Darklandia Read Online Free PDF Page A

gray tunic, dirt crusted around her nostrils and underneath her fingernails, and still smiling.
    Could Darla hear these repulsive thoughts racing through my mind?
    “Can we please go?” I finally asked, taking a step toward the open door, stopping myself before I placed my hand on the grubby doorframe.
    Darla followed me out and held her sec-band up to the sensor to close the door.
    “Did you hear about Commissioner Baron?” Darla said, as we descended the steps outside the brownstone. “It’s been two days since he raptured the mayor and he still hasn’t been purified.”
    We passed a striking glass building that once was a popular tourist destination after a terrorist attack destroyed most of this block. The building was a symbol of the former misery that plagued America. It was the perfect place to use for the Department of Felicity’s New York headquarters. I didn’t want to have this kind of conversation with Darla in such close proximity to the very people who could deactivate our sec-bands, but my curiosity got the best of me.
    “How do you know this?” I asked.
    Lately, Darla was much less careful about what she said and where she said it. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand the ramifications of discussing these topics. I think her impulsiveness had more to do with the false sense of security she got from the rations and from being matched two months ago. She knew where she would be in ten months after she graduated from Fillmore Preparatory School and had her Perfect Union ceremony with George Clink, son of Community Development Commissioner Robert Clink. In ten months, Darla would be sleeping in a twin bed with George Clink and watching Felicity Broadcasting for hours after George came home from crunching numbers at the Department of Community with his father.
    “I overheard my mother telling my father she heard it from Katherine Banks,” Darla replied.
    We were halfway past the Department of Felicity now. Four angels stood in front of the building and eight more stood in the courtyard, one at each corner of the two sunken fountains, the North Pool and the South Pool, neither of which had spouted a drop of water for more than forty years. I waited until we crossed the street before I spoke again.
    “Why do you think they haven’t purified him yet?” I asked, trying not to picture the knife as it plunged into Mayor Hillstead’s bloated gut. I tried not to imagine the blade slicing through each layer of skin and fat until it reached his organs, puncturing Hillstead’s stomach and coating his insides in the bitter, greenish-blue remains of his rations.
    “I think they’re trying to get some kind of information from him before they purify him,” Darla replied, as we approached the front gate of Fillmore Prep.
    Though Darla probably didn’t know it, she had just made a daring implication about the purification process. Her comment implied the purification would wipe away whatever information was stored inside a person’s brain. I found it hard to believe that a single surgical procedure could do this, or a thousand hours inside Darklandia. That left only one rapturous option.
    I didn’t speak any of these thoughts allowed and I tried not to huff too loudly as we climbed the steps into the school building.
    “Sweet felicity,” Darla whispered, crossing her hand over her forehead, chest, and shoulders to form an invisible star as we passed underneath the stone arch into Fillmore Prep. The blue star set into the keystone of the arch flashed brilliantly in the morning light.
    “Sweet felicity,” I muttered, forcing my hand to form the same star, though I hardly had enough energy to raise my arm.
    My exhaustion and thirst kept me so preoccupied throughout our Darkling History lesson I hardly noticed when Neil Livingston placed a heavy black object on my desk until he slid the cold steel against my hand.
    I nearly jumped out of my seat at the sight of the gun. “What—!”
    The entire class of