Z 2136 (Z 2134 Series Book 3) Read Free Page A

because of its rarity. While death seemed so pervasive to Adam now, with his eyes finally opened to what was going on in the cities, public executions weren’t a regular thing behind The Walls. Outside, among the charred and rotten hands of the undead, it happened all the time. Adam would one day blink into the bright light outside The City, but the thin sliver of hope that he might one day see his sister kept him hanging on, like a cupped palm to a wind-flickered flame.
    Adam’s back was pressed to the cold metal of a pitch-black van, on its way to the Halo. He hoped they would return to asphalt soon. The dirt, snow, or whatever they were driving through was doing terrible things to his already tangled gut.
    Soon, the door would open and he’d be yanked from the van into blinding light. A cannon blast would herald the chaos of a mad dash by contestants, all willing to kill for supplies, murdering to live through The Opening Rush.
    The chaos Adam was pretty sure he wouldn’t survive.
    In this, the beginning of Adam’s end, darkness was his blanket. The van’s only light bled from lights on a black metal cuff glowing blue around his wrist. A small gray screen sat atop the cuff, with blue lights running around the top and bottom of the cuff, with tiny holes running beneath the screen. Though Adam had theories, he didn’t know what the bracelet was. The man who had fastened it to his wrist grunted as he did so, but his coward’s face was buried behind a black visor, stripping Adam’s chance to search for truth in his eyes. The bracelet felt cold, as if it couldn’t absorb any warmth from his body. After a while on his wrist, it made Adam feel colder than he was, and despite more than a half year spent mostly in isolation, the new frost in his body made him feel twice as alone.
    In every game Adam had ever seen, vans almost always carried more than one passenger. He didn’t want to wonder why he was the only one in this van, because the truth was likely as ugly as every other truth he’d come to know since his father was first accused of murdering a mother whom Adam still missed every day. But he couldn’t help dwelling on his solitary transport, remembering how much he used to enjoy this part of The Darwins: The Pre-Game. Those citizens who did watch The Pre-Games loved getting to know the players and picking their favorites before the cannon was shot. That was always Adam’s favorite part, because there was never any killing, and often there were jokes.
    Now he was in the dark alone, save for small cameras in all four corners, giving citizens a bird’s eye view of his death ride. He wondered how many people were watching him, as he’d watched so many in the past. And what kind of contestant did he appear to be? Was anyone voting on him as a potential winner? Some contestants were quiet, most tried to seem braver than they were, keeping quivers from speech and flinches from eyes. A few always cried. Some picked fights. Adam’s favorites pretended that being in a van on its way to the Halo, and the promise of spending their final few days on the run—gasping and hoping for bullets instead of a death by feasting undead—wasn’t so awful at all.
    Adam wanted to be strong enough to pretend and bury his fear behind jokes like those men and women. But there was no one else to joke with, and that absence made everything worse.
    Something was wrong, because things were so different. Every Game he’d ever seen had at least two players from each City, yet Adam hadn’t heard a second van rolling ahead or behind them.
    I can’t be the only one from City 6, can I?
    Adam had spent seven months in prison.
    He had been on a fairly fixed schedule, in which he was moved from his cell to the yard for an hour each weekday, two on the weekends. The consistent routine made it easy to tick off the time—which was important when trying to preserve a sense of normalcy. The other thing that had helped him hold onto sanity was