Free Pawn by Aimée Carter Page B

tripped me up. It was the way she talked and formed sentences. After a week, I still didn’t have it down. When she spoke, she sounded like she had the answers to everything, and there was something about her that made even me want to follow her off a cliff. I couldn’t mimic that no matter how hard I tried.
    Celia also made the mistake of trying to teach me how to read, even though I insisted it was useless. It wasn’t that I was stupid or wasn’t trying. Letters strung together had simply never made sense to me. I knew what words meant, and because Benjy had read to me every night, I knew my favorite stories by heart. But while I had a talent for remembering what I’d heard, something about reading didn’t work in my head. Celia tried to keep her cool, but eventually she gave up.
    “I’ll record your speeches for you,” she said after a disastrous lesson using one of Lila’s favorite childhood books. “You can memorize them instead.”
    This worked for me, and once we figured it out, things gradually grew easier. Whether I liked it or not, I was slowly turning into Lila Hart.
    It took me eleven days to learn everything I needed to fool the casual observer into thinking I was Lila. Every moment I wasn’t sleeping or receiving lessons from Knox and Celia, I watched recordings of her. Speech after speech after speech, public appearances, family recordings from when she was an infant onward—by the time those eleven days were over, if there was something to know about Lila, I knew it. She didn’t eat red meat; she preferred music so old that the songs were sung by people, not by digitally created voices; her eyes never crinkled when she smiled; and according to Knox, she’d gotten that butterfly tattoo only months before she died. It had been an act of rebellion that she’d purposely revealed during a formal dinner between her uncle, her grandmother, and the leaders of foreign nations I’d never heard of. Even Celia, who stared blankly at her hands while the speeches were playing, managed a smile at the memory.
    But those were only snapshots. Glimpses of who she was. Facts. In a way, it felt like the more I learned, the less I knew her. And I was no closer to having a conversation with her than I had been before Daxton had found me.
    The speeches she gave were dangerous and full of reasons why there should be equality among the people like there had been during the early twenty-first century—when no one was marked or assigned careers, when freedom meant more than being able to walk down designated streets at night. When one person’s entire life wasn’t determined by a single test; when you had the chance to be whatever you wanted to be and live the kind of life you wanted without being told what to do. When we all had a choice. A real choice.
    My entire life, I’d been told that the ranks were there for a reason. Everyone had their place, and the only way society could function was if we all respected the system. We were all equals when we took the test, and we were all scored the same way.
    But in the speeches Lila gave, she said that the children who grew up in the neighborhoods meant for IIs and IIIs weren’t given the same opportunities as the others. At first I didn’t understand—there was only so much you could learn, right? Who cared where the schools were or what kind of supplies we had?
    And then she talked about the education the children of Vs and VIs received.
    “Some kids have tutors to help them with the test?” I said, stunned. “Isn’t that cheating?” Getting five minutes with my teachers had been next to impossible, let alone anything more. It wasn’t their fault, not really—there were dozens of us crammed into a classroom. Most days the teachers were lucky if they got everyone to shut up at the same time.
    Celia pressed a few buttons on the remote. “I wouldn’t call it cheating. It’s more...teaching to the test, shall we say?”
    “Most of the highly sought-after tutors