The Society (A Broken World Book 1) by Dean Murray Read Free Book Online Page A

soared. I was well on my way towards feeling invulnerable when I was ordered—as Skye—to take a morning weapons class over on the other side of the compound from where I normally trained.
    My mood instantly soured when I saw what was waiting for me. I'd been expecting to be added into a normal class of newly-franchised military recruits. Instead, I was sent to a class that before my arrival had included a grand total of one student.
    The Citizen-President had told me just days before that there were only two people in my age-group who'd done everything that had been asked of them rather than dropping out of school and training to go off and start working towards their franchise. I was one of the two, and I knew without asking that Megan was the other.
    We'd never been friends, but even as a child I'd known that there was something unnatural about Megan. I'd had to be coached into obeying the rules—chided with the mantra that my nurses had repeated to me at every turn. Megan had never seemed to need any prompting. She followed the rules even to the point of alienating the other kids.
    I'd learned early on that if I wanted to both obey the rules and not make enemies I was going to have to be careful to make myself scarce when my companions started thinking about testing the boundaries. It wasn't pleasant because it meant that, as time went on, I spent more and more time by myself, but I knew it was the only way I was going to earn the reward that was waiting out there for me.
    Megan, on the other hand, never tried for that kind of subtlety. She went wherever she pleased—inside the strictures of the rules we'd been given—and she reported every sin or misdemeanor with a smirk that told everyone around her that she'd known all along that they wouldn't measure up to her standards.
    My isolation was self-imposed. Megan's isolation was because she'd made an enemy out of every single person she'd had even the slightest contact with. By all outward evidence, she'd spent every waking moment honing herself into whatever our Society needed her to be. I, however, knew the truth, a truth that I'd never even suspected before the Citizen-President had walked into that office and changed my life forever.
    He'd said that I'd never left the zones with the highest social desirability index, but I knew that wasn't true. I'd left—only once, but I'd left. That meant that the system wasn't perfect, that it didn't track us as completely as I'd always suspected it did.
    He'd said that Megan had left once, but the fact that some trips didn't register meant that she'd actually left more times than that. Megan was a hypocrite. Her holier-than-thou attitude had been hard enough to stomach when we'd all believed that she really meant the things that she was saying. Now that I knew it was all an act, that she was off doing something that wasn't strictly in keeping with the precepts, she turned my stomach.
    She smirked at me as I stepped onto the textured, no-slip training floor, and I wanted so badly to wipe that expression off of her face. I knew I could take her—she'd always had a slight edge in hand-to-hand during the few instances when we'd crossed paths in training sessions, but even if she was franchised now, there wasn't any way that she could hope to take me down now, not with my newfound advantages.
    All that work, that hypocritical, catty mask she'd worn for years, and she'd ended up coming in second place to me. Only this time the gulf between first and second was even bigger than normal. There'd only been one dose of the prototype nanites and I'd gotten it.
    "Okay, you two. I want to see what you're capable of—no killing blows and nothing that will take more than twenty-four hours to heal. I'm under orders to make sure that you don't interfere with the training schedule that's been laid out for you. Don't make me break the two of you up."
    The instructor slapped his stun baton against his leg, emphasizing his point. The baton was