Page 21

MARA

I couldn’t believe how much had changed.

Twenty-seven days.

From when my brother died to me waking up back at Castle Calvernon, almost a month had passed. And in that time, the world had turned upside down.

After texting somebody that I was awake, Edith filled me in on how the world had gone crazy.

For starters, the war had officially begun.

Our attack on Telvia—which was intended as a diversion so my team could get behind enemy lines to destroy the nanotech—became the catalyst that started it all.

NIT-V2 was fully operational, and every captured Dissenter or Northern soldier was being retrofitted.

Raúl’s army was growing stronger by the day, and his forces officially outnumbered our own, five to one.

The East, although still philosophically opposed to Raúl, feared the end of the war was near and that Telvia would come out victorious.

President Laurence, in an attempt to garner some semblance of mercy from Raúl, had backed out.

Their military packed up and rolled on home, fortifying themselves and claiming that they wanted to remain as neutral parties in the fray.

They were idiots. If Raúl conquered the North, there would be nothing standing in his way from demolishing the eastern region.

Charles, out of fear of losing control of the North, negotiated a peace treaty with the Telvian Council.

The terms were that the North had to pull out of the war and ally with Telvia.

Dissenter forces had to submit to Raúl or be kicked out of the North for good.

And, as a sign of good faith, Charles had agreed to hand me over to my parents.

Once I was delivered, Raúl would stop attacking Northern lands.

Together, he and Charles would work as a team to annihilate the Dissenters.

According to Edith, the whole thing was chaos.

Charles had given Sasha two days to move all of her Dissenter forces off Northern territory.

That wasn’t part of the negotiations with Raúl, but it seemed Charles wanted to give Sasha a fair chance.

And finally, Wes. Edith explained that she really didn’t know all the details.

Everyone was nervous to talk about it, and no one had the guts to ask him directly about what happened.

All she knew was one day she was saying goodbye to all her Dissenter friends—Matias included—and the next day she was hearing rumors that Charles had died.

General Bynes had been taken into custody, and Lieutenant General Krous had been promoted to her position.

Dissenters were informed they could stay, and the Northern military was ordered to reengage in the war efforts.

First in Command Gary Fisher had gone missing, and Marissa Calvernon, Wes’s mother, was appointed as the new First Commander.

There were a million questions, very few answers, and only two known facts.

The first was that Charles Calvernon was dead. He died the night he had beaten me within an inch of my life.

The second was that First Commander Gary Fisher did not assume control of the North as interim president as protocol would have dictated.

Wes did.

Wes was now President of the North .

I sat on my bed, feeling overwhelmed and restless as I sipped water. Everything was hitting me like a category-five tornado touching down. My brain cycled through time, recapping everything that had happened.

War had begun, and we were losing. Raúl’s plan of controlling the minds of the people was proving to be massively successful.

Edith also explained that our soldiers were reluctant to fight back against the Telvians.

It didn’t take long for them to begin recognizing Telvian soldiers as former comrades.

How can you kill the people you love—your best friend, your brother, your sister—when you know their mind isn’t their own? When you know they’re fighting for the enemy and have no choice?

This was the biggest problem everyone was facing right now.

While Raúl had no qualms killing us , our soldiers were hesitating to pull the trigger against them .

And who could blame them? Was I not in their same position less than four weeks ago?

Did I not hesitate to fight back against my brother because of who he was to me?

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair at all, and Raúl was playing on that too successfully.

Then there was Wes. I couldn’t believe he was now president—a role he had been running from his whole life. A role that wasn’t supposed to be his to begin with. And if it weren’t for me, he wouldn’t have had to carry the burden either.

It was my fault.

I interfered with an Enforcement officer who was beating a poor child for being out of his district.

And when the officer turned to hit me, Chase jumped in, ready to take the strike on my behalf.

When my father found out what happened, he demanded I tell him who was with me that day. And I…I gave up Chase’s name.

Never in a million years did I think Chase was going to be executed.

I thought he would be denied as my match or, at worst, demoted to a lower caste.

Never in my life did I think Chase would be burned alive.

Of course, at the time I didn’t know he was a Dissenter either.

And not just any Dissenter, but the future leader of a faction. And I didn’t know he was my promised.

Fast forward and here we were with Wes being forced to assume the position I knew he never wanted to take.

Because Wes detested the politics and always felt that he could never measure up to his brother.

He walked around living in his brother’s shadow, and his father reminded him regularly of how he was never good enough.

I knew what that felt like.

My life in Telvia had been nothing but abuse.

My father was the only one that showed any semblance of hope that I could shape up and be valuable somehow.

But my stepmother hated me. And she took out that hate with a whip that mercilessly cracked at the flesh of my back since childhood.

But I couldn’t blame Belinda, really. Raúl was unfaithful, and I was the product of that.

And to make matters worse, he didn’t just sleep with anyone.

He slept with a Dissenter . How could Belinda not hate me?

She was forced to raise her husband’s love child.

Wouldn’t that make you go a little crazy?

So I grew up hardly existing. Telvians kind of knew who I was, but I was this daughter that was hardly spoken of, and I lived in the shadow of the great First Son of Telvia, Jacob de la Puente.

Everything Jacob did was gold to my parents, except when he defended me.

Belinda couldn’t stand that, and it drove her insane.

I couldn’t believe this was where I was. To think that seven months ago, I was eagerly awaiting my eighteenth birthday in Telvia, to my current life as a Dissenter, recovering from nearly being beaten to death.

“Mara,” Edith hedged, pulling me out of my head. “What happened in Telvia? Why did you shoot us and take off with your brother?”

My jaw slackened. No one knew the truth of why Jacob and I betrayed them, and it was time for me to come clean. To come clean about everything , all the way to the beginning, when Sasha promised me to Wes. “It’s a little bit of a long story.”

She curled up on the bed next to me. “I’ve got time.”