The Choice

by Third Cousins

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

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  A Synopsis & Table Of Contents...

  Inspiring Words

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Copyright

  The Bounty

  The Choice

  Book 3

  Dystopian Romance

  By: Kacey Lu & Third Cousins

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  A SYNOPSIS & TABLE OF CONTENTS...

  Sarah finds herself making some difficult choices and having to pick between old friends and new. Will she take the side of the person who had always had hers or will she defend the one who can’t defend himself?

  Nathan has had his opinion of Sarah turned on its head. He thought that she was a cold and heartless bounty hunter, but he’s started to realize that there’s a lot more to her than that. When he realizes that her mysteries are only making him fall for her harder, he knows he has an important choice to make. Will he let the government kill him or will he accept the chip that he’s run from all his life?

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  DISCOVER MORE BOOKS BY THIRD COUSINS

  A SYNOPSIS & TABLE OF CONTENTS...

  INSPIRING WORDS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  DISCOVER MORE BOOKS BY THIRD COUSINS

  COPYRIGHT

  INSPIRING WORDS

  “I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.”

  - Daphne Rae, Love Until It Hurts

  CHAPTER 1

  Sarah

  I could feel the panic rolling off Nathan, who was standing behind me. Andy was in front of me and coming closer. His eyes were focused on me. I could feel the scorch of the red hot glare that he was directing at me. “What’s going on?” he asked, walking forward in huge strides. “Where has the girl gone?”

  There was no way for us all to walk away from the conversation. Andy wasn’t going to let Natasha go. He’d already been suspicious over whether there had been more at the camp.

  “Andy, I can explain,” I started, as I held my hands out in front of me, gesturing for him to stop. I couldn’t explain, of course. There was no way that could explain and still protect the people I'd left behind in that camp. No explanation would protect me, either.

  He stopped, though. He looked at me with an impatient sigh. I could see him waiting for my explanation. I couldn't use my gun: it was programmed not to work on agents of The City of Hope.

  I let my eyes scope out the surroundings in my peripheral vision. The floor was covered in dead trees and branches, but they were all too dry to cause any real damage without breaking them. I noticed a small gray blur to my right. I knew I only had one shot at grabbing it before Andy realized that I had no intention of explaining anything to him.

  The breeze picked up around us and the leaves started to rustle. I held up my hand and looked to my left. “Something's stalking us,” I hissed.

  I noticed Andy’s brief break in concentration as he turned to look for what I was talking about. I lunged to my right, ignoring the protests of my wound, and picked up the stone that was half hidden underneath a log. The damp earth from beneath clung to it as I pulled it up.

  Andy probably knew what I was going to do. I could see it in his eyes, as he lunged towards me. I waited until the very last moment. I waited until I could feel his breath in my face, before I stepped quickly to the side. My sudden movement caught him off guard. He’d never been very good at thinking a situation through. He stumbled and I brought the stone down quickly on his head.

  My stomach flipped. The air filled with a deep hollow crunch that made me feel sick. Warm, sticky liquid started to pour over my hands and I looked down to see that it was Andy’s blood. Andy lay sprawled at my feet.

  “Do you think he’s dead?” Nathan asked.

  I jumped at his sudden interruption. My mind was still replaying the sickening crunch, as though it was on a mission to actually force sick from my stomach.

  I looked up at him. His face had turned white. He looked distraught over just seeing a man die. “Maybe,” I told him. The blood was still pouring thick and fast out of his head and I knew that, left unattended, the wound would kill him, even if the initial blow hadn’t.

  I forced myself to stand up. The muscles in my legs were on fire from crouching down for so long. I looked back down at my hands. I needed to wash up. I couldn’t carry on, knowing that Andy’s blood was all over me.

  The river was close. I could hear it over the rustling of the trees, so I turned in the direction of the rushing water and started to walk away.

  “Are you just going to leave him?” Nathan asked. He sounded surprised.

  I stopped and turned to him. His eyes were wide open in shock. The whiteness to his cheeks was slowly being replaced by a pink blush.

  I nodded my head. We didn’t have time to bury him. We didn’t have time to be sentimental. We were in a part of the jungle that we shouldn’t be be hanging around in. We were on our way to The City of Hope. If I was caught burying a bounty hunter by one of the guards, then I’d be buried next to him.

  “We need to move on,” I said, turning back towards the water. I kept my voice calm and cool. I knew that Nathan was only a small push away from totally freaking out and I couldn’t let that happen.

  He didn’t say anything else. I couldn’t hear his footsteps following me either. I got to the wide river and knelt down on its grassy bank. The earth was damp and it soaked through my jeans, but I hardly noticed. My attention was focused on the red tinge my hands were putting in the water as I washed them clean.

  I spent longer than I should have done by the river. I could feel the minutes slipping past me as the sun slowly sank in the sky, tracing a jagged course through gaps in the tangled leaves overhead.

  I couldn’t get my hands clean enough though. They were sore with my vicious scrubbing, but I could still feel the hot, sticky blood all over them, even when there was no more to be seen.

  Nathan’s hand on my shoulder finally pulled me away from the water. I looked up in surprise. For a moment, I wasn’t sure who I was expecting, or even where I was.

  “We should find somewhere to rest,” he told me in a gentle way, which told me that he could see the pain in my eyes.

  I nodded. I was sure that there were the ruins of an old village not far from where we were. The light blue of the sky was starting to darken and I knew we had maybe only an hour or so of daylight light left, before we’d be stumbling through the dark.

  I stood up and dried off my hands on my jeans. “We better get going,” I said to him without looking directly into his eyes.

  I headed away from the river with Nathan following behind. I pushed my damaged body to move quickly. I told myself that it was because I wanted to be settled before night fell, but I knew the real reason was that I wanted to put as much distance as I could between myself and Andy.

  CHAPTER 2

  Nathan

  Sarah was an enigma. She was everything I hated and everything that I respected all rolled into one. I couldn’t get my head around her. She was a bounty hunter. Her job was to bring people to their absolute deaths if they weren’t willing to play ball with the government. I’d always though
t that bounty hunters were cold and heartless. How could they not be?

  Sarah wasn’t, though. She’d proven that to me on several occasions. She’d had the chance to take the whole camp, but she hadn’t. She’d risked herself to swap Natasha for me. She’d killed one of her friends to protect Natasha and the rest of the camp. How could I deny that she had a heart? How could I deny that Sarah was clearly a feeling, living, breathing girl?

  I stumbled forward. Even hurt as she was, Sarah was walking much quicker than me. She was used to the terrain. I could tell from her delicate step that barely caused a creak from the litter of twigs and leaves on the ground. I was sure that she could hear my heavy footsteps, though. I was just trying not to fall, as I practically jogged to keep up with her.

  Her hips swayed when she walked. I noticed the gentle rhythm, as I let my mind drift. Her perky ass bounced with her steps too. I found my eyes almost glued to the up and down motion of it, as my legs burned. She stopped suddenly and I found my cheeks burning red, as she turned back to look at me. Had she felt my eyes on her? Did she know where I’d just been looking?

  “What’s up?” I asked, trying to take control of the situation.

  She shook her head. “I thought I heard something,” she whispered to me and her voice was barely audible, even in the silence.

  I turned my attention to the surroundings. She was right. I could hear the not so distant sound of branches being broken under foot. “It’s not human,” she continued.

  I could see her hand reaching down into her waistline as the sound got closer to us. The slight gleam of metal told me that she had pulled out her gun, but I kept my eyes focused on the direction that the noise was coming from. I could feel my heart rate starting to get faster. The bushes to my left started to rustle and I turned quickly, not knowing what to expect.

  I laughed in relief, as a deer broke its way through the branches of the bush. It stopped and looked at us curiously. I stepped forward with my hand stretched out. I thought perhaps the deer might be tame, but when I took a step forward it quickly pelted off.

  “I’ve never seen a deer in real life before,” I told Sarah as I turned to face her.

  She frowned at me. “You lived in the woods?” Her question was full of a rose tinted innocence, which relit previous fears I’d had about her father actually being released.

  “There haven’t been any woodland creatures for a very long time. The government thought that if they eliminated all the wild animals, then they’d be able to starve the resistance out of the woods. I’d heard stories about the jungle though. I’d heard that it was like an ark of animals, just waiting to be reintroduced to the rest of the world.”

  She looked confused. She looked as though everything I’d just told her went against everything she had ever been taught. “That’s not what happened,” she said eventually. “The animals were almost extinct before the government took over; they’ve been introducing re-population programs all over.” She sounded sure, but her eyes gave away the prickling feeling of doubt she was starting to feel.

  I didn’t know what to say to her. She had no real idea about what was happening in the world around her. I didn’t blame her. She’d been raised by The City of Hope. How was she to know any different?

  “We should probably set up camp,” I settled on after a while. I glanced up at the sky, which was dark overhead.

  She nodded. I could see clouds of thoughts brimming in her eyes, but I didn’t force her to vocalize them. She had to work out what was going on, on her own. She had to figure things out for herself, if she was ever going to truly believe them.

  We walked for another half hour or so, before I saw tall, looming shadows in front of us. The trees had started to thin out and the pale moonlight marked the path as we approached what looked like an old village. I couldn’t see much, even with the moonlight, but I could tell that there were at least five cottages, all in different stages of becoming derelict.

  “We’ll stay here tonight,” Sarah said. She pushed open a cottage door and waited for me to walk in. “We’ll be safe here. I’m pretty sure even the guards don’t know about this place. We're well away from their normal patrol areas.”

  I wondered how she knew about it. I thought about a much younger version of Sarah, a trainee bounty hunter, stalking something through this area of the forest and stumbling into this ruin one bright and sunny day. I could almost feel her excitement as she realized she had somewhere she could hide away from all the troubles which had been placed on her shoulders way too early.

  The cottage that she’d chosen wasn’t too bad. The walls had started to crumble, but the roof was solid and the ground was dry. The door groaned against the otherwise silent space around us as she pushed it closed and walked into the dark room.

  “We’re only a day away from The City of Hope, so we should set off early tomorrow.” She sat down on the floor and started to pull her bag away from her shoulder. “Are you hungry?”

  CHAPTER 3

  Sarah

  The wind was howling through the empty window panes where long-gone glass would once have held it back. I was tired. I could feel every bone in my body aching. The hard stone floor beneath me actually felt comfortable, but I forced myself to stay awake. I would only have one more night with him. I would only get one more night and I wanted to take advantage of the time we had left together.

  “What were your camp doing?” I asked, when Nathan had pulled the blanket I’d given to him close to his chest.

  “What do you mean?” he gave me an inquisitive look.

  “Well, what were you all hoping to accomplish?” I felt as though my question before had been pretty self-explanatory.

  He chuckled, but the expression on his face was dark instead of at ease. He shifted forward and the soft moonlight fell onto the side of his face, causing the other side to fall into shadow. He looked me right in the eye. I could tell that he wanted me to take what he had to say seriously.

  “Before the last resistance we were working on a way to turn off the chips. We thought that way the people would be free to make their own choices, and that perhaps we’d gain enough support to defeat The City of Hope once and for all.”

  I knew about the resistance. It was something that The City of Hope didn’t shy away from talking about. Both the city and the outcasts had suffered greatly in the fight. The city had won, though. Their numbers had been great compared to those opposing them. The fight had had a clear winner before it had even begun, and the city government made sure that nobody would forget that.

  “So, after the resistance your camp stopped working on it? Why did they even take part in the resistance if they knew their numbers weren’t big enough? It doesn’t make sense.”

  The dark look was still on Nathan’s face. He had deep lines pulling his eyebrows together and his eyes were cold and hard. “They had no choice. Someone betrayed the old worlders. Someone told the city what we were doing and they attacked. All we could do was fight back. I lost my mother in the fight, but Natasha,” he paused and his head shook softly. “Natasha lost everyone. She lost her mom, her dad and both of her brothers.”

  It was hard to believe that the resistance had left such scar on his life. “The city says that you attacked them first,” I said, as I thought about the official account.

  Nathan laughed again. This time, though, I could hear the bitterness that matched up to the angry, shadowed face that he was wearing. “Well, I guess you can’t believe everything that you hear,” he said. “We didn’t just give up, anyway. Folks, including Natasha, have been working on it in secret. She’s got pretty close too. She was telling me about it the night that you took her.”

  “Why was she working on it in secret? I thought that all of the old worlders wanted to disarm the chips?”

  “They did, before the resistance. Now, most old worlders just want to survive. They’re too afraid to fight back against the city. They’re too afraid to do anything about the crappy situation they�
�re in. Natasha is one of the few who’s been willing to do something, to keep on fighting against them.”

  “What about you?” I asked. Our eyes met across the darkness. I could see a stutter of conflict within them, before he shook his head and broke the connection.

  “I was doing what the rest of them were. I was just trying to survive.” He sounded ashamed of himself. His eyes were fixed on the floor and I could see his shoulders starting to slump. “It’s why I didn’t think twice about making the swap with Natasha. I mean, sure she’s like a sister to me and I love her, but she’s so much more than that. She’s the only hope we have at living in a free world. I’m nothing. I’ll never be anything. I don’t matter.”

  “You matter to me,” I said, before I could stop myself. I could feel my cheeks burning as he looked up at me. His eyes were full of pleasant surprise.

  I shifted my gaze away from him. “I meant because you’re going to be the reason my father walks free,” I said quickly in the hopes that he wouldn’t read too deeply into the words I’d previously said.

  He nodded. “I’m glad that I can help you with that,” he said and a tired smile spread across his face. “I guess you could say that you’ve given my life meaning,” he joked.

  I laughed a little awkwardly. I knew that he hadn’t bought my explanation. I knew that he could sense the deep discomfort I was feeling over revealing how I really felt about him. I tried to shake off the moment. I couldn’t focus on how I felt. I couldn’t focus on the fact that when his face had darkened I’d wanted to kiss the shadows away.

  I had one more day with him. I had one more night and then it was over. I would be taking him through the city’s gates and I would never see him again. I’d known that this would be the case. It had always been the case. There had been no sudden change of plan.

  But yet, a sudden feeling of dread came over me. I didn’t want to hand him over. I didn’t want to lose him forever.