Entanglement (YA Dystopian Romance) - By Dan Rix Page 0,41
gaped, petrified, down the length of the man’s finger as it bored into him like a spotlight.
Clive shifted again. He edged closer, his arms flexed.
But Aaron wasn’t about to be taken by a cult in a dark warehouse and paraded as a freak.
A dozen seats. A dozen grown men. Aaron stood, and his chair toppled backwards. He balled his fists, ready to fight, as Casler spoke.
SEVEN
2 Days, 11 hours, 11 minutes
“I would like to present my son, Clive Selavio . . . ” He saw that Aaron had stood and trailed off.
Aaron froze. Slowly, he stared around the warehouse at a hundred puzzled faces, and the thumping of his heart echoed, as if amplified over a loudspeaker. He faced the podium again, Casler—and they stared at each other in shock across three rows of blood red hoods.
Clive grabbed his cloak and tried to yank him back down. “Aaron,” he spat. “Sit down! You’re ruining it!”
Aaron no longer had a choice. He plowed toward the aisle, shoved aside knees, and stumbled. Clive grabbed his cloak and it ripped off his shoulders. Without it he felt naked, exposed, with only jeans and a T-shirt protecting him from a hundred pairs of gleaming eyes. He kept going, vaguely aware of someone rising behind him—and acutely aware of Casler’s gaze drilling into the back of his skull.
Finally, he lunged through the door and stumbled into the night. A moment later, Dominic ran onto the field after him.
“Number eleven, you can’t just leave!” he yelled.
“Yeah—” Aaron spun, and his face burned with sweat. “Then stab me.”
“This is a big moment for Clive. You walk out on him, you walk out on Dr. Selavio, you walk out on us,” said Dominic.
“Can I throw a ‘fuck you’ in there too?”
Dominic just raised his eyebrows, then shook his head. “That’s a big mistake, number eleven.”
Aaron marched toward the street.
“A very big mistake,” Dominic muttered, before slipping back into the warehouse.
Aaron walked under the blotted out moon, between dark, hungry-looking Cadillacs.
He had gotten it so wrong.
No shit the date in the article matched his birthday; March thirtieth was Clive’s birthday too. Dr. Selavio had tested the device on his own son, not on Aaron . . . and, according to his speech, cured him of half death. A chill crept up Aaron’s spine.
He was now outside the warehouse, missing the crucial truth—and in fifty-nine hours, he was due at the Chamber of Halves. Aaron reached the road and began to jog, then to sprint. Anything to burn off his adrenaline. The orange streetlights swam overhead, and a humid wind whipped his hair. He passed parked cars for several hundred feet, then his thighs gave out and he keeled over, gasping for breath.
A boy who had no half, Dr. Selavio had said—no doubt just rhetoric to play up his cure for half death. Because it didn’t make any sense. Or did it? Technically, children were born halfless all the time. Those babies were always stillborn, though—
Aaron jolted upright, distracted by the car parked next to him. There was someone in the passenger seat.
He approached the window, heart pounding. But it was too dark to see. He leaned closer, pressed his forehead to the glass, and waited while his eyes adjusted. When they did, he jerked his head back.
For several agonizing seconds, a woman peered at him blankly through the glass, emotionless, her gaze eerily vacant. Aaron returned her stare, fighting the urge to look away—until he realized there was nothing staring at him. There was nothing behind the woman’s eyes, no spirit, no life, only a lonely cavity where a person should have been. A hole.
And Aaron understood the hideousness of juvengamy.
The woman’s half was in the meeting, whom she had joined with as an infant. After juvengamy, most of the clairvoyance linking their bodies he had come to possess. Hardly anything was left inside her. She was a shell, his slave, and he her master.
***
After school the next day, Aaron staggered out of Health class into a humid Thursday afternoon, still haunted by the woman’s ghostly eyes.
People said the discovery of halves had cured humanity of all that . . . The atrocities of war, slavery, crimes against humanity. Now there was a whole new kind of genocide.
Juvengamy.
It was the sacrifice demanded of all the Brotherhood’s members. Now he understood why it was so illegal.
But worst of all, Amber’s father was an honored member like Casler, of pure juvengamy blood and close to the potentate.