Reboot Read Free Page A

near me, except for Ever.
    “I didn’t catch your name,” he said, turning my arm so he could see, oblivious to the fact that this was a weird thing to do. “Wren,” he read, releasing me. “I’m Callum. Nice to meet you.”
    I frowned at him over my shoulder as I headed for the door. I didn’t know what it was to meet him, but nice was not the word I would have picked.
    Newbie day was my favorite. As I headed into the gym later that morning with the other trainers, excitement rippled through my chest. I almost smiled.
    Almost.
    The newbies were sitting on the shiny wood floor in the center of the large room, next to several black mats. They turned away from the instructor to look at us, their faces tight with fear. It looked like no one had puked yet.
    “Don’t look at them,” Manny One-nineteen barked. He was in charge of wrangling the newbies their first few days here. He’d been doing it for longer than I’d been here, and I figured it was because he was bitter about missing the opportunity to be a trainer by one minute.
    All the newbies focused their attention on Manny except Twenty-two, who gave me that weird smile before turning around.
    HARC medical personnel were lined up against the wall behind Manny, holding their clipboards and some tech equipment I couldn’t begin to understand. There were four of them today, three men and a woman, all dressed in their usual white lab coats. The doctors and scientists always came out to observe the newbies. Later, they would take them down to one of the medical floors to be poked and prodded.
    “Welcome to Rosa,” Manny said, arms crossed over his chest, eyebrows low like he was trying to be scary. Didn’t fool me. Not now, and not when I was a twelve-year-old newbie.
    “Your trainers will pick you tomorrow. Today they will observe you,” Manny continued. His voice echoed across the gym. It was a giant empty room with dingy white walls that had been stained with blood many times.
    Manny began listing off their numbers and pointing for our benefit. The highest was One-twenty-one, a well-built older teenager who probably looked intimidating even as a human.
    HARC coveted the higher numbers. Me, above all. My body had had more time than most to adapt to the change, so I regenerated and healed faster than anyone at the facility. Rebooting only occurred after every bodily function shut down. The brain, the heart, the lungs—everything had to go before the process could start. I’d heard the number of minutes dead referred to as a “rest,” a time for the body to regroup and refresh and prepare for what was next. The longer the rest, the better the Reboot.
    Today was no different. Manny paired off newbies and ordered them to go at it, giving them a chance to impress us. One-twenty-one picked up the fighting quickly, his partner a bloody mess within minutes.
    Callum Twenty-two spent more time on the floor than standing in front of his shorter, younger partner. He was clumsy and his long limbs went everywhere except where he wanted. He moved like a human—as though he’d never Rebooted at all. The lower numbers didn’t heal as fast and they had too much leftover human emotion.
    When humans first began rising from the dead they called it a “miracle.” Reboots were a cure for the virus that had wiped out most of the population. They were stronger and faster and almost invincible.
    Then, as it became apparent a Reboot wasn’t the human they’d known, but a sort of cold, altered copy, they called us monsters. The humans shut out the Reboots, banished them from their homes, and eventually decided the only course of action was to execute every one of them.
    The Reboots retaliated, but they were outnumbered and lost the war. Now we are slaves. The Reboot project began almost twenty years ago, a few years after the end of the war, when HARC realized putting us to work was far more useful than simply executing every human who rose. We didn’t get sick; we could