Fragments Read Online Free PDF

Voice attack two months ago, before Kira had found the cure for RM and
     the Voice had reintegrated with the rest of society. Without the hall, they’d taken
     to using the auditorium of the old East Meadow High School instead; the school had
     been closed a few months before, so why not? Of course, Marcus thought, the building is the least of the things that have changed since then . The old leader of the Voice was one of the senators now, and two of the former senators
     were the ones on trial. Marcus stood on his tiptoes, but the auditorium was packed,
     standing room only. It seemed like everyone in East Meadow had come to see Weist and
     Delarosa’s final sentence.
    “I’m going to be sick,” said Isolde, clutching Marcus’s arm. He dropped down from
     his toes to stand flat on the ground, grinning at Isolde’s morning sickness, then
     grimacing in pain as her grip tightened and her fingernails dug into his flesh. “Stop
     laughing at me,” she growled.
    “I wasn’t laughing out loud.”
    “I’m pregnant,” said Isolde, “my senses are like superpowers. I can smell your thoughts.”
    “Smell?”
    “It’s a very limited superpower,” she said. “Now seriously, get me some fresh air
     or I’m going to make this room a lot grosser than it already is.”
    “You want to go back out?”
    Isolde shook her head, closing her eyes and breathing slowly. She wasn’t showing yet,
     but her morning sickness had been terrible—she’d actually lost weight instead of gained
     it, because she couldn’t keep any food down, and Nurse Hardy had threatened her with
     inpatient care at the hospital if she didn’t improve soon. She’d been taking the week
     off work to relax, and it had helped a bit, but she was too much of a political junkie
     to stay away from a hearing like this. Marcus looked around the back of the auditorium,
     saw a seat near an open door, and pulled her toward it.
    “Excuse me, sir,” he said softly, “can my friend have this chair?”
    The man wasn’t even using it, just standing in front of it, but he glowered at Marcus
     in annoyance. “It’s first come, first served,” he said lowly. “Now stay quiet so I
     can hear this.”
    “She’s pregnant,” said Marcus, and nodded smugly as the man’s entire demeanor changed
     in seconds.
    “Why didn’t you say so?” He stepped aside immediately, offering Isolde the seat, and
     walked off in search of somewhere else to stand. Works every time, thought Marcus. Even after the repeal of the Hope Act, which had made pregnancy mandatory,
     pregnant women were still treated as sacred. Now that Kira had discovered a cure for
     RM, and there was a real hope that infants would actually survive more than a few
     days, the attitude was even more prevalent. Isolde sat down, fanning her face, and
     Marcus positioned himself behind her seat, where he could discourage people from blocking
     her airflow. He looked back up at the front of the room.
    “. . . which is just the kind of thing we’re trying to stop in the first place,” Senator
     Tovar was saying.
    “You can’t be serious,” said the new senator, and Marcus focused his concentration
     to hear him better. “You were the leader of the Voice,” he told Tovar. “You threatened
     to start, and by some interpretations actually started, a civil war.”
    “Violence being occasionally necessary isn’t the same thing as violence being good,”
     said Tovar. “We were fighting to prevent atrocity, not to punish it after the fact—”
    “Capital punishment is, at its heart, a preventative measure,” said the senator. Marcus
     blinked—he’d had no idea that execution was even being considered for Weist and Delarosa.
     When you have only 36,000 humans left, you don’t jump right to executing them, criminal
     or not. The new senator gestured toward the prisoners. “When these two die for their
     crimes, in a community so small everyone will be intimately aware of it, those crimes are