I couldn’t saveanyone.
The knowledge didn’t stop me from stepping in front of her when the scientists came to pick out who they wanted to fuck with next. It didn’t stop me from going with them willingly so they had no reason to look for someone else, or when they led me into a room and started stabbing me with needles. It didn’tdoanything, as far as I could tell.
Neither did trying to save her, because I saw her little body prone and unmoving in a puddle of dried blood when they led me past my usual holding cell and took me into isolation.
She couldn’t have been more than seven.
Fuck.
That was the first night a soldier came into my cell. They beat the shit out of me and left me lying in a pool of my own blood. The next day, they dragged me back into that same room and injected me with more needles.
It was rinse and repeat until the days blurred and I wasn’t sure what was going on, until I started to realize that as hard as they hit me, I was still getting up the next day and moving.
It made me wonder if they’d brought us here to look for a cure at all. It made me wonder if the world really was so fucked that even after it had all ended, the people in charge were still doing what they did best. The strong exploited the weak for power. My dad had done it before I ran, and now the people in charge were doing it again, using my body to further their own agenda.
I wasn’t here fortheGreater Good. TherewasnoGreater Good.
I was here to become a weapon.
CHAPTER
TWO
BISHOP
Aubrey Malcolm hadthe greenest eyes I’d ever seen.
We weren’t supposed to talk to the prisoners. We weren’t supposed to interact with them. I knew guards did—they’d go into the cells at night and find the ones they thought were the prettiest so they could have their fun.
It was forgiven, even encouraged—the men and women behind the bars were considered less than animals by the company that hired my unit. I’d joined the Order tohelppeople, at least that’s what I’d thought when I signed up.
It turned out we were nothing more than mercenaries in fancy jackets, with fancy dog tags that might as well have been collars. We weren’t better than the raiders who roamed around and took what they wanted, we just did it with guns and authority, with the blessing of those in charge instead of the condemnation of the world around us.
We weren’t supposed to reallylookat the test subjects.
But I couldn’t help looking at him.
Aubrey Malcolm never put his head down, he never cowered when the guards came around. It didn’t matter that most of us were more rabid than the damn ferals that had all but ruined the world. We had permission to act like animals as long as we kept it private, and kept it to the captured.
As much as I tried to keep my squad in line, there were some men who didn’t respect rank or orders.
There were people who wanted nothing more than to cause hurt and pain, and I wondered sometimes if they hadn’t derived the RRV13 from people like them.
It wasn’t really a shock to realize the recruits who joined the Order did it for power, for safety, for security. There’d just been a part of me that had hoped some of the people who’d joined did it for the right reason.
To help.
Sometimes it felt like I was the only one.
Wanting to help was going to get me killed. Knowing that they were killing off the weaker people in the building, the injured, the children…
It was enough to make me hasty.
And knowing that they were taking the men and women who they deemedviableexperimentsand injecting them with some concentrated version of the rain to see if they’d either turn or inherit more of the strengths that came with the infection?
I wasn’t sure how I managed to follow protocol at all.
Especially when I realized that Aubrey Malcolm haddisappeared from his cell and I hadn’t seen him in two weeks.
