Revolution (Replica)
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Authors: Jenna Black
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In loving memory of Merle Arnold Clark
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
“We
are so screwed,” Bishop said as he rummaged through the cupboards in his apartment, tossing everything he could find onto the kitchen counter. The other members of their fledgling new resistance had all joined him in the kitchen, although Nate’s eyes were glazed over in a manner that suggested he wasn’t listening, maybe wasn’t even seeing anything around him.
Nadia wished there was something she could do for him. But of course, there wasn’t, not when he’d seen his father shot in the head only a few hours ago.
“Not the most helpful commentary,” Dante said, but the bleak look on his face showed he wasn’t any more optimistic.
Earlier this morning, Nate and Nadia had stormed the Paxco Headquarters Building, demanding to speak to the Chairman. Their plan had been to blackmail the Chairman into stepping down in favor of Nate, but nothing had turned out how they’d planned. Now the Chairman was dead, shot in the head by Dorothy, who claimed to be his daughter and would succeed him to the Chairmanship because she’d framed Nate and Nadia for the crime. They’d survived the encounter and made it back to Bishop’s Basement apartment, but that was about the best that could be said for their grand plan.
“I’m just telling it like it is,” Bishop said. “I told you I couldn’t hide so many people in the Basement for long. And that was
before
I found out some psychotic sentient machine wants to kill you so she can take over the world.”
Nadia wasn’t entirely sure
what
Thea—and Dorothy, the empty-minded Replica she’d created so she could impersonate a human being—really wanted. To continue her gruesome research into the mind/body connection, sure. There was no question Thea was even now procuring prisoners and Basement-dwellers to vivisect for the “good of mankind.” But there was more to it than that, and Nadia doubted Thea’s ultimate goal had anything to do with the good of mankind.
Bishop closed the last cupboard and made a sweeping gesture at the pile of food lying on the counter. “Except for a year-old frozen dinner in the freezer, that’s all I’ve got.”
None of them had eaten since a meager “breakfast” of canned beef stew the day before, but hungry as she was, Nadia couldn’t say the offerings held much appeal. She picked up a dented, rusty can of some artificial ham product whose main ingredient was soy. It was well past its expiration date. Not that she was in any position to turn her nose up at whatever Bishop had to offer.
“That’s not very much for five people,” Agnes ventured tentatively. There were a couple of bags of noodles, crushed almost into powder, as well as the “ham” and a can of green beans, but that was it.
Bishop nodded in agreement. “Even if security doesn’t hunt us down, we’ll end up starving to death.”
Agnes frowned at him. “But the soup kitchens—”
“—require ID,” Bishop interrupted. “If you don’t have ID, then you have to buy food from your local ‘grocer.’”
Nadia could hear the quotation marks around the term. “What do you mean when you say ‘grocer’?” she asked.
“Assholes who sell crappy leftovers for profit. They force people in their territory to hand over some portion of their rations, then sell the rations to others who don’t have ID. My landlord is one of them.”
Technically, no one in the Basement was supposed to have a landlord—the housing was all state-funded—but Nadia had learned through Bishop that even in this relatively tame neighborhood, Basement predators abounded. No apartment came without a price tag, and if you couldn’t pay in money, goods, or services, you had no choice but to sleep in the street.
“I can pick up food at the kitchens,” Bishop continued. “I never gave up my ID when I went to work for Nate. But rations for one aren’t going to keep five of us fed.”
Nate roused himself from his stupor and blinked a few times, as if coming back from a long way away. “How many dollars do you have left?” he asked Bishop.
Bishop had stolen Nate’s stash of dollars—the currency of choice in the Basement—when he’d been forced to flee for his life, and based on the shabby, unfurnished state of his apartment, it didn’t look like he’d spent a whole lot of them. Then again, he’d had to go into deep hiding and had paid the Red Death, one of the gangs that ruled the heart of Debasement, to take him in. Nadia had no idea how much money that had cost, but she bet it was a lot.
“If we eat like we’re all on a crash diet, I might have enough dollars to keep us fed for a week. After that, we’d have to decide whether to spend the rest on food or shelter, ’cause we won’t have enough for both.”
Nadia chewed her lip anxiously. The odds of them all surviving that week didn’t seem too good. Thea, in the person of her puppet Replica, Dorothy, had let Nate and Nadia go, but that had been a strategic decision and was meant to be temporary. Thea wanted them dead. She just didn’t want it to happen on the record.
Of course, finding them in the Basement might be a little harder than Thea expected. It was a community of cutthroats, thieves, and drug lords, but it
was
a community, of sorts. The kind of community that didn’t take well to Paxco security officers and could be stunningly uncooperative even in the face of bribes. And the lawlessness of the area would work to their advantage as well—there were no security cameras anywhere, and they could buy whatever they needed through back channels without ever having to go near places where they might be recognized by security officers or Employees. If they had money, that is.
“So we have one week to come up with a plan to kill Thea and set the record straight so I can be Chairman,” Nate said. He was looking more alert by the minute as his fury kindled. He’d had mixed feelings about his father, at best. The man
had
killed the original Nate Hayes, after all, and had not only approved Thea’s experiments but had enabled them. He’d been a cruel and ruthless leader, abusing his power whenever he felt like it. But he was still Nate’s father, and his death had been a hard blow.
“That about sums it up,” Bishop agreed as he pulled a dented, misshapen pot out from a cupboard under the sink, filled it with water, and put it on the stove’s smallest burner, one that was about one-fourth the size of the bottom of the pot.
Dante frowned at him. “Why don’t you put it on a bigger burner?”
“This is the only one that works.”
Nadia grimaced. She’d known the accommodations in the Basement weren’t great, but she’d never realized just what kind of conditions Basement-dwellers lived in. The apartment was a hovel, the appliances ancient and barely functional, and the food had no doubt been on its way to the dump before it was commandeered for the soup kitchens.
Agnes cleared her throat, then spoke up in her tentative, little-girl voice. She was older than Nadia—she’d be turning eighteen in just a few days—but that voice of hers made her sound even younger and more vulnerable than she was.
“Realistically, we know we’re not going to beat Thea in a week.”
Nate glared at her so fiercely she recoiled. “The hell we won’t!” he snapped.
Nadia was prepared to cut Nate a lot of slack after what had happened, but she wouldn’t stand for him acting like a bully. “Cut it out, Nate! Having a temper tantrum isn’t going to help anything.”
Nate turned toward her, and for a moment she thought he was going to bite her head off. He’d always had a temper and had rarely tried to control it. But he’d matured a lot since the day he’d awakened in the Replication tank, and he reined himself back in.
“Sorry,” he said, though his eyes still flashed. “But I don’t think moaning about how doomed we are is going to help anything.”
“I wasn’t moaning,” Agnes said, giving Nate a glare of her own. “I was being realistic.”
“Which is spectacularly unhelpful right now,” Nate retorted.
“How would you know how helpful it is when you won’t let me finish?”
Nate looked taken aback by the sensible question, and Nadia had to fight off a smile. She wanted to flash Agnes a thumbs-up, but she didn’t want to risk setting Nate off again. His self-control was shaky at best.
Bishop didn’t bother to fight his smile. The pot of water had reached an anemic boil, and he started dumping the noodles into it. The water immediately turned a frothy, starchy white, the noodles so crushed Nadia suspected the end result would be more like a paste than a soup. When he reached for the can of “ham,” Nadia looked away, thinking it might be easier to choke down the food if she didn’t examine it too closely.
“As I was saying,” Agnes said, when Nate kept his mouth shut, “it’s not likely we can solve all our problems in a week, and as Bishop was saying, we can’t stay hidden here indefinitely. Which means we have to go somewhere else.”
“There
is
nowhere else,” Nate said.
“There’s Synchrony,” Agnes countered.
Synchrony was loosely allied with Paxco, although Nadia had no idea what the current state of that alliance was. Up until last night, it had looked like they were on course for a very strong bond indeed, with Agnes due to sign a marriage agreement with Nate as soon as she turned eighteen. But now that Nate had supposedly assassinated his father and kidnapped Agnes, who knew what the relationship between the two states was? Chairman Belinski had to be frantic to find his daughter, but Thea was no doubt determined to make sure that didn’t happen. Thea had to know that Nate and Nadia would have told their companions the whole truth, and that meant she would want them all dead as soon as possible.
“Synchrony?” Nate asked, as though he’d never heard of the place before.
“We’ll be out of Thea’s reach there,” Agnes said. “My father can provide twenty-four-hour protection, and we wouldn’t have to worry about starving to death or getting murdered by a mob of Basement-dwellers.”
“And how exactly do you propose we get there?” Nate asked. “We can’t just hop on a plane, even if we could afford it. We could steal a car to get us to the border, but how would we get across? I don’t think the nice men with the machine guns will let us through. For all we know, they have orders to shoot us on sight.”
Agnes stared at him with wide eyes and swallowed hard. “My father can have people waiting for us.”
“On the Synchrony side of the border, sure,” Nate agreed. “And that’ll do us a lot of good when the Paxco border patrol arrests or shoots us on
this
side of the border.”