Surrender Read Online Free Page B

about what he’d said about the Badlands. Such freedom. I envisioned my dad walking wherever he wanted. Without fear. Without that pinched look he got around his eyes when he went out to develop our “superior tech crap.”
    He’d hug me good night—yeah, that broke a rule—wearing his jacket. The shiny black leather made my nose tingle with the smell of polish.
    And I knew.
    He was going into the forest. At night. Two more broken rules.
    Rule-breaking must run in the family,
said that voice again, the same voice as in the courtroom. I wished I’d been able to turn and see who it belonged to.
    I hadn’t heard any voices before this. Maybe it was myproximity to the Thinkers. Or maybe my offenses had finally landed me on someone’s to-be-monitored list.
    Maybe the Baddies didn’t abduct Dad after all. Maybe the Greenies . . .
This time, the voice was all mine. I shoved the thought aside and told myself to go to sleep. My dad had worked in the tech department, level ten, top secret. He’d developed the highest-class tech in the Goodgrounds.
    He’d had clearance to enter the forest. Anytime he wanted. That’s what he’d told my mother when she asked. That he’d gotten the proper approval, that many of his inventions needed power he could only get when the rest of us were asleep.
    And I’d believed him.
    As I drifted to sleep, I could almost smell the leather of his jacket. Almost feel the gentle press of his embrace.
    Almost, almost.
But after seven years, everything about my dad was harder to imagine.
    Waterfalls and rivers and streamlets and the sound of waves on the shore . . .
    I couldn’t keep the images of water out of my head, and I seriously needed to
go
. Morning had arrived and Jag still hadn’t left to shower.
    The luxuriously warm water of a hot spring called to me.
    “I gotta go!” I sprang up and took the two steps to the toilet. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t go in front of him. He would hear!
    I felt his eyes on my back. Didn’t he need to go? Turning, I saw his playful smile before he wiped it away.
    He closed the book and started banging on the bars with it. “Hey! Get me outta here!”
    Slowly, painfully slowly—so painful and so slow, I thought I might wet myself—the guard sauntered down the hall.
    “I gotta go,” Jag said. “And I’m not goin’ with her here.” He jerked his head toward me.
    My face must have looked absolutely pitiful, because the guard laughed as he unlocked the cell. “You guys working together yet?” He ran a red reader from Jag’s shoulder to his ankle and bound his hands with
superior tech crap
.
    I stared at the guard. Working together? What did that mean? Jag shrugged and threw me a look that made my heart do a little flop. The guard appraised me for several seconds before escorting Jag down the hall.
    And then I was able to go.

4.
    The first time I got thrown in Lock Up, my mother came as soon as she got the e-comm. If I’d stayed longer, I might not have been so eager to go back (the getting-puked-on came during my second incarceration). My mother droned on about how embarrassing it was for our family to have a rule-breaker, how my sister, Tyson, hadn’t died so I could be a vagrant, how I was exactly like my father. Blah, blah, blah.
    I was proud of her last argument. I
wanted
to be like my dad. Maybe not living in the Badlands against my will. But at the time, I thought even that would be better than living in the Goodgrounds according to someone else’s will.
    After the lecture-that-had-no-end, my mother smeared perma-plaster over my link, gunking me up from ear to ear.She dialed in special transmissions for me, ones about lying and stealing. It started because I told her I’d attend this totally lame Goodie party. And I went to a party, just not that one. Instead, I’d snuck down the street and into the Abandoned Area where I’d hidden an old ID card on another . . . questionable trip.
    With the card tucked in my back pocket, I’d