Authors: Lisa M. Stasse
The Forsaken (2 page)
For Alex McAulay
Contents
Chapter 1: The United Northern Alliance
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.
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.
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.
