Free State of Chaos (Collapse Series) by Summer Lane Page A

“borrow” oranges. The less people know, the better. The more people who know your secrets, the higher the potential for them to betray you.
    “Well, I’m effectively scared,” Harry replies.
    “Who knows if somebody’s really even stealing from her?” I say. “She could have made up the whole story just to put everybody on edge. To keep us all on our best behavior.”
    Harry shrugs.
    “It’s possible, I suppose.”
    Yeah. It’s possible.
    I concentrate on eating my food. It feels like everybody is watching me, waiting for me to give myself away. It’s miserable. It’s the prison camp environment. Nobody trusts anybody else, and everyone’s afraid of being stabbed in the back.
    Maybe I was right.
    Maybe this is a lot more like high school than I thought.

Chapter Six
    Four weeks in a labor camp is enough to make anyone grouchy. My clothes are worn through with holes and my body is coated with a thick layer of dirt. I’m slowly starving, dehydrated, lonely, scared and desperate to escape. The only problem is, there isn’t any easy way out of this stupid camp.
    Thirty days of observation has only told me two things that
might
be considered a weakness:
                      1. Even with all of the trucks and plumbing Omega has inside the school complex, the portable generators that they’ve installed isn’t enough to keep all the lights in the camp running. The back stretch of the fence is dark, but as far as I can tell, heavily patrolled.
                      2. Grease, the Omega soldier with the bad hair, seems to have gained sympathy for Sophia and I. He might come in handy.
                      3. I’vepretty much got the routine of the guards figured out, and I know which troopers are lazier or less intelligent than the rest.
    Omega is armed, powerful and dangerous. I, on the other hand, am tired, tiny and afraid. There’s nothing I can do. Omega never slips up. They don’t leave weapons lying around for me to steal. They don’t leave stretches of the fence unguarded. They’re on top of everything, and Kamaneva is on top of everybody in Group 13. The woman has gotten considerably crueler in the last couple of weeks. She’s started daily torture treatments and public punishments to keep the workforce under control. Every once in a while one of the officers will round up the prisoners, grab a worker for a real or imagined violation of a regulation, and beat or execute them on the spot.
    It keeps everybody in line.
    Omega has moved us from orange fields to empty fields. They’re making us prepare for planting, although I’m not sure what we’re going to plant yet. I’m guessing it will be somethinghigh in nutritional value. Something to keep an army going. And judging by the amount of prisoners being brought in and forced to work, I’m guessing Omega is planning on hosting a whole lot of troops. Soon.
    That’s not a rosy prospect.
    Everybody has a different idea about who Omega is, why they’re here, and what they want. In my opinion, it’s really not that much of a mystery anymore. Omega is a cover name to keep us confused. Global forces are involved. There’s no other explanation. They need slave labor to keep the invading troops fed, and who better than to provide that kind of work than people like me?
    But what is their final goal? What’s the point of this invasion?
    Power, wealth or greed, probably. The usual suspects. Besides. Who wouldn’t want to take down the United States, right?
    “If you ever get the chance to escape,” I tell Sophia and Harry over dinner one night, “take it. Don’t wait for anybody else. Don’t think. Just go. Take the opportunity.”
    “I couldn’t leave without you,” Sophia says firmly.
    I close my eyes, because I don’t believe that. In the end, it all comes down to self-preservation. If Sophia saw an opening to escape, she’d take it without looking back. So would Harry.
    And so would I.
    Wouldn’t I?