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OPENED HER EYES AND STARED AT WHITENESS. A CLOUD? DEATH? She was naked, with a thin cloth sheet draped over her to her neck. She felt no pain. She could breathe. Cautiously, slowly, she reached for the area on her chest where the stick had impaled her. The wound was gone. The skin was slightly raised in a jagged circle—scar tissue—but she was otherwise whole.
    She shivered. She was lying on something cold. She sat up, and she felt dizzy and weak, as well as famished and thirsty. She closed her eyes a moment, waited for her head to settle, then reopened them.
    And then she realized, now fully awake, that she was no longer in the woods. She was sitting on a metal bed, in a smallwhite room empty except for the bed, a toilet, a small table and chair, a door with no handle or control panel, and a vid screen in the corner of the wall.
    Where was she? The white cell . . . the vid screen . . . She began to feel a seed of panic rise up in her belly. She stood, wobbly, holding the sheet over her body. And then she saw the gray jumpsuit on the chair, folded neatly, waiting for her—a re-education center jumpsuit—and she sat down heavily, hugged herself, and began to shake. “No,” she whispered. “Nick, what happened?”
    The door opened silently and a bot walked in, holding a tray of food and a container of water. It was a Lecturer, Cass knew. Exactly as Nick had described them—the sickly white plastic skin, the long thin limbs and neck, the dead green eyes. Cass felt a jolt of recognition—the bot’s eyes were the exact same shade of green as Nick’s new eye.
    The bot set the tray down on the table. “You will be hungry, thirsty, and weak after your extensive rejuvenation,” it said. “First, you will pay careful attention to a message of guidance from the Senior Advisor. Then you will dress and eat.”
    The vid screen snapped to life and an image of a bot appeared, sitting at a wood desk, its hands clasped together in front of it. “Greetings, future Citizen,” the bot said. “I am the Senior Advisor, responsible for the management of the ongoing Great Intervention . . .”
    The message continued, and Cass stared at the screen,nauseous from fear but also feeling anger building up. She was Cass. They would not take that away from her. She would survive, and she would still be herself. The bots would never beat her.

CHAPTER 9
    NICK FELT NUMB AS HE WALKED WITH ERICA, DUCKING THROUGH SPARSE woods, quickly crossing the cracked roads lined by burned-out pre-Rev buildings only when they had to. He was leaving his brother and sister behind. He thought about heading back to the City to get Cass, but he couldn’t break her out of re-education on his own. Kevin was gone, vanished, and the Freepost was a good place to look for clues. Erica walked in silence, which Nick appreciated. He wouldn’t have been able to handle a conversation when all he could do was think about his brother and sister and how quickly he had lost them.
    Erica seemed to know where she was going—she moved confidently, only occasionally checking an old-fashioned pre-Rev compass that hung on her belt next to her hunting knife.And she was certainly comfortable in the woods and pre-Rev roads—she obviously wasn’t a City dweller, the way she broke a trail with minimum effort and made almost no noise with her passage.
    They paused for lunch with their backs against a small house, the roof caved in but the windows and doors miraculously intact. Nick didn’t like stopping so close to the road—he felt too exposed—but Erica seemed relaxed and he decided to let it be. Lunch consisted of water and a dehydrated military supply protein kit that Erica dug out of her pack and rehydrated with a splash of water and a flick of the tiny built-in one-time-use conduction unit that came attached to each kit. She found two spoons, offered one to Nick, and they sat close together, sharing the bitter brown paste. It tasted like hell, but Nick knew from experience