Free The Last Uprising (Defectors Trilogy) by Tarah Benner

before they all come out.”
    Logan whipped her hair around to glare at him. “This could be our only chance to see one of these places in person. I am not going to pass this up.”
    “How do you plan on getting inside?” Roman jerked his thumb at the glass door closest to us, above which was mounted a beady black identification rover.
    Logan laughed. “One rover? Seriously? If a dozen people come out at once, there’s no way it can read them all.”
    “They don’t care about the people coming out — only the people going in.”
    “There’s got to be a service door,” said Greyson. “That’s our best bet.”  
    Logan’s eyes grew wide, looking at me and Roman with satisfaction.  
    I gave a noncommittal shrug, and Roman sighed in resignation. Even though I knew I was on the wrong side, I couldn’t deny that I was curious. I wanted to get inside that commune and see how World Corp had taken a country in crisis and made the people live cooperatively.
    Ducking behind the vans, we moved carefully along the back of the building. We’d only gone a few yards when the strong stench of decay filled my nostrils.
    “Compost heap,” muttered Greyson. “We must be near the kitchen.”
    Looking across, we could see a slope in the concrete, leading to an entrance that was not flanked by glass windows. And, just as Greyson had predicted, the steel service door did not have a rover mounted above it.
    But Logan’s eyes weren’t fixated on the entrance to the kitchen.  
    There was a loud bang, and a door farther down the building burst open. Before any of us could call to her, Logan was sprinting out from behind one of the vans, throwing herself behind an enormous generator.  
    I squinted down to the other door and saw a lanky teenager emerge from the building with his rumpled shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows. A large vent mounted on the side of the building was hissing wildly, creating a cloud of steam as the hot air was released into the cold. The boy was pushing a cart of what looked like garbage.
    “Laundry,” Logan mouthed at us. “This is it.”
    Waiting with bated breath, we watched the boy upend the contents of the cart into a dumpster. He turned back around, and Logan jumped out from her hiding place. She had her gun out, and it was pointed at the back of the boy’s head.
    I wanted to scream, but my throat had gone completely dry. He couldn’t be older than seventeen, and she was going to shoot him.  
    I watched, paralyzed, as Logan stalked him in complete silence, my muscles braced for a gunshot. But she did not shoot.  
    The boy seemed to be humming to himself, and my eyes settled on the slight bulge of his back pocket and trailed up to the headphones in his ears. Between the clatter of the cart and his music, he was blissfully unaware of the gun trained on the back of his skull.  
    My breath became more shallow as he approached the door. If he turned around, he was finished. And if Logan shot him, our advantage of stealth would be gone.
    But he did not turn around. He waved his arm in front of a scanner on the lock so it could register his CID, and he pushed the cart through the open door.  
    As agile as a cougar, Logan jumped at the closing door and stopped it with an index finger.
    “Hey!” Greyson hissed.
    While I’d been watching Logan, he had been climbing over the side of the dumpster, rummaging in the trash the boy had thrown away. I peered over the edge and saw pieces of discarded clothing mixed in with empty detergent cartons and balls of dryer lint.  
    Greyson tossed me a piece of white fabric, and I heard two shoes slap the pavement beside me. More clouds of white polyester rained from the dumpster, and I ducked behind it to change.  
    The piece of clothing Greyson had given me looked like a nurse’s dress. It was ripped under the arm and too big in the hips, but otherwise it was fine. The shoes were a fake, plasticky leather — the ugly nonslip kind I had been issued at the