Apocalyptica (Book 2): Ran Read Online Free PDF Page A

it was in almost every way a memory. I suppose it qualified as a recurring nightmare.
    It was a lucid dream, but despite knowing what I saw wasn’t real I couldn’t change anything. I was a passenger only, forced to relive that day again.
    I was sixteen. It was, in fact, my sixteenth birthday. The room around me was bare except for a sleeping bag, the white walls and short beige carpet utterly without markings. I had been in this room many times in my short life, an eight-by-four cell I was sure got repainted whenever an occupant left it behind.
    This time was different. This day was different. The corner of the carpet to the right of the door was dog-eared up, untucked from its long residence beneath the edge of the wall. I sat in the middle of the room in lotus, one hand lightly cupping the other.
    I could hear Kevin, the docent on watch, making his rounds. That’s what they called the person in charge of checking the cells: a docent. A guide. As if the cells were vessels on a journey for those held within.
    Well, that was what we were taught. A fundamental tenet, actually. Every experience was a teaching experience, one the person having it must complete with no exceptions. I lost count of the days spent in this room or one of its clones, but I had decided this would be the last. Shoved in here a week before when I’d loudly and stupidly announced my intention to leave on my birthday, I made myself a promise that one way or another I would never come back.
    Kevin opened the door of the cell next to mine. I lifted my wrists and looked at them carefully, waiting for the right moment.
    The heavy oak door swung open in front of me. Kevin, a boy my age with the too-large hands and feet of a puppy with growing yet to do, settled eyes framed by a mane of curly black hair on me. It was an image forever burned into my brain, that face. One of those innocents who believed what they saw, what they were told. Wide blue eyes met mine, and I smiled.
    I jammed the carpet tack into my wrist and drew it along and through my radial artery.
    I woke up before the next part could play out, a small blessing. It only grew less pleasant.
    In accordance with the strange turn my life had recently taken toward being filled with tired movie clichés, I came around to find myself tied to a chair. My head hurt a fucking lot and my wrists felt like I’d spent ten hours playing ping pong with Forrest Gump. The latter could be blamed on how I was secured to the chair, which put my slumped-forward weight on my wrists while I was knocked out.
    Fact: getting knocked out for longer than a few seconds is much, much worse than movies and TV imply. The human brain is meant to be on, as long as it’s not engaged in sleep. When you’re knocked unconscious, it’s a pretty decent rule of thumb that the longer you’re out, the worse you got hit.
    I still wore my armor, though my holsters were empty and the knife strapped to my chest was gone. No great urge to pee, meaning I probably wasn’t out for hours. I went through my concussion checklist—something every girl with hundreds of hours of fight training should have memorized cold—and decided that if I did have one, it wasn’t bad.
    The relief didn’t do anything to lessen the aching throb in my head. I really wanted to shoot the guy who hit me.
    I was in a basement, that much was obvious. The shitty concrete floor was flaking everywhere, and water stained the walls from long-ignored leaks in the foundation. Overhead pipes and wires nestled between floor joists. Fortunately this didn’t look like a murder basement, but I suppose the best ones never do.
    Rather than panic, which I assure you was on my list of go-to reactions just then, I took deep, calming breaths. An almost subterranean rage suffused my entire body and was at war with the impulse to start shrieking in terror. I knew if I gave in to either I’d have trouble stopping.
    Been there before.
    Not that those reactions were in any way wrong.