The Change (Unbounded) Read Online Free PDF

also comforted me, and I let several long seconds pass before I moved away.
    “One of the first things you might have noticed,” he said, “is that you don’t feel hunger anymore. Your body will absorb sustenance from the world around you. Like you did with my curequick in the coffin.”
    So much for thinking my lack of appetite these past months was because I was too busy with Tom and Justine to care about food. “Obnoxious name,” I said. “Curequick.”
    He laughed. “You name it then.”
    “Maybe I will. So are you saying we don’t eat?”
    “Oh, we eat.” Cort looked amused. “When we do, our bodies absorb less around us. But we don’t need to eat. Of course, that doesn’t stop some of us from overeating anyway.”
    “He’s talking about Laurence,” Stella said, glancing at me before typing something on her keyboard. Her woven metal crown lay discarded on the desk, and I could see tiny metal probes jutting wickedly from nearly the entire inner circumference. Definitely not a sound device. Maybe it recorded brain waves.
    I glanced at what she’d written but it was in some kind of computer code and didn’t mean anything to me. “Who’s Laurence?”
    “Laurence is one of us—the newest besides you.” She looked around the warehouse. “Most of these crates are for his paper business.”
    “He hates that being Unbounded messes up his eating urges,” Cort added. “So he pretends it doesn’t. On the bright side, he’s an excellent cook.”
    “Ah, an overweight stepbrother,” I said. “But still family.”
    Cort nodded. “Something like that.”
    “Maybe he’s happy the way he is.” I’d always been a sucker for the underdog. Maybe I felt an affinity with them because I was there so often myself.
    Stella smiled and the effect was powerful. Even with minimal makeup, every feature was perfect, from her wide brown eyes and high cheek bones to her sculptured eyebrows and smooth golden skin. She had good genes, or maybe an excellent plastic surgeon. “Laurence is happy. Besides, it’s not as if the weight is physically unhealthy for him, though the extra pounds would make him vulnerable in an attack.”
    “Attack?”
    “From the Emporium.”
    “Ava was talking about them earlier. Sounds like some kind of retail conglomerate.”
    She shook her head. “They own a slew of retail businesses, to be sure, but they’re a group of Unbounded like us, except they have a completely different agenda.”
    “They’re bad guys.” Cort leaned forward, resting his elbows on the armrests of his chair and rubbing his hands together as if anticipating his tale. “Basically there are two types of Unbounded—our people and the Emporium. We allow regular humans—mortals—to live their lives as they choose, interfering only to make their lives better. Almost every medical and technological advance since the Renaissance can be traced to our Unbounded. On the other hand, the Emporium doesn’t share what it learns. Their people use medicine and technology to gain money and power. They meddle constantly in politics and aren’t above making certain people disappear—permanently. Their stated goal is to create a utopia for all humans, mortal and Unbounded.”
    “Utopia doesn’t sound bad,” I ventured.
    Stella snorted and even that was attractive in her. “They can succeed only by severely limiting freedom, and that is never justifiable.”
    “Yet Emporium Unbounded would say they protect more people than we do.” Cort pierced me with his blue eyes, as if challenging me to make a judgment call.
    “They want to set themselves up as gods,” Stella retorted.
    Cort shrugged. “You have to admit that living so long does make us seem almost like deity. People have worshipped far worse.”
    “The Emporium will do anything to control the world,” Stella said, ignoring Cort’s last comment, “and they almost succeeded with the Greeks and Romans. Basically our job is to block their politics where we can