Stolen Read Online Free Page B

days. Two casinos had gone dark this month, one the month before. The big three remained—the Loss, the Apple, and Mark Antony’s Forum—along with a few others, but if the downslide continued, the Strip would be dark in a year. An unexpected wave of nostalgia hit Wes. The city’s descent had been quick. The diamond in the ice desert was the RSA’s last playground, but lately that playground had lost its luster, the bubble was cracking, the snow globe was about to collapse. New Vegas, the city that had shrugged its sequined shoulder at the apocalypse, was about to turn off the lights. He looked down at the lonely black slabs, the abandoned casinos looming like dead trees over the strip. The world was ending, and Vegas had staved off the inevitable for as long as it could, but the End had come to cash in its chips.
    Wes only wished he could do the same.
    Down below, a group of people were assembling in the middle of the icy sidewalk. Wes held his breath as his phone confirmed what he already suspected. The text read: LS VGS BLVD + L FLMNGO. ZERO HR. A protest mob. He’d never heard of anyone protesting anything in the RSA before. No one would have dared.
    But that was before 12/12, before the drakon, before Nat. Wes hated the nickname the nets had given the battle, as if it were a tragedy, when only drones had been destroyed. Rumors of what happened on the ocean had spread through the RSA like a swift and wild winter breeze. The soldiers who’d lived to tell the tale were new recruits whom the talking heads on the nets had tried to cast as a group of deluded children spinning stories, perhaps even a Xian conspiracy. Even so, the relentless lore of the mighty fire-breathing creature was becoming popular around the globe. In the outlaw territories, they feared the hydra, in New Pangaea, the
tarakona,
and its rider was named a demon, a devil, a witch, a black drau. Old Vegas hands had dubbed the creature the Black Ace, and its image was everywhere in the city, its serpentine silhouette appearing on T-shirts and graffitied on walls, along with the words THE BLUE IS REAL! THE MONSTER IS REAL! DOWN WITH T HE RSA!
    People were starting to believe the rumors that the thrillers who haunted Garbage Country weren’t suffering from failed government experiments but were dying from a magical disease. Which meant magic was real and the Blue was real.
    Of course the Blue was real. So was the Monster, if you wanted to call it that, though having seen it, Wes wasn’t certain he would. He just wished he could be as certain of everything else he had witnessed, and he wondered again about the vision he had experienced that afternoon, if Nat had truly seen him as he had seen her. He clung to that memory and to the hope that one day he would make good on his other promise.
    I’ll come back for you. This isn’t the end for us.
    Wes flinched every time he played the words back in his mind. They were almost too painful to think about, even for him. He told himself they were true. He needed to believe they were.
As real as the drakon and the stories and the Blue itself.
    The Blue and the girl who belongs to it.
    He’d left Nat to find his sister, to answer a question that had occupied him for nearly a decade:
Where was Eliza? What happened on the night she disappeared?
    Did Shakes have the answer to that question at last?
    The elevator chimed, the music faded, and the doors opened to a blast of cold air. He’d reached his destination. The thirty-second floor. A girl in a slim-fitting, whole-body heat suit stood at the door. She was wearing one of the new ones, with the fancy hoods, the bootstraps, and the matching balaclava that left only her eyes visible. Her eyebrows were tattooed pink and her eyelids were covered with gold glitter and swooping waves of blue eyeliner. “Welcome to Ice. Are you on the list?” she said automatically, checking the tablet she held.
    He coughed and she looked up