I wanted to scream, I wanted to run from there, but I couldn’t.
I didn’t feel it, but I heard the tear and the rip as she cut into my chest and between my ribs and into my beating heart. Inserting a loop into my heart so that I would be trapped inside the Loop, with no hope of escape.
“When’s your next Delay?” Kina asks, snapping me out of the recollection and back into the bright sunlight of the yard.
“Uh, about three months,” I tell her.
“You feeling lucky?”
I shake away the last of the lingering memory of the heart implant. “I’ve made it through four without dying so far. Five if you count the heart implant.”
“What were they?” she asks.
“My first was a nanotech. They never told me what it was for, but they made me drink some blue liquid, then they injected me with something. The second was a surgery. Luckily, it was only a minor one—they replaced the cartilage between two of my ribs with a new fiber that was supposed to have better tensile strength than the natural stuff, then they ran a bunch of tests and left me to recover without painkillers. The third Delay, they injected me with this fast-acting virus that made my temperature rise immediately, and bruises began to appear on my skin where blood vessels were bursting below the surface. They let the virus take me to the point of convulsions before they injected me with an experimental vaccine that—fortunately—worked. The fourth one was a new type of surgical stitching—they cut my forearm open from the elbow to the wrist and then sewed the wound up with some kind of skin-binding tool.”
Kina is silent for a while. I hear her exhale. “That sounds awful.”
“It’s not exactly a holiday,” I tell her.
“How can they let this happen to us? How can the government treat us like this?”
“The people don’t vote against Galen Rye,” I remind her. “If you’re rich, he’s a capitalist hero; if you’re poor, he’s fighting for your rights.”
“It makes you wonder, why has there never been a rebellion?”
“It takes a lot to rebel, and Galen’s got the extremists on his side. Besides, they’ve made it impossible,” I point out. “They control every aspect of our lives, our currency is digital, they can seize it without lifting a finger, taxes come out of wages without the worker having to hand anything over, we’re watched twenty-four hours a day by surveillance drones so nothing can be planned, and they keep enough people solvent so that the voices of the repressed are never listened to.”
“There were rumors, you know, on the outside. I never heard them directly, but my mother, she—”
Kina is interrupted by the one-minute warning ringing out across the yard. The drones hover off their center pillar, weapons tracking the inmates below.
“What rumors?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she says. “It was just conspiracy theory nonsense. I’ll speak to you tomorrow, Luka the librarian.”
I want to hear more about these rumors, see if they match up with Alistair and Emery’s whisperings of war, but there’s no time. The back wall begins to close, and I step inside my cell.
When the wall shuts and the silence returns, I have nothing but time.
I lie back on my bed and think about the stories my dad used to tell me and my sister when we were kids. He’d tell us all about the Third World War—the Futile War. Mom always said that the stories were too adult for us, but we always wanted to hear more. I often wonder if that’s why I felt such a kinship with Maddox, because he was so similar to my dad.
Twenty-nine nuclear bombs were dropped during the Third World War; some were big enough to level half a country, and others merely took out cities. An estimated 900 million civilians died during the conflict, but countless more died in the aftermath as Earth’s temperature dropped and the effects of the nukes took their toll.
It was a coalition of rebels that ended the war—rebels from both sides, from almost every country. The fact was that most of the citizens of the world didn’t want to be a part of it; they were too smart to fall for government propaganda and fearmongering, so they ended it, not with bombs or missiles but with a combination of hope, courage, and having nothing left to lose.
No single country won the war, no group of nations left to write their own version of history—the people of Earth won the war, and when those who started it were brought to justice and sentenced to death, those same people vowed it would never happen again.
Once the old powers were removed, evidence was uncovered of corruption so deep and sickening that it justified the musings of even the most ardent conspiracy theorists; several of the world’s most deadly diseases at the time had been cured decades previously, but the treatments were kept from the world to benefit the rich pharmaceutical companies, who made trillions selling near-useless pills to the sick and dying. It transpired that the political groups that people so fervently supported were merely a facade fostered and encouraged by the billionaires of the world to keep the people at odds—it was much easier to pass a despicable law when the citizens were voting with anger in their hearts rather than logic in their heads. Oil was obsolete; it had been for nearly a century—dozens upon dozens of scientists, mechanics, and tinkerers had created engines that ran on solar power, water, and hydrogen, but governments the world over bought and buried the patents because the oil wars were making fortunes for a select few.
After the war, the World Government was formed: a government that represented peace and prosperity, health care for every citizen and genuine equal opportunities for all, and—most importantly—logic. Logic in the form of Happy Inc. advising the government, solving international problems, and administering flawless and swift justice. And for a while it really worked, but curing three of the top five causes of death had its drawbacks too—the population exploded after civilization was rebuilt. People lived longer, and almost no one died young. The populations of countries were forced into the surviving cities, as far away from the nuclear blasts as possible, and overcrowding was a huge problem, as were water shortages, energy shortages, famine, and the spreading of brand-new diseases that seemed to be born in the fallout. To this day, the sites of the nuclear blasts and the surrounding areas of irradiated land are uninhabitable. These areas are known as the Red Zones.
My sister and I would listen to these stories, and stories of the most famous battles, with such interest that we could barely sleep afterward.
But the thought of war, real war, is one that both terrifies and excites me. I wish it didn’t excite me, but just the notion of any sort of break in the routine of the Loop makes me almost dizzy with anticipation.
My father told me that they used inmates during the Third World War; they promised them reduced sentences, even freedom, if they would fight on the front lines. That’s an offer I would take without a second thought.
You’re getting ahead of yourself, Luka, I tell myself. You’ve heard one rumor. There is nothing going on.
And I know that it’s true, and I’m ashamed of myself for wishing for war, but when you’ve been caged and broken down, perhaps war is the best you can hope for.
I’m pulled from my thoughts by the hatch opening and Wren’s voice.
“Hey, Luka, how are you?”