Total pages in book: 61
Estimated words: 55551 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 278(@200wpm)___ 222(@250wpm)___ 185(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 55551 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 278(@200wpm)___ 222(@250wpm)___ 185(@300wpm)
“I do worry about it, Sullivan. Why is he talking about brain chips? Are you telling me…” Her eyes widen. “Oh my god, Sullivan. It makes so much sense. You’re a drone.”
My temper flares suddenly. “I am not a fucking drone!”
Drone. That’s the word I haven’t heard in years. A word I never wanted to hear again.
“What is a drone?” Thorn asks the question.
“There’s a fucking predatory organization that poses as a school of sorts,” Raine explains. “And it is a school. Sometimes. But sometimes, it’s something else. They get poor kids from colonies. Kids who have no chance of making anything of themselves. And then they get those kids fucked up and injured in training, and they sell them a cure. The cure is becoming a drone. They don’t think anything they’re not allowed to think. They don’t do anything they’re not told to do. They’re living, breathing robots. Fuck, Suli. Why did you never tell me?”
I hate hearing her tell him my deepest shame. I was hours away from becoming a peon of the academy when I escaped. The chip was only the first part of the proceedings. If I hadn’t run when I did, they would have severed parts of my frontal lobe. They would have turned me into an obedient, unafraid, programmable creature.
“I never told you because it was never any of your business. I’m not a drone.”
“No. But you were chipped. Tracked, probably. No wonder they’d always show up within hours of our raids. No wonder…” she looks at me. “You fucking Judas goat.”
“That’s not true. They never tracked me.”
“Of course they did!” Raine practically explodes at me. “The chips are tracking devices, idiot! You should have told me. You should have told all of us. Instead of that bullshit story about being a pirate raised by pirates.”
I guess I did tell a lie here and there. It didn’t seem to matter at the time. All that mattered was having a good time and doing pirate things. Making money to send home. Building a crew. Making a life. I didn’t want to think about the fact that some fucking institution had shoved a thing into my skull that changed everything forever.
I say none of this. I just look at her and give a tiny shrug.
At this point, Thorn decides he has heard enough.
“Take the other human, Avel,” Thorn says, standing aside to let Avel into the room. “Take her. Secure her. Deal with her.”
“With pleasure,” Avel rumbles.
“The fuck do you think you’re doing?” Raine’s question is a warning as she raises her side arm.
“That’s a gun, my guys,” I say. They don’t seem to be realizing how dangerous she potentially is. A moment later, she takes care of that problem by discharging it directly at Avel. By some absolute miracle, she misses and the projectile ricochets off the wall, zipping between Sona and Thorn before burying itself in the floor.
Avel grabs her before she can take another shot, wresting the gun from her hand with a very hard slap to her hand that I can see shocks her into a temporary kind of submission.
“That is unacceptable behavior,” he says, speaking mildly given she just tried to kill him. Or did she? I’ve never known Raine to miss a shot, certainly not at close range like this. Is she losing her nerve? Freak accident? Misfire? I might not ever know, because she is now being carried out of the room, kicking, screaming, and cursing all the way.
When we are alone, and Sona is dismissed, Thorn turns his attention back to me.
“What Raine was saying. Was that true?”
“Yeah,” I admit. “I didn’t really get a scholarship to the academy. I was sold to it. That’s what they do to poor kids who want to get out of their starving colonies and make a better life for themselves and their families. They say they’ll teach you to work in security or entertainment. Either way, you end up a drone or a whore. Sometimes both.”
His face falls into an expression of pity I neither want nor need. Then he starts apologizing for the past, which is the most painful thing he’s ever done.
“I am so sorry that happened to you, Suli. It makes sense now why you are the way that you are, why you trust nobody, and why you feel little loyalty to anybody besides your crew. You were betrayed deeply. That is the kind of pain that makes a wound that bleeds for a lifetime.”
His words are surprisingly poetic, though I don’t know if I should actually be surprised. Thorn is smart, and though his world is primitive, he understands simple things on a level the more advanced people I’ve encountered never did. He understands things like trust, loyalty, love, connection. Yes, he has also essentially enslaved me, but he’s left the parts of me that matter intact. The people I was sold to all those years ago never intended to leave anything untouched. They were going to erase me, piece by piece, and they were going to play with the shell of me until it cracked and broke and could be discarded.