Render

by K A Riley

  RENDER

  THE RESISTANCE TRILOGY, BOOK TWO

  K A RILEY

  To my spouse, my partner, my best friend, my lover, my rock, and my wings: thank you for being so many magnificent people all in one!

  “We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. In times of tragedy, of war, of necessity, people do amazing things. The human capacity for survival and renewal is awesome.”

  — Isabel Allende

  “The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge.”

  — Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act 3, scene 2)

  Contents

  Also by K A Riley

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Coming Soon!

  Also by K A Riley

  Also by K A Riley

  For updates on upcoming release dates, opportunities to read for free, exclusive excerpts from upcoming books and more:

  K. A. Riley’s Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dsihB1

  Resistance Series:

  Recruitment

  Render

  Rebellion (Coming Soon!)

  Athena’s Law Series:

  Book One: Rise of the Inciters

  Book Two: Into an Unholy Land

  Prologue

  I don’t know how long it’s been since the six of us escaped from the Processor.

  We’ve been on the run from Hiller’s soldiers for three or four weeks. Maybe more. It’s hard to say, since the sun seems to come and go at will. We get our bearings by shadows and daylight when we can, and we go by our guts when we can’t.

  When we first discovered that the Eastern Order was a phantom, a fabrication created by our own government, the six of us lost all sense of purpose and our very reason for being. In the space of a few minutes, we went from lives of certainty to lives of pure chaos.

  It wasn’t only the revelation about the Order that hit hard, though. Before she took her own life, Hiller said to Brohn, Amaranthine and me, “You’re the ones whose abilities were beyond our control. Amaranthine’s techno-sensitivity. Kress’s telepathy…And you, Brohn…well, you haven’t even begun to discover your power yet.”

  You’d think that being on the run for weeks would give someone a lot of time to contemplate what it all means. But not me. I’m still too freaked out to accept that I might really be some kind of telepathic raven-whisperer. Brohn says he doesn’t feel any different from before, although I suspect he’s just masking his fear of what’s coming, trying to be strong for all our sakes.

  Amaranthine, or Manthy as we call her, barely talks to us on her best days, so it’s as difficult as ever to know what’s going on inside her head.

  When we first escaped, the three of us agreed not to say anything to Cardyn, Kella, or Rain. Over time, though, we slowly broke down and told them everything we discovered up in the Halo, everything Hiller told us about ourselves. We’re a family after all, and families aren’t supposed to keep things from each other. Once we revealed our secret, Cardyn told us he was impressed. Rain seemed jealous. Kella didn’t care one way or the other. She doesn’t care about much these days.

  Those were difficult conversations. How do you tell someone you’ve known all your life that you might have some kind of super power, and that your potential abilities are the reason the government kidnapped you and pretty much everyone you’ve ever known?

  The worst part, though, is knowing that our abilities are the reason two of our best friends are dead. There used to be eight of us. We lost Terk and Karmine to the very people we thought we were being trained to help.

  Losing them carved a massive hole in each of us. It’s a void nothing can fill. Even when we didn’t have anything, we always had each other. Now our Conspiracy of eight is down to six—seven, if you count Render, the jet-black raven who’s been my friend and constant companion since I was six years old.

  Thanks to our time in the Processor, any shred of innocence we had left is gone. Every trace of trust has been ripped away. Without Terk and Karmine, we can never go back to what we used to be. We’ve lost too much.

  Life on the run has meant a constant feeling of dread about what happens if we’re caught and recaptured—and just as much dread about what happens if we aren’t. We stay out of sight as much as we can. Every once in a while, when we need a respite from the woods, we’re forced to follow the endless abandoned highway that takes us through an oppressive red desert. We keep going, hoping we can find a friendly town before we starve to death or, even worse, before Hiller’s soldiers track us down and kill us themselves.

  Until we get our bearings, we can’t hope to get any more answers. And without answers, we don’t have any hope.

  We’re heading west. That’s about all we know. We’re pretty sure it’s the direction of the Valta, the direction we came from. The direction of home.

  1

  Over the last several weeks, we’ve passed a few small towns. At least, what used to be towns. Now, they’re nothing but smoldering, heartbreaking lumps of fused black carbon.

  In the single bombed-out town that’s not too hot to approach, we do our best to wander through the cluttered and cratered laneways that are all that remain of the roads. We kick aside smoking debris of buildings and businesses. There are no supplies and nothing lying around we can make use of. The damage here is devastating. It is also complete. We’re not sure who did this, but whoever it was, they weren’t looking to send a message or win a war. This was total and uncompromising annihilation.

  While the others wander off, I find myself frozen in place, staring at the wreckage as Render soars overhead, appraising the totality of the ruins. I close my eyes to study the scene below through the raven’s mind. My gut clenches when all I take in is the horror of nothingness. Molten steel. Remnants of homes. Contorted skeletal remains of human beings burnt beyond all recognition.

  “We’d better move on,” I announce to the others in a quivering voice when I’ve seen all I can stand. “There’s nothing for us here.”

  “You okay?” Brohn asks, sidling up next to me and laying a gentle hand on the small of my back. I look up into his eyes to see the same emotions in his face that are eating away at me. Fear. Hopelessness. Sadness. He may not have looked through Render’s eyes, but he knows what’s out there just as well as I do.

  I’m grateful for him. Grateful that he keeps me warm at night. That he checks in on me when he sees me go into silent moments of mourning. Grateful that he understands when I need space and when I need companionship. He’s not my boyfriend, not exactly. I can’t even imagine that such a word exists in a world like this. But he’s my shelter. He’s my protector. He’s the most important person in the world to me right now, because he’s one of the few people who understands me.

  “I’ll be fine,” I tell him. “There’s just so much…nothing. It’s hard to take.”

  “I know,” he replies, his voice barely more than a whisper. I know what’s going through his mind right now, because it’s the same thing that’s in mine.

  “The good news,” I sigh, “is that I don’t feel totally lost. Not as
long as we have a general sense of direction and a specific sense of purpose. There are only two things I really care about right now.”

  Brohn nods. “Getting home and getting revenge,” he says. “If we can just find the right road to the right mountain, and actually find our way back to the Valta…” he adds, but he doesn’t finish the thought. We all know the chances of finding our way are low. But the stakes are high. We need to warn the friends we left behind about the danger they’re in.

  If it’s not already too late, that is.

  “Let’s go,” I say, taking his hand and squeezing before letting it go. I try not to flaunt our tenuous relationship in front of the others. It seems cruel, given that everyone in our group is alone. The last thing I want is to be a cause of more pain for anyone in our Conspiracy.

  “Where is everyone?” Rain asks as we climb our way out of the black and blistered crater of a town and return to our endless march. “I don’t get it. If there’s no enemy, where are all the people? What happened here?”

  “Just because there’s no enemy doesn’t mean there’s no war,” I remind her. “Besides, we don’t know there’s no enemy. All we know is what Hiller told us, and she’s not—I mean wasn’t—the most reliable source of information.”

  Rain knows all this. Still, she’s right to ask. Growing up, all we knew of the outside world was that our nation was engaged in a desperate fight against the invading Eastern Order, a ruthless army of cold-blooded killers. Now it turns out the world is empty, the enemy we thought we knew is an invention, and the war itself might be a lie. There is more going on here than Hiller admitted to. Every trail, road, and highway we walk is abandoned. There are no civilian mag-transports. No rumble of military convoys. Not even any spy-and-assault drones flying overhead. Nothing.

  “No one around means no one to attack us,” Manthy mutters, nodding in quiet agreement with herself.

  “No one around also means no help,” Rain says.

  “Great,” Cardyn adds with a dramatic eye-roll. “Lost and alone. Probably the two worst things anyone can be.”

  Brohn shakes his head. “I can think of a few things worse than that.” We all know he’s talking about Terk and Karmine.

  Brohn and Karmine were rivals. But they were also friends who had come to rely on each other as we endured months of intense military and psychological training at the hands of the Recruiters. Brohn also had a special relationship with Terk, our gentle giant of a friend. From the day we were loaded into the back of the Recruiters’ truck, Brohn’s natural leadership abilities and Terk’s intimidating size combined to form a wall around the rest of us, a wall we figured would keep us all safe for a long time.

  Three months later, Karmine and Terk were both dead, and the rest of us were on the run from an enemy we never saw coming.

  I watch from behind as Brohn puts a hand on Cardyn’s shoulder. “Besides, we’re not alone. We have each other.”

  “He’s right,” I say. “We’re all we have left, but at least that’s something to be grateful for.” Then again, we’re all we’ve ever had. Whether we were secluded in the Valta or locked away in the Processor, we always found a way to survive as a group.

  For the past ten years, the Recruiters showed up in the Valta every November 1st like clockwork. They gathered up the new Seventeens, leaving everyone else to wait and wonder for another year. We spent every one of those years terrified about what the war and the outside world looked like. The viz-screens showed us cities on fire and our military in motion. We saw the enemy, the dreaded Eastern Order, commit every atrocity imaginable. They flew bomb-carrying drones into buildings, shot up schools, ransacked cities, attacked women and children on the streets, and spread through our nation like the worst kind of virus. They were ruthless, evil, and completely unstoppable.

  As it turns out, they may have also been non-existent.

  When it was my Cohort’s turn to be recruited, things went slanted, and we found answers to many of our questions and to a host of others we never even thought to ask. Now, the big dilemma is whether it was better being tricked or being disillusioned.

  With no answer to that one yet, our only goal is to get back home, share what we’ve learned with those who still live in the Valta, and strategize about how to survive going forward.

  As we trudge along, Rain says, “I wonder what we’ll find if we ever make it home.”

  It’s a question we’ve speculated about a few times, but one that fills us with dread. I find myself looking over at Brohn, whose body tightens under the weight of the possibilities. He’s the one with the most at stake in this journey of ours. My father and brother both disappeared ages ago, so I have no family left back home. No one does except for Brohn, whose sister Wisp had to stay behind when we were taken.

  As we walk along, we debate the possibilities, partly as a way to pass the time, partly as a way to remind ourselves of everything that used to be in the days before the Recruitment.

  “It’ll probably look exactly like it did when we left,” Cardyn says. “Shoshone High with its leaky roof. A bunch of caved-in buildings for the kids to run around in.”

  “Gardens,” I add, recalling our attempts to cultivate vegetables. I miss the things that grew. I miss the greenness of the mountainside, the freshness of the air. Right now, it feels like we’re in a wasteland, like the home we once knew is little more than a dream, a figment of our collective imagination.

  As if listening in and agreeing with me, Render lets out a loud kraa! from somewhere overhead, which makes a few of us chuckle. There’s something reassuring about his presence. Having a flying sentinel along on our trek makes us feel protected. We know he’ll warn us of any potential trouble. He might even find a way to guide us in the right direction if we stray from the path.

  As we walk and speculate about our uncertain future, we veer from joyful optimism to moments of total terror with a bunch of uncertainty sprinkled in. We talk about old times, the war, and about our months of being trained, tortured, and tricked by Hiller and her army of evil liars. It’s an embarrassing and infuriating subject, but it’s one we can’t seem to avoid talking about. Anything to take our minds off our blistered feet and empty bellies.

  Since our escape, we’ve come close to exhausting the meager supplies we were able to find back in the Eta Cube of the Processor. We’ve been stretching everything out as long as we can. The three small meal-replacement bars lasted nearly a week, but that was only after we split them up into pieces not much bigger than crumbs. A bag of protein flakes got us through another week. The salt tablets went fast, along with the iodine pills Rain said might help with water purification along the way. We divided up four palm-sized packages of crackers and spread out three bottles of a meal-replacement drink over a period of another week.

  Brohn’s expertise in hunting and trapping has saved us from crippling hunger a few times. Using one of the knives he swiped from our old training facility, he was able to rig a small trap that caught two skimpy squirrels, which he skinned and then cooked over a homemade fire. We supplemented that with anything remotely edible we could scavenge in the thin stretches of desolate woods scattered between expanses of dried-out land. At one point, we got lucky and stumbled across a trove of wax currants and holly grapes, which I remembered were safe to eat even though Rain had her doubts.

  “I’m sure there was something toxic in those,” Rain said.

  “It’s called ‘berberine,’” I reminded her. “It’s only dangerous to newborns and pregnant women. I think we’ll be okay.”

  “I don’t know how you remember that,” she said with a sideways glance in my direction. “Ria taught us those lessons about edible plants years ago. We couldn’t have been more than nine or ten at the time.”

  “I don’t know how I know either,” I replied. “I just do.”

  Rain relented, and we wound up getting a nice energy boost, enough to keep us going for one more day.

  I wasn’t lying when I told her I was
n’t sure how I remembered the stuff about the berries. The truth is, I still don’t quite understand what’s happened to my memory over the past few months. It’s like my brain took a video-capture of every moment of my life, and I’m only now learning how to press play, zoom in, and have a look around.

  I didn’t mention to Rain that I could remember everything about Ria, the Sixteen who taught us about the vegetation around the Valta. And I do mean that I remembered everything: Every item of clothing she ever wore. The way she moved. The spectrum of browns—chestnut, auburn, copper—in her hair. The cadence of her voice. The scar on her temple. The unevenness of her eyebrows. The sparkle of green in the irises of her eyes. Even the pattern of lines on the palms of her hands. Ria took us on a whole bunch of field trips in the woods around our isolated mountain town. She showed us Kinnikinnick, Rabbitbrush, Holly Grape, and a dozen other plants and explained all about their uses and chemical compositions. Her mother was a botanist and one of the last adults to die in the drone attacks.

  All this I remember now, even though if someone had asked me about it a few months ago, I couldn’t have begun to tell them any of it.

  I haven’t been able to bring myself to tell Rain and the others what’s happening to me. I already feel like a freak because of what Hiller said about my telepathic connection with Render. I’d always attributed our link to the implants—the “tattoos” as everyone calls them—that my father gave me when I was younger. But according to Hiller, my abilities go far beyond a few microchips. There’s an actual connection with Render, as if we’re linked in a way that can’t be severed by a break in the technology.