Chapter 1
Serpent
Alexis:Year 2090
“Who are you?” a female voice whispered in my ear.
I sat up with a start and blinked groggily.
My wrists throbbed with pain. They were scraped raw.
Grasses and pink summer flowers rustled, as a warm breeze blew through the emerald field I was napping in.
Rural Montana was a quiet, eerie place.
Located two hundred miles north of Helena’s city lights, the power grid barely sustained our run down trailer park.
The Titans had arrived in the year 2050, and the world had crumbled.
Kids at school called it apocalyptic core.
I called it hell.
No one knew where the human-esque immortal Titans with razor-sharp teeth, black veins, long claws, and superspeed came from, or why they tore humans apart for fun.
Their existence was unfortunate, if you wanted to live (I didn’t).
Father John said the Titans had appeared to “teach humans alesson.” Since we did nothing but perish dramatically and gruesomely... strange lesson.
After all, it was the Spartans who had saved us.
“Can you hear me?” the unknown voice asked louder.
I whipped my head around and searched for the speaker, but there was nobody else in the field.
I groaned as the quick movement made my wrists throb worse.
Father and Mother were making their “special drink” in the bathtub again to deal with hunger—a combination of cleaning supplies, water, and moldy bread yeast—and their behavior had become increasingly erratic.
Case in point, last week I’d looked “wrongly” at Father, so he’d tied me up with a rough rope because I was a, “lazy, good for nothing, spoiled ten-year-old bitch.”
This morning, I’d gotten tired of being tethered like a dog and had hit my arms down against a rock while pulling until I’d gotten free.
Both wrists were definitely fractured.
At least you’ve escaped.
The good news: Father was so clueless he probably wouldn’t even remember that he’d tied me up.
The bad news: He needed fancy Spartan Federation medication—preferably death—but he couldn’t afford it.
Someone needed to take care of his mental health the cheap way—hit him over the head with a shovel (that was what they’d done to neighbor Paul: whacked him when he wasn’t looking).
“You can hear me, can’t you... what—are you?” the invisible voice said next to my ear, and I jolted with fear.
Great, I’m being hauntedby a ghost.
I looked around warily.
