Nomad by JL Bryan Read Free Book Online

She couldn't have handled eight more hours of Candace tales. Now she had only eleven hours to pass until she reached New York and transferred to her final bus to New Haven.
    Raven covered her mouth and whispered a request for soft classical music. Her sunglasses sprouted tiny black earbuds and played Mozart. Drowning her brain in music seemed like a good idea.
    She was exhausted, and she let herself drowse. She might not get another chance after she reached her final destination.
    Raven closed her eyes and saw herself on another bus. It was stripped down, no padding on the seats, graffiti all over the interior and rusty holes in the walls and roof. Ropes held the side door shut. Instead of a dark night outside, the sun was scorching bright, and they seemed to be crossing a desert. Scrubby cactus grew by the road, and tall heaps of rock cast deep shadows in the distance.
    She sat with her friend, Kari. They were sixteen years old, wearing armor-lined jackets and holding plasma rifles. The bus was crowded with other young people, mostly between the ages of twelve and seventeen, so many that they had to sit in the aisle and on each other's laps. They sang an angry fight song, child crusaders on their way to the next slaughter.
    The war had no front. It was everywhere, one urban battlefield after another, fought with bombs, rockets, firearms, digital viruses, propaganda, and sometimes bottles and bricks--a dirty, vicious war that had raged for years. On one side, the dictator who'd seized control of Washington, supported by the powerful megacorporations and a corrupt Congress. On the other, the popular resistance, struggling against an enemy equipped with the latest tanks and aircraft, plus an army of trained men in black uniforms. The dictator didn't mind running up trillions in public debt as he tried to put down the revolutionaries.
    The young people around her looked like children, but they were hardened fighters. Many had lost their parents to the mass arrests and joined the resistance at a young age, or their parents had been resistance fighters who'd died. They had nowhere to go, so they fought, traveling to hotspot battles as they flared up in different cities, helping to combat the dictator's forces wherever they decided to clamp down. In some places, the local police and National Guard were sympathetic to the resistance. In others, they were loyal to the new power in Washington, and the fighting became extra nasty.
    Raven and Kari had learned bits and pieces about weapons from ex-Special Forces officers, hand-to-hand combat from martial arts masters, and info-tech skills from expert hackers. Such itinerant teachers drifted through the slums where Raven and her kind lived, typically on the run from Providence Security themselves. Hundreds of thousands of Providence Security agents served as the dictator's private army.
    Raven and Kari had drifted from one resistance group to another over the years, but they had always stuck together, until the final mission.
    Raven understood. Her data cube was filled with nothing but information about the future dictator, and she had traveled back in time with a gun. Her mission, she thought, was becoming obvious.

Chapter Six
     
    Raven reached the Port Authority building in New York at two in the morning. She had barely slept during the bus ride, waking every ten minutes to check her surroundings, as though her body had an internal alarm clock that didn't want her to grow too comfortable.
    During a layover in Philadelphia, she'd visited a sprawling discount store and purchased clothes to help her blend better with the locals. She hadn't seen other women in combat boots and fatigues, so she'd bought sneakers, comfortable dark blue jeans, and a simple white blouse to lower her profile a bit.
    She searched the cavernous, fluorescent-lit Port Authority terminal for a place where she could sit with her back to a wall and her eyes on the crowd. She had several hours to kill before the bus to