovers over the instrument panel. The glowing images—a buffet of coordinates, energy signatures, and global thermal detectors—scroll, rotate, and reconfigure under Rain’s flashing fingers.

  With deft flicks at the holo-images, she calls out coordinates, altitude, mag-grav energy output, cabin pressure, communications relay status, and confirmation of analytic feedback from the barge’s self-assessment and internal diagnostic systems.

  It’s a masterful bit of navigation, and there’s no one I’d rather have at the helm.

  The long window at the front of the cockpit is crystal-clear. It doesn’t even cast reflections or distortions, and I have to resist the temptation to stand up and reach forward to put my hand on the glass to confirm it’s actually there.

  It seems I’ve been doing a lot of that lately: questioning reality.

  After what we went through in the Mill, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Growing up the way I did—in a tiny town destroyed by war—there wasn’t a lot I could be certain about from day to day. Every strong breath of wind could carry a drone strike right behind it. Every red, sun-soaked morning could be the beginning of the end.

  The one thing I did know for sure was the difference between what was real and what wasn’t.

  In the past year, I’ve come to find out that I didn’t even know that.

  I put my hand on Brohn’s knee, and he puts his hand on mine, smiling over at me before turning toward Rain and leaning forward to ask her something or other about the barge’s atmospheric controls.

  As Rain chats with him over her shoulder, I give Brohn’s knee a gentle squeeze. He smiles and probably thinks I’m being affectionate. The truth is, I just want to make sure he’s real.

  My dad used to read bedtime stories to me when I was little. I never liked traditional fairy tales or those terrible stories where some girl has an amazing adventure only to wake up and discover it was all just a dream…Or was it?

  Ugh.

  I think I perfected my patented eyerolls listening to those.

  I liked the stories about travel and adventure where I could get lost in the fantasy and not have to worry about whether the poor hero was going to wake up in bed and find out the whole thing had been a colossal waste of time.

  Right now, though, I wouldn’t mind waking up and finding out we only imagined the poverty, danger, and death we’ve encountered so far in our young lives.

  But here in the barge, there’s joy in the air for a change.

  Over the droning thrum of the mag-powered engines, we listen to the happy buzz from Mayla and the Unkindness as their eager and triumphant chatter mingles with the gruff laughter and raucous celebrations of War and his rowdy band of snaggle-toothed Survivalists.

  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when the Unkindness leads them all in a boisterous, Bob Marley tune with the lines, “Don’t you worry ‘bout a thing. ‘Cause every little thing’s gonna be all right!” reverberating in deafening waves through the sterile, recirculated air back there in the belly of the barge.

  Cardyn keeps looking over his shoulder, and I can tell he kind of wants to join them. Of all of us, he’s the one who would.

  Brohn’s too self-disciplined, Rain’s too busy, I’m too shy, and Manthy is well…too Manthy to jump up and join in a cacophonous singalong.

  Cardyn starts to get up but then I catch him glance across the cockpit to where Manthy is practically melted down into her seat, and I know he also wants to keep our Conspiracy together. It’s been a long time since we’ve been together and free at the same time.

  He tries to change his seat to be next to Manthy, but she leans her head against the side window and tells him to go away.

  So Cardyn compromises. He returns to his seat and stays up front with us, and I giggle as I watch his head bobbing and his lips moving to the song as he drums his fingers on his armrest and taps his foot on the floor.

  I’m especially impressed by the Survivalists. For a bunch of former warlords and mercenaries, they’re surprisingly in tune.

  Cardyn gestures backward with a flick of his thumb. “Quite the combo, eh?” he calls out to me above the overlap of Rain and Olivia’s chatter in front of us, the humming mag-engines below us, and the noisy singing coming from behind us. “Who’d have thought War and Mayla would ever be sitting there singing together and laughing it up in a stolen presidential heli-barge?”

  I’ve never flown like this before, and my voice sounds echo-y and hollow in my own ears. “The Survivalists and the Unkindness are more alike than they thought.”

  Looking over his shoulder through the doorway at the petite, dreadlocked Mayla and the bald, bus-sized War, Cardyn clearly isn’t buying it.

  I tell him I’m serious. “They really do have something in common.”

  “What? That they’re both carbon-based forms of life?”

  “No, you goof. They discovered the truth about enemies.”

  Cardyn leans toward me across Brohn and cups a hand around his ear. “Truth? What truth?”

  “That enemies are a myth.”

  Brohn squints like he’s deep in thought before nodding.

  “I guess I never thought about it that way.”

  “Well it’s true,” I tell him. “Enemies are made up by people like Krug, who are too scared to be who they are and too egotistical to let everyone else be who they want to be.”

  “Live and let live,” Cardyn beams before easing back in his seat and returning to his closed-eyed foot-tapping.

  Rain swivels around in her pilot’s seat, her eyes darting toward the revelers beyond the open cockpit doorway. “If those two can get along, maybe there’s hope for everyone.”

  I look back through the access portal into the back of the barge and, although I’ll never get used to seeing War and Mayla—former rivals and enemies—relaxed, singing, and chatting each other up like old friends, I couldn’t agree more.

  “Getting us out of Krug Tower was only the first fight,” Brohn reminds us. “The big battle is up ahead.”

  Cardyn snaps his eyes open and whips back toward me, a deep crease appearing on his forehead.

  “Are we really going to overthrow our own government?”

  Brohn answers, “Yes,” but I shake my head.

  “It’s not our government,” I remind them both. “It’s Krug’s. He didn’t lead our country. He stole it. We’re doing this to give the country back to the people. Everyone has the right to be free to live in peace without being conned into thinking there are enemies around every corner.”

  “Sounds so noble when you say it,” Cardyn laughs. “Maybe you should run for president. Right after we throw Krug off the top of a very tall building, that is.”

  “We’re not killing anyone for the sake of killing. He needs to stand trial.”

  Cardyn crosses his arms in a pretend pout. “Fine.”

  “Okay, you big baby,” I sigh. “But I get to toss him.”

  Relaxing his scowl, Cardyn grins at me, a mischievous glint in his eye.

  “We’ll see.”

  “Besides,” I remind him, “The Constitution says I’d have to be thirty-five to be president.”

  Rain glances back at me, her long hair swaying in a shimmering curtain of silky black as she turns her head. I think she’s about to scold me or something, but instead, she laughs. “Then I guess we’ll see you in seventeen years.”

  Now it’s my turn to cross my arms. I know when I’m being teased. “If I’m president in seventeen years, then something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.”

  We all share a good laugh, but our moment of levity is interrupted by Manthy, who gives a little moan from where she’s twitching in her seat. Her eyelids flutter, her head listing to one side.

  I’ve been wanting to say something to her or comfort her for a while now, but after her dismissal of Cardyn, I figure I better not risk it.

  For the past half hour, she’s been drifting i
n and out of what is clearly a very restless sleep. Now awake, she doesn’t bother to brush the thick, tangled veil of hair away from her face.

  Bracing myself on the backs of the two empty cockpit chairs between us as the heli-barge bounces its way through the turbulent air hundreds of feet above the ground, I make my way over to her, slide into the empty seat next to hers, and ask if she’s okay.

  As a technopath, she has a special relationship with the digital parts of the world that haven’t been blasted back to the stone age by Krug in his murderous, tunnel-visioned quest for power.

  Here, like in Krug Tower, there’s tech all around us, and I know she can’t always control how, when, and to what degree her consciousness winds up intertwined with it.

  So I feel dumb asking if she’s okay.

  Honestly, I don’t know what I’d say if someone asked me the same question.

  Either way, she doesn’t answer. But she doesn’t need to. I know what she’s been through. We’ve all suffered, but she suffers on a different level. She doesn’t talk about it, but I’m pretty sure I know what’s happening: