Sacrifice: A Young Adult Dystopian Novel (The Emergents Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  Sacrifice

  K. A. Riley

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

  Copyright © 2019 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.

  Cover Design: The Book Brander

  Contents

  A Note from the Author

  Dedication

  Summary

  Epigraph

  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

  Epilogue

  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 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 (You Are Here!)

  Synthesis (Coming in early 2020)

  #3: Transcendent Trilogy

  Travelers

  Transfigured

  Terminus

  I’m glad you chose to join in the Conspiracy! Enjoy the revolution!

  — KAR

  Dedication

  To those who gave up the stuff they love to be with the ones they love.

  Summary

  Captured by the group of rogue Emergents known as “Hypnagogics,” Kress and her Conspiracy search desperately for a way out of their confinement in a stadium-sized prison-lab called the Mill. There, they find themselves subjected to a bombardment of psychological manipulations, physical challenges, and cruel techno-genetic experiments.

  Forced by the mysterious “Auditor” to endure a battery of mind-warping Virtual Reality missions and unsettled by a series of shocking discoveries, Kress and her friends will need to make agonizing choices and an equally painful sacrifice.

  Epigraph

  “The important thing is this: to be ready at any moment to sacrifice what you are for what you could become.”

  — Charles Dickens

  “One-half of knowing what you want is knowing what you must give up before you get it.”

  — Sidney Howard

  “I alone have had the courage and strength to keep us safe. I alone have challenged those who would challenge us. No one in the history of this great nation has sacrificed more than I have!”

  — President Krug, “State of a Great Nation,” public address (July 4, 2042)

  Prologue

  This room…No. This cell is small, insignificant, pointless, and plain.

  I know the feeling.

  I’ve been in here a long time. There was no interrogation, no trial, and no sentence handed down.

  Right now, all I have are questions.

  Where are my friends?

  Where am I?

  Why am I here?

  After getting betrayed and captured, I just woke up here, a prisoner with no purpose.

  The entire time, I’ve stayed focused on what’s important: Brohn, Cardyn, Rain, Manthy, and, of course, Render.

  We were from the same town. Our shared experiences turned us into family. Our stubbornness turned us into survivors. It took all of that combined, plus a common enemy in Krug and his Patriot Army, to make us a Conspiracy.

  On the day the members of my Cohort in the Valta turned seventeen, we were recruited and held captive in a military installation in the middle of nowhere. We managed to escape and make our way to San Francisco—one of the last almost-free cities left—where we helped lead a rebellion against the encroaching Patriot Army.

  After our triumph there, we started to make our way back east, and we felt like we were on a pretty good trajectory. We had a stolen and fully stocked presidential transport truck, a clear destination in mind, and a small but powerful army we were beginning to assemble.

  Then we ran into War, the leader of a syndicate of Chicago Survivalists. We endured captivity and what seemed like an endless fight for our lives. We were saved by Mayla and the Unkindness, her small society of hardy and helpful Good Samaritans.

  And then, Sheridyn, one of the fellow teenagers we rescued, joined up with three of her friends, betrayed us, slaughtered the Unkindness, and brought me here.

  I lived through all of that in less than a year.

  I’ve put up with a lot.

  Up until now, all I needed to do was survive.

  Now, in the middle of this new avalanche of questions, what I need most are answers.

  1

  I wake up, scrambling in my head to hold onto the fading filaments of a dream.

  It’s too late, though. I can’t hang on. The dream is gone, and I’m alone on a floating cot in my very small cell of a room.

  I put my fingertips to the right side of my neck, and I shudder to feel the hard, flat plate protruding just above the surface of my skin. I trace its edge with my fingertip. The skin around the cold disk started out raw and tender. Now it’s as hard and cold as the disk, itself.

  Sometimes, like last night, it still bothers me in my sleep, and I wince at the dull throb it sends through the stiff muscles leading down to my shoulder.

  Since the beginning of my time in here, I’ve known from seeing my reflection in the hazy whiteness of the wall that the thing embedded in my skin is a black disk, some kind of contact-pad, that feels like it’s been riveted into my neck.

  Sitting up and swinging my feet to the floor, I inspect the room I’ve come to know so well. It’s a prison cell, but it doesn’t look like one. It’s clean. Maybe too clean. There’s no dirt, no dust. Not even those little specks you see dancing in the air when the light hits them just right.

  In here, there’s none of that. There’s no grated window high up by the ceiling. No rats scuttling around in the corners. The walls aren’t a patchwork of graffiti-covered cinderblocks. There’s no stainless-steel toilet next to the bed and no baton-wielding guard pacing menacingly outside an iron-barred door. There’s not even a
tattooed, sadistic cellmate to keep me company.

  It might not look like a typical prison cell, but I can’t get out, I don’t want to be here, and I’m powerless to do anything about any of it. Plus, I’m not with my friends, my Conspiracy. So that, by itself, makes this the worst kind of prison of all.

  Basically, I’m locked in a white cube with no windows or specific light source, yet it’s perpetually bright in here.

  Off to the side, there’s a separate small room—an alcove really—with a luminous white sink the size of a small cereal bowl and a sonic shower tucked into a shallow recess in the ceiling. It’s where I clean my clothes, clean myself, and brush my teeth. Everything I need to do to feel, if only vaguely, human again.

  In the main room, I sleep on a frameless cot, which floats on a mag-pad. In the middle of the room, there’s a cylindrical glass island with two matching glass and silver stools where I sit by myself and eat the meager breakfast of blue and white protein cubes and the two water-tubes that pop up every morning out of a built-in grav-chute in its top.

  On the first day, I tried reaching down into the opening as the cubes and tubes rose up through a quivering magnetic field.

  I got a painful shock, and my hand got pinned to the wall inside the chute. It took all my strength to pull myself free from the powerful energy beam. For a few hours after that, it looked like someone had driven a burning truck across my arm.

  So I learned fast that the innocent looking little opening has a volter and a grav-field.

  Get too close, you get a shock. Suffer through that, and a focused gravitational field nearly rips your arm off.

  With that lesson learned, I dedicated the first night in here to getting my bearings. Slipping into survival mode, I inspected every inch of the milky-white room. I looked for air vents, input ports, outlets, exhaust flues, access points, charging stations, waste disposal chutes, gaps or seams in the construction.

  Nothing.

  I tried calling out into the air.

  “Is anyone there?”

  Still nothing.

  “Hey! Where am I?”

  More nothing.

  On that first day, I screamed and shouted for another half hour before I lost my voice and any sense of dignity I might have had left.

  With my throat a raw and patchy mess, I swiped the pattern of dots, bands, lines, and swooshes on the digital implants in my forearms. I reached out with my mind to connect with Render, the inky-black raven who’s been my friend, partner, and spirit-mate since I was six years old.

  It was like trying to turn on a viz-screen with no power. There was no static. No signal. No connection. No Render.

  So, I tried smashing each of the two delicate-looking stools against every surface of the cell. I don’t know what they’re made out of. They look like ice but are stronger than synth-steel. They don’t even leave a mark on the flawless white walls, which glow and swirl in hypnotic, lazy waves like they’re filled with thick currents of cream.

  Other than the glass stools, the only loose item in the room is an ocular viz-cap holding imprints of a bunch of micro-logged books. It was sitting bug-like on the island when I woke up the first day. A hazy translucent yellow, about the size of a grape, it emits a static field that holds it onto my temple as it projects a holo-text menu into the air in front of me, listing the reading material it contains.

  Ignoring its primary purpose as a digi-reader and hoping to create a tool or something with a sharp edge, I first tried rubbing the small device against the corner of the wall leading into the shower room. It was like trying to sharpen a piece of rubber with a hunk of cheese.

  After that failure, I figured I might as well get some use out of the thing.

  Sticking the little device to my temple, I scanned through the catalogue hoping to find something, any good reading material, to help me pass the time. Lying on the cot with the rate-sensor identifying my eye movements and adjusting to my reading speed, which is really fast, by the way, I skimmed through everything it had to offer.

  In the Valta, I learned how to read early. My dad was my first and best teacher. By the time I was six and nearly finished with first grade, I could read better than my older brother Micah. Before I turned seven, though, our town was attacked for the first time, and nearly all the adults—parents, aunts, uncles, teachers—were killed or went missing in the horrifying aftermath and in the dozens of fiery drone strikes that followed.

  In the few years after that, the older kids took over the teaching and training. While they were engaged in the ongoing task of putting a formal educational plan in place, a Sixteen named Carlita took on the leadership role of digging through the old library. She specifically asked for me to be on her team. Her father and my father had been friends, and I think she thought of me as the younger sister she never had.

  I tagged along with Carlita, trudging through the rubble while trying not to surrender to the oppressive, heart-heavy trauma of being an eleven-year-old orphan in a world at war. When I cried, which I did a lot in those first days after the attacks that took my father, she comforted me. But only for a minute.

  “If you spend more than one minute looking back,” she said, her voice cold and even, “your head’ll get stuck that way, and you’ll never see all the things—the painful and the pleasant—that will be in front of you.”

  And then she would put me back to work.

  Together, Carlita and I, along with my best friend Cardyn and seven other Neos and Juvens, collected and catalogued all the old paper books, the solar-powered text-pads, the holo-script projectors, the viz-caps…anything we could salvage. Then, we passed it all on to the newly formed Curriculum Committee, the crew of older Juvens and Sixteens who spent every day designing the classes and lessons we wound up following until years later when it was our turn as the new batch of Seventeens to be taken away by the Recruiters, who came like clockwork every November 1st.

  Of course, what we thought was Recruitment turned out to be a physical and psychological confinement of the worst kind.

  After that, I learned to face a terrible reality: whether it’s a bombed-out town, a secret military laboratory, or this—a bleach-white room without a blemish or a single speck of dirt—prisons can come in all kinds of deceptive shapes and sizes.

  By the end of my first three days in here, I’d read all the books on the viz-cap. I skimmed through them in order only to find that they all had something to do with President Krug. I read all six of his personal autobiographies and the many other books about him, all hailing him as the closest thing to a savior on Earth. I wasn’t keen on those books, but I was curious.

  As I expected, they were nothing more than shameless self-promotion, lie after obvious lie, and an endless diatribe against anyone he considered a threat to his “great empire,” which basically meant anyone who refused to worship him as a god.

  I might have set a record for the most eyerolls in a seventy-two-hour span.

  I grew up believing in Krug and seeing him giving speeches on the viz-screens in the Valta. I’ve also been face-to-face with him twice. Now that I’ve read his books and all those biographies about him, I’m not sure which of those encounters makes me the most sick to my stomach.

  At least I read fast. Really fast. So the repugnance was fleeting.

  Unfortunately, I also remember nearly everything I read, so I had to concentrate hard to keep Krug’s word-filth from infesting my mind.

  In those first days, after grinding through all that transparent propaganda, I couldn’t sleep, so I went back to probing the solid parts of the room for weaknesses. I banged on the walls, stomped on the floors, and even climbed up onto the glass island to pound the heel of my hand against every inch of the ceiling I could reach.

  Frustrated, I decided I really needed to find a way to make a weapon. There wasn’t anyone around to use it against, but who knows? Maybe Sheridyn would show up again. Or Krug. I’d take any enemy over the relentless presence of absolutely no one.

>   Barefoot and with nothing on but a pair of pocketless granite-gray running pants and a sleeveless, orange compression top, I didn’t have a lot to work with.

  That didn’t stop me from trying.

  The clear surface of the island looks like glass, but, as I found out the hard way when I tried to crack it, it’s really a light-permeable polysynth alloy. I nearly broke my hand figuring that one out.

  The cot is comfortable. It’s also covered in a fabric I couldn’t seem to tear, no matter how hard I tried.

  So, I stopped trying.

  Now, since I can’t do much to improve my mind or my situation, I turn to taking care of my body.

  I do thousands of push-ups. I jog in place. I do step-ups and box-jumps onto the stool at the island where I eat my meals. I lie on the floor and do crunches until my abs are granite hard. I shadow-box, skip an invisible rope, and punch the walls until they’re stained red with my blood. I go through every kata and martial arts move I’ve ever learned. In my mind, at the end of every blade-hand strike, roll punch, and Biu Jee finger-thrust is Krug’s smarmy face.