Revolution (Replica) Read Online Free

footsteps kept right on pounding—all the way past the door. She and Dante both let out little laughs of relief, and he fixed his T-shirt. There was no way they could start back up where they’d left off—they’d both have half their attention focused on the hallway outside, listening for a sign that their friends were about to walk in on them.
    “It’s kinda hot in here,” Nadia said, fanning her face. She knew perfectly well the heat was coming from inside her, but she climbed to her feet anyway. “Let’s open a window.”
    “Sure,” Dante said, sounding resigned. “Only let me kill the lights first so no one can see your face.”
    She grimaced, realizing she’d been about to do something stupid and careless. Standing in front of a window with the lights on and showing her face to anyone who cared to look up was not the best plan for someone who was supposed to be in hiding. She waited until Dante flipped the lights off, then opened the window.
    The air that wafted in from the open window probably wasn’t any cooler than the air inside the apartment, but there was a pleasant breeze blowing. She propped her forearms on the windowsill and gazed out at the teeming streets of the Basement. At first, all she saw was a sea of color, the denizens of the Basement vying with each other to be the most eye-catching. Then she started noticing individuals, the women dressed in clothes that left little to the imagination, the drug dealers peddling their wares out in the open because laws weren’t enforced here, the thieves and pickpockets trolling the “tourists” for easy prey.
    “I used to think my life sucked,” Dante said, joining her at the window and looking down at the crowd. “There’s not a lot of perks to being the son of a couple of sanitation workers. I’ve been to the Basement before, but it wasn’t until lately that I realized how good I had it growing up.”
    Nadia nodded, but made no comment. She had often envied Employees the freedom of their lives—the freedom to choose their own careers and their own spouses—but she had never felt that way about Basement-dwellers. Their choices were limited at best from the moment of their birth, just like Executives, and yet they didn’t have the safe and comfortable living conditions to make up for it. All of the downsides of being an Executive, with none of the perks.
    The sound of a loudspeaker, distant enough that she couldn’t make out any words, caught Nadia’s attention, and she glanced around looking for its source. She didn’t see anything, but Dante nudged her arm with his elbow and pointed upward.
    A blimp was hovering above the Basement, and on its side was a huge video screen. The voice Nadia had heard was Dorothy, gazing sternly out from the screen as she spoke into a bank of microphones. It was some kind of press conference, but it appeared to be finishing up. The scene quickly shifted to slightly grainy surveillance footage. Footage that showed Nate pointing a gun at his father’s head and calmly pulling the trigger while Dorothy lay unconscious on the floor and Nadia stood by, a gun in her hand and a smirk on her face.
    “Christ!” Dante said beside her, and he held tighter to her hand. “That looks completely real.”
    “It isn’t,” Nadia said, a little too emphatically. She knew Dante believed her and Nate’s version of the story, but she knew she herself would have doubts if she hadn’t been there to see what really happened in person. The video was a complete fabrication. Nadia supposed that if Thea was able to create perfect Replicas of human beings in the flesh, it wasn’t hard to imagine she could create digital images of them, complete with voices.
    The scene shifted again as the blimp made its lazy way through the sky, this time showing Paxco’s new chief of security offering a reward for information leading to Nate and Nadia’s capture. The scene shifted one more time, and Nadia clapped her hand over her mouth to try