Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver Read Free Book Online Page B

as inconspicuously as possible. I don’t have to worry. Everyone in the room is transfixed by the man behind the podium. The air is charged; I have the sense of thousands and thousands of droplets, suspended, waiting to fall.
    “… is not sufficient to ensure our safety,” the man is saying. His voice booms through the room. Under the high fluorescent lights, his hair shines a brilliant black, like a helmet. This is Thomas Fineman, the founder of the DFA. “They talk to us of risk and harm, damages and side effects. But what risk will there be to us as a people, as a society, if we do not act? If we do not insist on protecting the whole, what good is the health of a mere portion?”
    A smattering of applause. Thomas adjusts his cuffs, leans closer to the microphone. “This must be our single, unified purpose. This is the point of our demonstration. We ask that our government, our scientists, our agencies, protect us. We ask that they keep faith with their people, keep faith with God and his Order. Did God himself not reject, over thousands of years, millions of species that were faulty or flawed in some way, on his way to a perfect creation? Do we not learn that it is sometimes necessary to purge the weak, and the diseased, in order to evolve to a better society?”
    The applause swells, cresting. I clap as well. Lena Morgan Jones claps.
    This is my mission, the job that I have been given by Raven: Watch the DFA. Observe. Blend.
    They have told me nothing else.
    “Finally, we ask the government to stand behind the promise of The Book of Shhh : to ensure the Safety, Health, and Happiness of our cities and our people.”
    I observe:
    Rows of high lights.
    Rows of half-moon faces, pale, bloated, fearful, and grateful—the faces of the cured.
    Gray carpet, rubbed bare by the pressure of so many feet.
    A fat man to my right, wheezing, pants belted high over his paunch.
    A small area cordoned off next to the stage, three chairs, only one of them occupied.
    A boy.
    Of all the things I see, the boy is the most interesting. The other things—the carpet, the faces—are the same at every meeting of the DFA. Even the fat man. Sometimes he is fat, sometimes he is thin, sometimes it is a woman instead. But it is all the same—they are always all the same.
    The boy’s eyes are dark blue, a stormy color. His hair is caramel blond and wavy, and hangs to his mid-jawline. He is wearing a collared red polo shirt, short-sleeved despite the weather, and pressed dark jeans. His loafers are new, and he also wears a shiny silver watch around one wrist. Everything about him says rich. His hands are folded in his lap. Everything about him says right, too. Even his unblinking expression as he watches his father onstage is perfection and practice, the embodiment of a cured’s controlled detachment.
    Of course he isn’t cured, not yet. This is Julian Fineman, Thomas Fineman’s son, and although he is eighteen, he has not yet had the procedure. The scientists have so far refused to treat him. Next Friday, the same day as the big planned DFA rally in Times Square, that will change. He will have his procedure, and he will be cured.
    Possibly. It is also possible he will die, or that his mental functioning will be so severely damaged, he might as well be dead. But he will still have the procedure. His father insists on it. Julian insists on it.
    I have never seen him in person before, although I have seen his face on posters and in the back of pamphlets. Julian is famous. He is a martyr to the cause, a hero to the DFA, and president of the organization’s youth division.
    He is taller than I expected. And better-looking, too. The photos have not done justice to the angle of his jaw, or the broadness of his shoulders: a swimmer’s build.
    Onstage, Thomas Fineman is wrapping up his portion of the speech. “We do not deny the dangers of insisting that the cure be administered earlier,” he is saying, “but we assert that the dangers of