Free The Society (A Broken World Book 1) by Dean Murray

weapon—one that will buy us time to bootstrap ourselves up to a point where we can beat them."
    He needed a better speech. There was no telling how often he'd practiced it out here in front of his shining gates with a score of heavily armed men at his back, but no amount of polishing was going to make this particular pitch workable. He'd lost all of his listeners right then and there.
    Even the most angry, revenge-driven grubber knew better than to provoke the Society. For decades we'd laid siege to their cities, containing the infestation that they represented. They couldn't beat us, and their plan to stand against us was exactly the reason that I'd been sent to this city.
    I'd been nervous about going into the compound. I couldn't go back to the Society—not without succeeding in my mission—but even being forced to live like a grubber wasn't as bad as being unmasked as an agent of the Society. They wouldn't just kill me, they would torture me to death.
    That nervousness disappeared as I heard him admit that they had a weapon they were going to use against the Society, against my home. He'd used the wrong recruitment speech for a grubber, but he'd used exactly the right one to get an operative from the Society to sign onto his little endeavor.
    I stepped to the front of the crowd.
    "Where do I sign up?"
     
     

Chapter 7
     
    The foreman was thrilled. My offer to join was the first crack in the dam that had been holding the rest of the grubbers back from signing up. It took a few more minutes, but by the end, he had the pick of the crowd. He turned away anyone obviously sick or otherwise unable to work, and still had more than enough volunteers to fill out the five positions he was recruiting for.
    We were escorted inside of the compound and a few seconds later the gates were locked again and there was no hope of escape. I wasn't sure what to expect after that. Back home, there would have been psych studies and aptitude tests to determine our strengths and qualifications. No matter his delusions of grandeur, Brennan didn't have access to that kind of technology and resources.
    Instead of undergoing testing to determine where we would be most useful, we were taken to the dormitories and assigned a bunk and a footlocker for our belongings. I spent the entire trip trying to stop my nervousness from showing.
    This was a particularly critical time in the insertion phase. The few remaining items in my waist pouch were all fairly innocuous—other than the special transmitter that was my only way to radio my handler back home.
    The device had been engineered to look like nothing more than a piece of scrap metal, but that wasn't a guarantee that it wouldn't result in my death if someone saw it. Back among Piter's men there had been a chance that whoever saw it wouldn't realize what they were looking at, but this was most definitely not Piter's territory, and for all of his foolishness when it came to announcing Brennan's intention to fight the Society, the foreman wasn't uneducated.
    I kept my eyes peeled on the trip from the gate to the dormitory hoping I would see a place to stash the transmitter, but didn't have any such luck. I wouldn't have been able to secret it while being accompanied by the foreman, three guards, and my four fellow conscripts, but it still would have been nice to know that I had a plan.
    The dormitory was likewise no good. The foreman gave us a couple of minutes to stow any belongings in our lockers, but I wasn't stupid enough to think that anything left there would be safe. The lockers might be proof against the rest of the dormitory's residents, but they wouldn't stop Brennan's security people, and that was the first place I would look if I was one of the people he probably had tasked to find spies among his new recruits.
    A few minutes after our arrival at the dorms, we headed back outside. It wasn't until we were leaving that I finally realized that the building housing the dorms was new