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Some leader.
I can only grit my teeth and follow the big impressions in the red-black dirt. Hadrian doesn’t pause and he doesn’t falter, making me wonder what he and his kind must have faced for them to survive the perilous conditions on this planet. It had once been beautiful—a thriving, delicately balanced ecosystem more beautiful than any planet in our reachable universe. I’d seen enough pictures and video feeds in the brief times I was in history class to recall the beauty. It looked nothing like that oasis now. Only ruin and death as far as the eye could see. And yet, the morts are alive and well. At least they are now if Hadrian and Theron are to be believed.
“You all right back there?” Hadrian asks over his shoulder. The brilliant sun is reflecting off his mask, but I don’t need to see his face to know he’s smirking. The asshole.
“I’m…fine,” I puff out.
“Do you need to rest?”
“Didn’t I just say I was fine? Stop chattering or we’ll never make it to the ridge by nightfall.”
“Whatever you say.”
I resist the urge to throw him off a cliff.
It’s not until a short while later that I realize he’s purposefully slowed his pace for me to catch up. Damn him. I’m grateful for the reprieve, but I don’t want him to be so nice to me. It’s much too easy to like him that way.
“Why is this so hard for me?” I exclaim, when I can no longer go and need a break. Hadrian stops and turns to me. “I bet you could run out here and not be so winded.”
“I told you it wouldn’t be easy. Your lungs have to work harder to breathe the filtered air. If you’re not used to it, it can be very taxing on your body.”
“If it’s so dangerous out here, how are you used to it?” This is said between deep, unsteady breaths.
“We often have to hunt for food if we want to eat. There are also repairs that need to be made to the Facility on occasion and Breccan believes it is important for me to understand the terrain and our surroundings.”
“You look up to him a lot, huh?”
“He’s like a father to me. He raised me after my parents were killed by The Rades. I would have died without him.”
“And yet you love his mate.”
The soft expression on his face turns to a scowl behind his mask. “What is it with your obsession about how I feel about Aria? She is my family. That is all.”
I have a feeling if I had him hooked up to the truth-teller it’d be as red as the sun. “What do you do at the Facility?” I ask to change the subject.
“I am being trained as Breccan’s second-in-command.”
“Really?” I don’t bother to hide my shock. “But you’re so young!”
“You are a female, yet you’ve managed to wrest control of an entire complex from its overseers and free its prisoners.”
“Fair point.”
“Why did you?” he asks as I motion for him to walk again now that my breathing has returned to normal.
“Take over the prison?” The topic makes my stomach roll, but talking is better than focusing on my already aching muscles. At his nod, I say, “I knew the only way I could ever see Aria again would be to get myself sentenced to Exilium, which to people on Earth II is a fate worse than death. The prison began as an experiment, as you’re aware, to see if this planet was inhabitable. What you don’t know is we were the experiment. Scientists were sent to perform tests on the prisoners to see how compatible we were with the atmosphere here.”
Hadrian stops short. “Scientists?” he asks.
“That’s right. Real sadistic sonsofbitches. That or robotic, like we weren’t even human anymore. When we woke up here, it was awful. You can’t even imagine it. Exilium is a women’s prison—men are more valued on Earth II and here we were treated like dogs. Or worse. Zoe, Willow, and I formed a tight bond from the get-go and began organizing our revolt almost immediately. Honestly, I never intended to be their leader. Willow is the smart one and Zoe has the fire. I just did what I had to do to survive. To get back to Aria. Really all it was, was pure selfishness.”
Hadrian is silent for a long, long time. “What happened to these people, the guards and the scientists? Did you kill them?”
“Bloodthirsty, are we?” But he doesn’t laugh at my joke. “We locked them up in the cells where they used to keep us. They’re fed and clothed, but they’ll never be free again.”
“You’re more forgiving than I would have been. I would have ripped them apart.”
“Believe me, I wanted to. Zoe, too. Shocker there. But we’d had enough violence. We wanted peace. Most of the women are incredibly fragile. Like Stella. That’s why we can’t have you and Theron disrupting their lives and threatening to kidnap them and take them away. Most of the women are scared of their own shadows let alone monsters like you two. They deserve to hold onto whatever semblance of peace they have now, not be kidnapped and sent to a strange place where frightening aliens are eager to breed with them.”
