FREE SAMPLE (Ch.1)

My world ended when I saw Philadelphia in the back of the van, cuffed and unconscious.

It was noon when I got the call for two emergency pickups. This was nothing unusual—it was my job, after all. That’s why I ran a takeout-only pizza shop. The frequent deliveries were the perfect cover for transporting people who had gotten themselves on the United’s bad side.

Cea—or Ceasar, as I knew her—was the one to make the call. I’d been in contact with her off and on over the past few months. She’d been stirring the waters, making a name for herself and figuring out who her friends were, so I knew it was only a matter of time before she needed a pizza.

What I didn’t know was that she and I had a history together.

Jayde, our mutual contact, wasn’t forthcoming with this information either. Jayde was my first connection with the underground, and we’d worked together enough that we might almost call each other friends. My shop was the closest pickup and dropoff point to the office were Jayde worked. And since Jayde was a guard for a high military official, he was involved in plenty of shenanigans that required pizza delivery.

I hadn’t shared a lot of my past with Jayde, but he knew enough to realize that Cea and I had come from the same unassimilated concentration camp. You’d think he would have put two and two together and had the decency to give me a head’s up that I might actually know the people he was depositing on my doorstep.

Instead, I was wholly unprepared when he opened the back of the van and I saw Philadelphia lying there.

I recognized her instantly, even though she was blindfolded. Her long brown hair pooled around her head like spilled coffee. She wore her favorite outfit—a khaki skirt and gray jacket with leggings and combat boots. It was the same outfit she’d been wearing when I saw her last, the day I left camp for good.

Take their offer while you still can, Phil—take it and run.

The memory of her face—watery eyes begging me to turn around and change my mind—brought with it several other images I was unprepared to handle. My parents, the commander’s gun pointed at my chest, Mira, the callous goodbye note taped on our bathroom mirror—everything I had spent the last several months trying to bury came rushing back with all the requisite unwelcome emotions.

You denied Him.

Jayde was unappreciative of my existential crisis. “C’mon, man, we’ve gotta move!” He’d already uncuffed Cea and helped her down from the van.

I nodded, sweeping the emotions back into the corner of my mind. Jayde knelt next to Philadelphia and removed the cuffs, and I picked her up.

As her dead weight settled in my arms, I saw the dried tears on her face and was slammed with two unsettling realities:

One, she had been through hell.

Two, a lot had gone down since I’d left camp.

Jayde helped me get the girls into the bunker, then made himself scarce. The bunker was a concrete cellar under the shop’s basement and the one part of the building the government didn’t know existed. It was where all my deliveries waited until they could catch a ride somewhere else.

Somehow I had the feeling I couldn’t just load Philadelphia on the produce truck and ship her back out of my life.

I laid her out on a blanket in the corner of the bunker, then took care of Cea. I got her a first aid kit and water, and she gave me the rundown while she cleaned and bandaged her own wounds.

The short of it was that Philadelphia’s dad, Dr. Smyrna, had been summoned to Mars to work for Cea’s brother, Dr. Nic, and gotten tangled up in a weapons plot. Now the United wanted the project finished, and they had been holding Cea and Philadelphia hostage to blackmail the scientists into completing the weapon.

The long of it was that Philadelphia’s brother Ephesus, whom we all thought was dead, apparently wasn’t, and the project was a world-ending superweapon called “Red Rain,” and Philadelphia had blown up a lab and turned Nic over to the authorities, and now the United wanted the weapon for themselves, and Jayde’s boss, Director Thames Nolan, was overseeing the project.

Luckily for all involved, Cea knew how to order pizza.

None of this really surprised me, except maybe the part about Ephesus coming back to life and definitely the part about Philadelphia blowing up a lab by herself.

I watched her sleep from across the room and wondered if she was the same girl I had left behind.