Alenna Shawcross hasn’t seen her parents since they were dragged out of her house by government soldiers of the UNA, a new nation formed from the remnants of Canada, the USA, and Mexico. And now, as a sixteen-year-old orphan, she has failed a government personality test designed to diagnose subversive tendencies.
As punishment, Alenna is banished to the wheel, a mysterious island where all the kids who fail get sent. A place where the conditions are brutal, and a civil war rages between two very different tribes of teenagers.
So when Alenna meets Liam, a charismatic warrior who is planning to escape, she must find the strength to make a difficult decision: to either accept her new life on the wheel, or to embark on a journey that will uncover shocking secrets about the UNA—and her own identity as well.
is a digital librarian at UCLA.
The Forsaken is her first novel.
Jacket design by Lizzy Bromley
Jacket photograph copyright © 2012
by Dan Mountford
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Lisa M. Stasse
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Book design by Hilary Zarycky
The text for this book is set in Perpetua.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stasse, Lisa M.
The forsaken / Lisa M. Stasse.
p. cm.
Summary: After the formation of the United Northern Alliance—a merger of Canada, the United States, and Mexico into one nation—sixteen-year-old Alenna is sent to a desolate prison island for teenagers believed to be predisposed to violence.
ISBN 978-1-4424-3265-9
[1. Government, Resistance to—Fiction. 2. Fascism—Fiction. 3. Prisons—Fiction.
4. Survival—Fiction. 5. Science fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S7987Fo 2012
[E]—dc23
2011027270
ISBN 978-1-4424-3267-3 (eBook)
For Alex McAulay
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter 1: The United Northern Alliance
Chapter 2: Scanned
Chapter 3: Forsaken
Chapter 4: Gadya
Chapter 5: The Village
Chapter 6: The Night Raid
Chapter 7: The Interloper
Chapter 8: Tiger Strike
Chapter 9: The Captive
Chapter 10: Liam
Chapter 11: Battle Cry
Chapter 12: The Decision
Chapter 13: Exodus
Chapter 14: The Attack
Chapter 15: The Boundary
Chapter 16: Reckoning
Chapter 17: Faithless
Chapter 18: The Gray Zone
Chapter 19: Frozen
Chapter 20: The House of Ice
Chapter 21: Selected
Chapter 22: The Archive
Chapter 23: Escape
Chapter 24: Destiny Station
Chapter 25: Homecoming
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am hugely grateful to my agent, Mollie Glick, whose enthusiasm and inspiration made this novel a reality. Thanks also to Hannah Brown Gordon, Stéphanie Abou, and the entire team at Foundry Literary & Media.
My fantastic editor, Courtney Bongiolatti, helped shape this book every step of the way, and I’m so glad that she took a chance on me. Thanks also to Julia Maguire and everyone else at Simon & Schuster for their support.
Much thanks and love to my family for always believing in my dreams.
PROLOGUE
AT FIRST I THINK the hammering sound is the noise of waves crashing down on white sand. I’m dreaming I’m in Old Florida with my parents, before the government restricted all travel.
Then, as I start to wake, I realize the noise is something else. Something real. I pull a pillow over my head. But the hammering gets more insistent.
I finally realize that someone is banging on the front door of our apartment.
I wonder why my parents aren’t answering. Usually they’re awake late at night. But tonight, there’s no sign of them.
“Get the door already, jeez,” I mutter.
I am ten years old.
I have no idea that tonight I will become an orphan.
The door to my bedroom bursts open, letting in a blaze of light. My mom rushes inside, frantic.
“They’ve come for us!” she hisses. I hear distant guttural voices barking out orders.
I sit straight up, pushing the covers back, my blood turning to ice.
The military police are here.
“Hide! Hide!” my mom whispers harshly. She grabs my arm, hard enough to bruise it through my pajamas, and yanks me out of bed.
We’re halfway across my room when I hear a deafening crack. Our front door is beginning to splinter.
“Run!” my mom screams, pushing me into the hallway. I see my dad at the front door, desperately trying to barricade it with furniture.
There’s no time to hide. No time to reach the kitchen and the hollowed-out space in the wall behind the refrigerator.
The front door gives way. Armed police barge into our apartment, knocking the smashed door off its hinges, plowing the furniture out of the way.
My dad springs forward, tackling the first man who comes through the doorway. But another policeman strikes him in the mouth with his assault rifle. The police surround my dad and start beating him with nightsticks. All of them are wearing dark visors and black uniforms.
“Alenna!” my mom screams as policemen race toward her. “You’ll be okay!” But the look in her eyes says she knows the truth.
Our lives are over.
One of the policemen jabs my mom in the neck with an electric cattle prod. Her body seizes up. She goes crashing to the carpet.
“Mom!” I yell, rushing over.
My dad has already disappeared. Before I can reach my mom, officers grab her arms and start pulling her away too.
I cling to one of her ankles, but an officer smacks my knuckles with his nightstick. I fall back with a gasp. My mom gets dragged across the carpet, right out the front door. It’s over lightning fast.
I barely remember what happens next. It’s just fragments, like a nightmare. Policemen stand in the doorway, blocking it so I can’t run after my parents. There must be at least twenty of them crowding our apartment.
In numb shock, I walk back into my bedroom and crawl into bed. I pull the covers over my head, clutching my throbbing hand. Now that they’ve taken my parents, what’s going to happen to me? I want to fight back, but what can a ten-year-old do against the government? What can anyone do?
Moments later, someone walks into my bedroom. I curl up in a ball as the covers are peeled away.
When I look up, an old man in a dark suit is standing
over me, smiling warmly. Behind him, officers rummage through my father’s frayed notebooks, slipping them into evidence bags in the hall.
“Alenna Shawcross, you are now a ward of the United Northern Alliance,” the old man says gently. “Come with me, and our government will take care of you—despite the treasonous crimes of your parents.”
I want to scream at him for taking my mom and dad away. Hit him in the face and then run. But I’m so stunned that I do nothing. I just sit there and stare back at him.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says. “In fact, I’ll take you to your new home. Orphanage Forty-One in New Providence, about an hour down the Intercoastal Megaway.”
“Why can’t I stay here?” I ask, biting back tears.
“You’re too young to live on your own. Besides, there are lots of other girls your age at the orphanage.” He smiles again. “Hurry up and put some shoes on. A car is waiting for us downstairs.”
A few minutes later, he leads me out of the apartment and into the narrow halls of our building. I’ve lived here, on the thirty-sixth floor of Tower G-7 in New Boston, for most of my life. I know that our neighbors must have heard what happened, but all of their doors remain closed.
“Today is the start of your new life,” the old man tells me. He puts a comforting arm around my shoulders. “You’re safe now, Alenna.”
I nod. But I don’t feel safe.
And I can’t imagine ever feeling that way again.
THE UNITED NORTHERN ALLIANCE
SIX YEARS LATER
AS OUR BUS APPROACHES the Harka Museum of Re-education, I peer out the window at the soldiers standing out front in the sculpture gardens. The sculptures are just broken remnants, long ago smashed under combat boots. The flagpole flies our nation’s flag, an eye hovering over a globe branded with the letters UNA, the abbreviation used by everyone for the United Northern Alliance.
The driver parks on a circular driveway in front of the museum’s entrance, and I look up. Marble columns sweep fifty feet toward a pediment that still bears old scars from rebel mortar attacks.
There’s only one day left until I’m forced to take the Government Personality Profile Test—GPPT for short—which is why our class is on this field trip. The trip is meant to show us what happens to kids who fail the test.
A heavyset woman in a gray uniform stands up near the front of the bus as the door opens. It’s Ms. Baines, our Social Reconstruction teacher. She ushers our class out of the vehicle and into the hot sun. We stand on the asphalt, a diverse throng of kids. Everyone, rich or poor, orphan or not, goes through the same public school system in the UNA.
“This way, class,” Ms. Baines orders. We follow her up a wide stone staircase, toward the massive front door of the museum that beckons like a hungry mouth. Inside, it’s dark and cool.
The Harka Museum once held some of our state’s greatest works of art. Now, like most museums, it’s a shrine to our government and its leader, Minister Roland Harka. Instead of paintings, the walls display digital maps of the United Northern Alliance’s global conquests. Armies are rendered as colorful dots, and battles as pixelated cubes.
Being in this museum makes me think about our nation’s complicated history. At sixteen, I’m too young to remember what a real museum was even like. I only remember reading about them, before most books and digital media were withdrawn from circulation. That happened when I was eight, two years before my parents got taken, and just three years after the formation of the United Northern Alliance—a merger of Canada, the United States, and Mexico into one vast, chaotic nation.
From what my mom and dad told me, the citizens of those countries weren’t in favor of the alliance. But food was scarce after a global economic meltdown, and people were turning to violent crime. So the government leaders made the radical decision to create the UNA.
When angry citizens rebelled, military police used lethal force to stop the demonstrations. The demonstrations turned into riots, and then into total anarchy as people turned against their own government.
Every week our building would shake as a car bomb detonated somewhere, and I’d often fall asleep at night listening to the crack of gunfire. That was when Roland Harka, a charismatic four-star general, took office by force and appointed himself prime minster of the UNA. For life.
After that, everything changed. Minister Harka united the military by rewarding those who joined him with bribes, and imprisoning anyone who disobeyed. He imposed savage penalties for breaking laws and snatched away the freedoms everyone took for granted. All communication was restricted: no more cell phones, personal computers, or Internet access.
Anything that could encourage subversion of the government, or simply draw a crowd—like religious gatherings—was outright banned. Then the nation’s borders were permanently closed. According to Minister Harka, the entire country had to be united in isolation to achieve safety and prosperity.
He also mandated that all scientists immediately put their knowledge to use for the benefit of the government. For Minister Harka, technological supremacy became the key to conquering the globe, amassing plundered resources from other nations, and maintaining order at home.
“Move it, Alenna!” Ms. Baines suddenly snaps, breaking my reverie and shooing me along a corridor. I’m lagging behind my classmates. We’re heading toward a large display screen, thirty by fifty feet, hanging on a stone wall in the main gallery. This screen is the centerpiece of every Harka Museum. When I reach it, I jostle for position, looking up at the live digital feed.
There is a name for the place that we’re watching—Prison Island Alpha—but nobody dares say it out loud for fear it might jinx them. Some call it the Land Across the Water, or the Land Beyond. To others it is simply the Forgotten Place. I stare in fascination at the footage of stunted trees and verdant plains now flickering in front of me.
The kids who get sent to this island are the ones who fail the GPPT, a test that predicts a propensity for criminal activity years in advance. It’s administered to all high school students during the fall of their junior year, and can identify potential murderers, rapists, thieves, and psychopaths before they act on their impulses. Because of this test, crime has virtually been eliminated in the UNA.
The test isn’t something you can study for. It’s not even a test in the normal sense. No one asks you any questions. Instead a serum gets injected into your veins, and then computers scan your brain, looking for abnormalities.
The kids who are found to have aberrant personalities—ones that will lead them toward a life of crime and violence—are labeled “Unanchored Souls” by the government and shipped to the desolate prison island.
I continue to stare at the digital window into this harsh world, waiting for something to happen. On the grassy plain, between rows of crooked palm trees, stand the ruins of gigantic concrete buildings. Behind them is a massive stone spiral staircase, leading up into gray clouds that hang above the landscape.
A balding museum docent steps forward, speaking into a microphone. His reedy voice crackles to life in our government earpieces, the ones we have to wear each day from sunrise to sunset in our left ears. Sometimes the earpieces play classical music—like Wagner and Bruckner—other times, recordings of patriotic speeches delivered by Minister Harka.
We can’t control the earpieces, so I’ve learned to ignore mine. But today I’m listening. I want to hear what the docent has to say.
“When Prison Island Alpha was first populated, more than two thousand video cameras were placed inside. We thought that the island would develop its own civilization—like penal colonies have in the past. Most notably Australia in the 1800s.” The docent pauses. “Yet this never happened on Island Alpha. Instead, the savages who call it home destroyed most of our cameras. Only a few cameras remain, hidden in trees. We now rely on satellite imagery as our primary—”
“Can’t you drop more cameras in there?” a boy interrupts.
The docent shakes his head.
“The inmates use the raw materials for weapons.”
“Doesn’t the island get overcrowded?” another classmate asks. It’s Melissa O’Connor, a brunette with perfect hair and teeth, courtesy of her wealthy parents.
The docent looks over at her. He has probably fielded a million random questions from students like us. I wish I could come up with one he’s never heard before, just to stump him.
“Overpopulation’s not an issue,” he explains, “because life expectancy on Island Alpha is only eighteen years of age.”
The crowd burbles.
Eighteen.
I turn that number over in my mind. I wonder what it would feel like to have only two more years to live. My chest tightens.
I haven’t done any of the things I want to do with my life yet. I want to travel, but because of all the restrictions, I haven’t left New Providence in years. And I want to write music. I’ve been playing guitar since my dad started teaching me when I was six, and the guitar was bigger than me, but I’ve never played in public, only at home. And I haven’t even gone out on a date with a boy yet, let alone kissed one. For a sixteen-year-old, that’s pretty pathetic.
I realize for the first time what being sent to the island really means—the total annihilation of hope.
I peer back up at the image on the screen. I don’t see a single person. Just the desolate landscape, rotting under the sun. I wonder if the inhabitants are hiding.
“Can the prisoners escape?” a nearby girl asks the docent, sounding worried. “Build a boat and sail it back here?”
“Sometimes they try, but they always fail.”
“What a bunch of losers,” Melissa mutters. Her friends titter, but not me.
I guess I just feel bad for any kid who gets sent to this place, even if I know they deserve it. Maybe it’s because of what happened to my parents.
The Forsaken (Forsaken - Trilogy) Page 1
