Forged: An Altered Series Prequel Read Online Free Page A

wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or a bad one.
    As I lay on my back, trying to call the air into my lungs, I stared at the round overhead lights hanging from steel rods and enclosed in steel cages, and I wondered if that was me in some symbolic way. Hanging by a thread but trapped in a cage at the same time.
    Maybe I was delirious.
    “Get up,” Natalia said.
    I could hardly feel my legs, but I managed to roll over onto all fours and suck in a gulp of air. I was used to being kicked around, after all. I could do this. If it meant saving Anna, I could suffer through anything.
    “Hurry. No assailant will wait for you,” she reminded me, and I lumbered to my feet.
    “Who would be assailing me?” I asked as her fisted hand landed a punch to my lower jaw, sending a shock wave of dull pain through every tooth root.
    I was on the mat. Again.
    “It’s not your job to identify your attacker.” Natalia appeared overhead, blocking out the lights. For a second, I thought I’d gone blind and dumb. “It’s your job to identify danger first, risk second. You should be able to predict where they’ll move and how they will attack by their body language alone. Everything else is a distraction.”
    “Okay,” was all I said, and we started again.
    She went easy on me after that. Her movements were slower. She gave me instruction as we grappled: “Put your hand here,” “Swing from here,” and, “If you twist this way, you’ll get more leverage.”
    We did that forever. I had no idea how long exactly. We were in a gym below ground, so there were no windows to mark the daylight. There were no clocks, either. Natalia had strapped on a watch when we first came down here, but I was too proud to ask her what time it was.
    I worried I’d run out of energy before we were even halfway through the session, but I somehow managed to keep going. And just when I thought I might die before Natalia called an end to the training, Connor showed up.
    Sweat had soaked through every dry patch of my clothing by that point, so I’d stripped off my shirt and now wore only the sweatpants and a black sports bra. My mascara had all but melted off and smudged beneath my eyes. Several hunks of hair had come loose from my ponytail and were now glued to my forehead and the back of my neck.
    Still, I felt Connor’s eyes trailing the curves of my body. “Is she done?” he asked Natalia.
    “I guess.”
    He slid his hands into his pants pockets. “She either is or she isn’t.”
    Natalia crossed her arms over her chest and let her high ponytail swing to the side as she cocked her head and narrowed her eyes at Connor. I could feel the ice crystals forming between the two of them.
    “She is,” she answered, and marched out of the room.
    Connor finally turned to address me. “I apologize if my sister was hard on you.”
    I frowned. “Natalia is your sister?”
    He nodded. “Half, actually. But that rarely matters when you share a mother. It’s sharing a father that makes it different.”
    “She wasn’t hard on me,” I said after a beat. “Though I’m not sure I’m as athletically trained as she is. I had trouble keeping up.”
    He laughed. “No one is as athletically trained as she is. She was almost an Olympic gymnast at sixteen, then decided the event trivialized the sport. She’s a tough girl to get ahead of. On anything.”
    “I can see that.”
    I grabbed the bottle of water Natalia had given me an hour ago and drained the rest of it, crumpling the plastic when I was finished. “So now what?” Inside, I prayed the training was over. I didn’t have anything left to give.
    “Now you eat something and go to bed, and you do it again tomorrow.”
    “Until when?” I called, following him out of the gym. “When are you going to tell me what I’m doing here? What’s the point of all this?”
    “When you’re ready,” he answered, and disappeared down the hall.
    *  *  *
    Connor wasn’t lying about the training. I trained