Iron Curtain by Melinda Jasmine Crouchley

Author:Melinda Jasmine Crouchley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: romance, artificial intelligence, military, young adult, science fiction, future, technology, virus, cyborg, dystopian
Publisher: Melinda Jasmine Crouchley

Paris burned the day Eleni Garza’s heart stopped beating.

It was the first terrorist attack on the country since the nano virus invaded, spreading its creeping horror over the cities and farmlands of France. Eleni and her parents, like so many other casualties, found themselves caught in the middle.

They felt immune. She felt immune. Growing up in hot zones around the world numbed and protected her from death in the way a seasoned soldier seems exempt from bullets or bombs after a few successful tours. But death found them that day.

It started with chocolate. Or the pretense of chocolate. She used the pretense of a trip to a chocolaterie to escape the military installation they called home. The military installation was in support of the medical base, erected solely to treat those who were in the later stages of succumbing to the nano-virus. Overall, a pretty miserable scene for any fifteen-year-old.

The dessert rations had been entirely depleted since they were nearing the end of their six-month tour of France, so she had an opportunity to exploit her father’s fondness for chocolate. She could escape the base without her motivations being suspect.

Her father, Gustavo Garza, or “G” to his small stock of friends and family, always kept a chocolate bar hidden somewhere on his person or at least somewhere nearby. When he worked in the hot labs he kept a little quarantine container with a dark chocolate sea salt caramel bar wrapped in fancy packaging on the counter, in an eye-line from where he worked.

He wouldn’t take that particular bar with him when he left, instead it remained behind in the hot labs, wherever on the globe the medical base was erected—a symbol of beauty and defiance, nested amongst the deadliest mortal enemies on the planet. A virus truly is the perfect enemy. It doesn’t choose sides. A virus, like a machine, does only as instructed. It writes out the history of its genetic code and only wants one thing—to live. To fulfill its purpose. To kill as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Her father was a man of good taste and bad choices.

Both of those things destroyed Eleni Garza’s family.

She had finished up school for the day and headed back to their shared single room. She was relieved to be done with the daily French lessons, given by an indignant teacher who berated her for not trying hard enough to learn the local language. The rest of her education consisted of computer courses she worked at her own pace, most of which were taught by proxy robots, not actual humans.

The door to their room was ajar and her mother, Julia Garza, was perched on the chair at their anemic folding table. She was always sitting on the very edge of things, as if afraid to commit her entire body to one thing. This left her agile and able to immediately pivot from one task to the next. She was like a small, dark hummingbird. Studying, observing, manipulating, consuming, creating, and then flitting off to the next thing, her wings beating at a pace too fast to discern.

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.