Broken Wide by Susan Kaye Quinn

Author:Susan Kaye Quinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: young adult, science fiction, paranormal, young adult, science fiction, paranormal, teen
Publisher: Susan Kaye Quinn
Published: 2018-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

Fog crackles around me.

Blue lightning jumps from the formless mist. I shield my face and run. The electric storm gives chase. I mentally shove it back, but that only gives the shock-strikes a path into my head. I stumble with the hit then keep running—straight into something. It’s a wall of a man—a jacker with dead eyes and gigawatts of energy charging his mindfield. He grips my skull with two beefy hands and rips my head apart—

I scream myself awake.

The sound echoes even as my mouth gasps at the cold concrete floor. I wrench my face away from it, heart pounding, chest heaving as I roll on my back. I blink hard at the blinding plasma lights overhead—my body cramps, my stomach still churning from the terror. I swallow that down, and the room slowly comes into focus. Just as my eyes recognize the vertical bars along one wall for what they are—a cage—my mental reach confirms it.

I’m in a shielded cell. Caught. Trapped.

The only question is where?

I quickly climb to my feet. My narrow cell has a bed, a toilet in the corner, and three solid walls, all of which are shielded. The fourth is a set of vertical bars, also shielded, and what’s beyond those makes it very clear where I am. A two-story prison stacked with cages of people I assume are jackers, due to the shielding and the light-green jumpsuits I’ve only seen one place before.

The Jacker Detention Center.

I rub my eyes to clear the last of the electrical haze from my vision. Whatever the CJPD shocked me with, it was tuned for jacker mindfields—just an ordinary mind-jolting taser, not Tiller’s mind-destroying tech, but it’s still messed with all my senses. The burnt electrical taste at the back of my throat. The electric skittish feel still sizzling my nerve endings all over my body. The sensitivity to light that’s making everything in this nightmare seem to glow around the edges.

“Will you look at that?” I know that voice, but my brain is too fried to place it. “He’s a jacker!”

I squint against the plasma lights and scan the cells across from me, trying to find the source. Directly across from me is a woman lying unconscious on the floor of her cell, so the voice isn’t hers, but I stumble forward anyway. I stop just short of the steel bars, so the shielding doesn’t fry my brain even further—the proximity raises the hairs on my arms.

But my eyes aren’t deceiving me—it’s Anna Navarro. Her face is twisted in pain even in sleep.

I hope it’s sleep.

I do a quick visual scan of the other cells— from mine, I can only see about a dozen across the two levels, but we’re packed in like animals, stacked on top of each other in our narrow slices of the Detention Center. Only we’re not being “detained”—no one leaves this place. And last I heard, Tiller was still using prisoners as fodder for developing his device. Then again, he’s deploying it in Jackertown now, so maybe it’s no safer outside the prison than in.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.