Five's Betrayal Read Online Free PDF

room and then go right back to where they began. Whatever Deltoch has in store for me, I know I need to impress him. To show him that I’m doing well and that I’m ready to take the next step.
    Deltoch chuckles a little, but it doesn’t sound like he’s actually amused.
    “A good trick,” he says. “I’m sure our enemies will cower in fear when they see our great army of chairs and tables laying siege to their cities.”
    “I can move something else,” I say, feeling stupid. “Something bigger. Or a bunch of swords or something.”
    “What I have in mind for you today is a little more interesting. A true treat. Come, follow me.”
    We move in silence through the compound. I fly, he walks. We head towards the front entrance that leads out into a wooded area that’s fenced off from the rest of the world. I’m not forbidden to go outside by any means, but for caution’s sake I have to get approvals and a tracker and all kinds of boxes checked off if I want to spend the day in nature, so I hardly ever do. Besides, I’m much more of a beach person, and it’s cold up here in West Virginia. I’ve grown used to much warmer climates.
    The entrance to the compound is camouflaged and well guarded. Soldiers salute us as we pass by, and then we’re just hiking through the woods, and I’m completely lost as to what we’re doing. I can’t even fly here, with all the low-hanging branches—I’d have to be above the tree line—and soon I get a little short-winded as we hike along, which I try to mask by breathing as quietly as possible.
    “Where are we going?” I ask, clouds of white escaping my lips in the cold.
    “I told you, it’s a surprise.”
    I try to figure out why Deltoch would go through the trouble of arranging something for me. Is this some sort of ploy to get me to exercise more, or is he leading me out into the woods to teach me some new kind of Mogadorian fighting that requires the open air? Is he leading me to Nine? I slip a hand into my pocket and let my fingers close around the metal ball, just in case.
    But I discover that it’s none of these things as soon as we come to a clearing. Standing in the winter sunlight is the last person I’d ever expect to see here.
    Emma.

CHAPTER FOUR
    IT TAKES ME A SECOND TO REALIZE THAT EMMA is actually there and not some sort of hologram or android or something. But it really is her. I can tell because holograms don’t leave footprints in the dirt as they shift their weight back and forth nervously on their feet, and androids don’t cry.
    Emma looks terrified.
    I can’t really blame her. She probably should be scared.
    She’s grown up a bit in the year or so since I last saw her, when she was swinging a metal pipe at my head the night of the botched job—the night Ethan took me in. When we were running the beaches as small-time crooks, her black hair was always pulled back into a short ponytail, but it’s around her shoulders now, hanging messily halfway down her back. She’s wearing pink pajama bottoms and a white tank top, which leads me to assume that she was taken in the middle of the night. Someone thought to give her a trench coat like all the Mogs wear, which practically swallows her.
    She must not have been expecting to see me, because when I step out of the trees and into view, she freezes, her face twisting in shock.
    “C-Cody?” she stammers through shivering lips. I’m not sure if she’s shaking because of the cold or something else.
    It’s been a long time since I went by that name, and it takes a second for my memory to catch up with what she’s saying and to realize that she means me.
    “Hi, Emma,” I murmur.
    I don’t know what to say or do, or even how to feel—why has this girl been plucked out of Florida and brought up to West Virginia? My first instinct is to go to her, but there’s a look in her eyes that stops me. I recognize it as a mixture of confusion and hatred. The same look she had in Miami when she called me a