Free The Defectors (Defectors Trilogy) by Tarah Benner Page A

me watching him with apprehension.  
    “What are you doing here?” he repeated.
    I sighed. Clearly he was not going to let me go until I gave him some explanation.  
    “I need food,” I said. “I’ve been traveling for days, and I’m starving. Literally.”
    His expression cleared a little, but he still wasn’t satisfied. “Why were you traveling on the trail? You were headed east. Are you lost?”
    “No,” I said, the offense registering in my voice.  
    “So you’ve defected.”
    I swallowed, unwilling to admit anything. It could all be a setup.
    He read the conflict in my eyes. “I’m taking you in to the others. You seem pretty harmless, to be honest,” he said with a grimace, flipping over Greyson’s knife and sticking it in his back pocket. “But it’s not up to me.”
    “Others?” I asked, ignoring his insult. “What others?” My fear and curiosity were fighting for dominance.
    “We decide everything as a group. We have to consider what’s best for everyone.”
    “Decide what?”
    He sighed, looking a little irritated by all my questions. “Whether you’re too big of a liability to keep around.”
    I was starting to panic a little when the inside of his forearm caught my eye.  
    “What happened to your CID?” I asked, grabbing his arm. On the inside of his forearm, instead of a clean, square scar, he had a long jagged X-shaped scar the size of a silver dollar.
    He yanked his arm away and stared me down. “I cut it out.”  
    “Je-sus.”
    He nodded darkly, as if that was the reaction he wanted. “Had to get off the grid somehow. Don’t get too attached to yours. If we let you stay, it will have to go.”  
    I shivered.
    He held up my arm to examine it and let it flop down beside me. My skin tingled where he gripped it.
    “Come on.”  
    He jumped up and yanked me roughly to my feet. He stood about a head taller than me and had a viselike grip on my arm. I squirmed, my head spinning again now that I was standing on two feet. He looked at me with wary eyes.
    “What happened to you?” he asked, his eyes traveling from my cut-up wrists to my bloody head wound.
    “Nothing. I’m just . . .” I stopped to take a breath, “starved.” I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, willing the pounding in my head to stop.
    He let out an exasperated breath and pulled me along like a prisoner he might force to walk the plank.
    “Who is ‘we’?” I asked again, thinking a few questions wouldn’t make or break my chance of survival. “Who lives here?”
    He ignored my questions. “Do you think anyone’s out looking for you . . .?” He trailed off.
    “Haven,” I said.  
    “Is that a fake name, or are you still using your old one?”  
    I felt a sting of irritation. “That’s my real name. And nobody’s looking for me,” I lied. My heart sank as I spoke the words.  
    “Just as well,” he muttered, and there was a dark edge to the way he said it.
    “What’s your name?” I asked. Now I was just buying time.
    He looked at me with suspicion. “Amory.”
    “Is that your real name?”
    “About as real as yours will be once your ID’s gone,” he said, waving his scarred arm with that crooked grin. It was strange, but I could see that he was actually very handsome despite the threatening tone of his voice. Maybe the loss of blood was making me hallucinate.  
    For a while, I couldn’t hear anything except the crunch of our feet on the gravel as he led me around the field to a cluster of trees.
    “Do you live here?” I asked, peering over the trees at the roof of the farmhouse.
    “Sort of.”
    “Where did you live before you went off the grid?”
    Amory didn’t turn to look at me. I could tell he was trying to avoid answering my questions. I was, after all, his prisoner.  
    “I try not to think about it,” he muttered. “I can’t go back anyway, so what’s the point?”
    That hit home. I thought back to my parents’ house and my own apartment in Columbia. My old