AllFreeNovel
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Seventeen. She was seventeen when they killed her. Starved to death in the cult Mom and Dad dragged us into.
Gaia would provide, we were told.
Gaia was all we needed.
Gaia would save the world.
Turns out, Gaia isn't too big on calories. Protein. Fat. Nutrients. No amount of sacrifice and prayer to Gaia kept basic biology going.
And my sister starved to death.
I was fourteen.
Debbie knows all this. Picked me for this job specifically because of it.
She was the one who brought down Gaia.
I never wanted to know I was part of a group that was so full of shit, so full of lies.
But I was. So is this Viking Virgin group.
And we're going to find them.
Save them.
Or die trying.
You try unlearning everything you know about life, your parents, yourself, your whole world view. Imagine being told up is down and black is white your whole life, and being surrounded by people who said the same thing. Not one, single person in your entire life believed anything other than what your leader told you to believe.
The cost of truth would have been death.
How would it feel to have it all fall apart? To realize nothing you knew was true?
I know how it felt.
How it feels.
Because that was me, seventeen years ago.
Twelve years ago, I went to jail for breaking into the old compound where I spent most of my childhood, desperate to find records that I could take to the media and expose the program for all they really were. My parents were set up by Gaia, made to look like religious loonies who killed their daughter through neglect, when that couldn't be further from the truth.
The only mistake my parents made was letting Gaia leaders brainwash them.
First, it cost them their daughter's life.
And then it cost them their freedom.
At nineteen, I was naive and stupid, too convinced of my own cunning to realize my emotions would be my weakness. Once I broke into the Gaia offices, I knew enough about hacking to get the files I wanted on a thumb drive but didn't think through the more standard security systems they'd have in place.
The electronic ones I'd easily disabled.
Didn't realize they'd added pit bulls.
No amount of code can disable those.
After being charged and convicted for breaking and entering, and theft, I spent two years in prison, hard baking but keeping my nose clean. The scars on my legs from the dog bites? Those healed, eventually.
The scars on my psyche and heart?
