Hadrian's Rage Read Online Free PDF Page A

the man to confess the truth at Frank’s trial. This confession was the basis for Gideon Weller’s trial, and Dean felt obligated to testify against the man who had made his own life a living hell and who had intentionally worked to destroy the boy Dean loved like a son, his best friend Will Middleton’s boy, Todd Middleton. Dean had promised Will on his deathbed to look after Todd, but he had failed. Now Todd was dead and Dean felt responsible. He had to make sure the man who really killed Todd, not Frank, but Weller, suffered the severest penalty of the law: exile or assisted suicide. In Hadrian, there are only two sentence options for anyone convicted of a crime, and for Dean, not even death was good enough for Gideon Weller. Now that Weller had been convicted, the country waited with bated breathfor his decision: exile or death. Dean did not want Weller to choose death, to drink the poison Hadrian’s government cultivated for those who could not bear facing life outside Hadrian’s Wall. He wanted Weller to be exiled. Government propaganda was clever enough to have everyone, including those who saw holes in the system’s management, convinced that life outside of Hadrian was nothing short of hell. With a planet overflowing with human population, it was relatively easy for Hadrian’s satellite system to collect countless horror stories about the squalor of life for billions living outside Hadrian’s Wall. Images of skeletal bodies, wasted corpses, warring over life-sustaining land, even cannibalism have made their way into Hadrian’s propaganda machine, leaving little room for doubt that the citizens of Hadrian are living in an enclosed utopia and anyone who fights against its rules is a fool deserving of death or exile.
    Too many thoughts are running through Dean’s mind, rendering him incapable of making sense of who he is, what he wants, or what he needs to do. All he knows is that he can no longer live a life of lies. As a result, he has decided to leave Geoffrey, the man he has been married to for twenty-four years; the man he loves but will no longer allow himself to hold. He must go. Dean’s grandmother, Destiny Stuttgart, or “Mimi” to Dean, has offered him a home. He will take her up on this offer. She lives in Augustus City, having moved there during the city’s rebuilding. Using her status as a founding mother, Destiny Stuttgart helped the fraught and careworn city raise itself up out of the ashes—nuclear ashes—like the phoenix reborn. Even with Mother Stuttgart’s presence, Augustus City continues to suffer the stigma of that fateful day, 6-13, when a Christian fanatic drove across the border and exploded a dirty nuclear bomb, destroying most of the city and killing Hadrian citizens in the hundreds of thousands. One victim was Dean’s best friend, Will Middleton. He had been working just south of Augustus city when the bomb exploded. Though he suffered no immediate damage, the cancer came shortly after. Years of battling the wasting disease had sucked his family of all financial resources until at last he died, leaving his son to be raised by a bitter, discontented man unable to bear the loss of his partner. And though Dean had done all within his power to protect Todd, he had failed the youth. The boy ended up suffering the same fate he had, being incarcerated in the Northeast Reeducation Camp under the tutelage of one Gideon Weller.
    And now, with all these thoughts muddied over the love he once felt forGeoffrey, Dean chooses to leave. He chooses to leave while Geoffrey is at work. He made no mention of this the night before when they had fought. His last words being “I hate you” and Geoffrey’s being “You better leave me.” And this morning when he woke up, Dean knew that was exactly what he was going to do. Blinking open his vocal contact lens, Hadrian’s main means of communication, and staying connected to the country’s information wave, Dean selects the timed pin messaging