The Almost Girl – ebook edition Read Online Free PDF

bad.”
    Again, spoken so much like Cale. I know I shouldn’t be surprised at the similarities, but nonetheless, I am. My teeth are ground together so tightly that my jaw aches. I don’t want to feel anything for Caden other than as a means to an end. He isn’t Cale.
    “Your girlfriend isn’t a bitch?”
    A laugh. “No, she is, but Sadie’s harmless. Remind me to tell you about it later,” Caden says just as Mrs Taylor raps on her desk. There won’t be a “later” if I have anything to say about it. If our brief exchange is any indication of what the next few days will bring, I’ll watch over him from a distance. I can’t risk any rapport with him – my loyalty is to Cale, and this boy is nothing more than a target. I look away, pretending to listen to Mrs Taylor.
    Newton’s laws of motion are a familiar subject, and while it’s something that I learned long ago, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have to pay attention. I learned that lesson the hard way in Boston when I carelessly answered a question with an analysis worthy of a doctorate-level dissertation. They treated me like some kind of second-coming prodigy. Needless to say, I didn’t stay at that school too much longer. Drawing attention tended to draw other bad things… way worse things.
    Like Vectors.
    I suppress an automatic shudder, and not even the workbook equations of motion can distract me. The Vectors are one of the most-feared and worst creations of my world. They are engineered creatures, made from human corpses… reanimated dead beings with one purpose. To hunt and to kill.
    Our technology is advanced, but we learned a hard lesson with artificial intelligence centuries before. While this world was embroiled in the French Revolution, my world was facing its worst crisis in history – the Tech War – a war that had devastated us to the point that topographical boundaries had been unrecognizable and continents reshaped. Whole oceans were destroyed. What had once been lush forests were now dusty plains of gray acid ash. Parts of my world are still black and oozing with toxic matter. But people survived, eventually reclaiming and rebuilding what they could.
    The Vectors were a new kind of soldier, created after the laws were put in place against any kind of self-evolving robotic intelligence. Nanogen technology became the perfect combination of programmable robotics and human genetics, and the Vectors were bred to supplement human loss, to protect and defend those who survived. They had been the brilliantly sick creation of a madman.
    My father.
    “You OK?” Caden whispers, distracting me. “You look ill.”
    “I’m fine.”
    But I’m not fine. Everything inside of me feels like it’s on fire. My ribs are splintering with alternating bands of hot and cold surging like rotating tides. There’s a strange buzzing sensation in my head, and I can feel myself becoming light-headed and fuzzy with each passing second. What the hell is happening to me?
    “Riven, can you hear me? Riven!”
    Caden’s face swims blurrily into my vision. And then it’s Cale’s. I reach toward him but he fades away, and I am left alone, terrified. There is nothing but darkness and the faces of the Vectors, inexorably closing in.
     
    When I awaken this time, I am lying in a sterile room with metal leads stuck to my chest and plastic tubing stretching across my face. White light stabs into my eyes and I lurch upright. Panicked, I pull against the tubes and wiring only to cause a frantic beeping. Someone in a white coat rushes into the room, and I shrink back, hands protectively curled in front of my chest.
    “It’s OK, Riven, it’s OK. Calm down, you’re safe. It’s me, June.” Caden’s aunt is standing next to me, a soft smile on her face. “We really need to stop meeting like this,” she says as she checks the monitor and replaces the oxygen tubing under my nose.
    “Where am I? What happened?”
    “You went into circulatory shock and you