The Legend Trilogy Collection Read Free

four, and then finally, ten minutes.
    Then fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes.
    I look at Tess. She just shrugs. “Maybe their reader’s broken,” she suggests.
    Thirty minutes pass. I don’t dare move from my vigil. I’m afraid something will happen so quickly that I’ll miss it if I blink. My fingers tap rhythmically against the hilt of my knife.
    Forty minutes. Fifty minutes. An hour.
    “Something’s wrong,” I whisper.
    Tess purses her lips. “You don’t know that.”
    “Yes I do. What could possibly take this long?”
    Tess opens her mouth to reply, but before she can say anything, the soldiers are exiting my house, single file, expressionless. Finally, the last soldier shuts the door behind him and reaches for something tucked at his waist. I suddenly feel dizzy. I know what’s coming.
    The soldier reaches up and sprays one long, red, diagonal line on our door. Then he sprays another line, making an
X.
    I curse silently under my breath and start to turn away—
    —but then the soldier does something unexpected, something I’ve never seen before.
    He sprays a third, vertical line on my mother’s door, cutting the
X
in half.

1347 H OURS.
    D RAKE U NIVERSITY , B ATALLA SECTOR .
    72°F I NDOORS .
     
    I’ M SITTING IN MY DEAN SECRETARY’S OFFICE. A GAIN . On the other side of the frosted glass door, I can see a bunch of my classmates (seniors, all at least four years older than me) hanging around in an attempt to hear what’s going on. Several of them saw me being yanked out of our afternoon drill class (today’s lesson: how to load and unload the XM-621 rifle) by a menacing pair of guards. And whenever that happens, the news spreads all over campus.
    The Republic’s favorite little prodigy is in trouble again.
    The office is quiet except for the faint hum coming from the dean secretary’s computer. I’ve memorized every detail of this room (hand-cut marble floors imported from Dakota, 324 plastic square ceiling tiles, twenty feet of gray drapes hanging to either side of the glorious Elector’s portrait on the office’s back wall, a thirty-inch screen on the side wall, with the sound muted and a headline that reads: “TRAITOROUS ‘PATRIOTS’ GROUP BOMBS LOCAL MILITARY STATION, KILLS FIVE” followed by “REPUBLIC DEFEATS COLONIES IN BATTLE FOR HILLSBORO” ). Arisna Whitaker, the dean secretary herself, is seated behind her desk, tapping on its glass—no doubt typing up my report. This will be my eighth report this quarter. I’m willing to bet I’m the only Drake student who’s ever managed to get eight reports in one quarter without being expelled.
    “Injured your hand yesterday, Ms. Whitaker?” I say after a while.
    She stops typing to glare at me. “What makes you think that, Ms. Iparis?”
    “The pauses in your keystrokes are off. You’re favoring your left hand.”
    Ms. Whitaker sighs and leans back in her chair. “Yes, June. I twisted my wrist yesterday in a game of kivaball.”
    “Sorry to hear it. You should try to swing more from your arm and not from your wrist.”
    I’d meant this simply to be a statement of fact, but it sounded sort of taunting and doesn’t seem to have made her any happier. “Let’s get something straight, Ms. Iparis,” she says. “You may think you’re very smart. You may think your perfect grades earn you some sort of special treatment. You may even think you have fans at this school, what with all
this
nonsense.” She gestures at the students gathered outside the door. “But
I’ve
grown incredibly tired of our get-togethers in my office. And believe me, when you graduate and get assigned to whatever post this country chooses for you, your antics won’t impress your superiors there. Do you understand me?”
    I nod, because that’s what she wants me to do. But she’s wrong. I don’t just
think
I’m smart. I’m the only person in the entire Republic with a perfect 1500 score on her Trial. I was assigned here, to the country’s top