Free The v Girl by Mya Robarts Page A

but I never get full. At least Olmo is eating better, although he has got this habit of eating only a part of the chocolate bars Aleksey brings him. Olmo saves the rest in his emergency backpack.
    I could use one of those bars at the moment. My stomach growls as I walk down the winding damaged streets toward the museum.
    Poncho growls when we reach Exodus Street where some Accord cops are drinking. One of them, Gary Sleecket, leers at me as blatantly as usual. “Why so lonely, pretty?” he shouts before they burst into laughter. I ignore them, hurrying my way to TCR headquarters. I haven’t been there since my seduction failure, and I’m dreading being that close to Rey again.
    Buck Weaver founded The Comanche Resistance after he came across some solar e-readers at the museum ruins. He used them to learn survival and fighting skills, and secretly shared what he was learning with his most trusted friends, including a fourteen-year-old Rey. As they got stronger they started to scheme acts of opposition like hiding provisions and specially sabotage against the Patriot trains. Only a dozen of us remain because TCR has lost members to recruitment. We don’t have decent weapons, and if the local government discovered us, we’d be executed.
    I take a deep breath before entering the training room.
    “Hey! You’re back!” says Duque, pulling me into his arms. I smile widely. It’s good to know at least someone missed me. I missed you, too, Duque. He leads me to the place where his fiancée Veronica is talking to Cara Winston and her daughter, Holly, but I’m not in the mood to join the conversation.
    “It’s too bad the law doesn’t permit me to take her place,” Cara says grimly. Unlike me, Holly hopes to marry a local boy one day. If she survives recruitment and plays her V-card, she’ll find a husband quickly. Like her mom, she’s slim and blonde. Just the kind of girl Starville bachelors prefer. And unfortunately soldiers.
    The mirrors are still where I put them. Luke Rivers is already warming up in front of them, his straight black hair falling on his forehead and framing his almond-shaped eyes. Rey trusts him, but I don’t understand why he’s here. The Rivers are one of the few Starville families with enough resources to bribe the local authorities to make them ineligible for recruitment.
    My heart skips a beat when I see Rey. I never felt like this before around him, but butterflies are somersaulting in my stomach. He greets me stiffly. Can it get more awkward between us? Something about the way he looks at the mirrors tells me he’s thinking about the last time we were here together.
    I can’t stand the awkwardness so I leave the room to enter an adjoining room in which the roof has collapsed. The sunlight blinds me for a moment.
    Nats first and later Patriots used this room to behead their enemies. The room’s tragic past and the strange sounds heard at night are the reason for the rumors of a haunted museum. Here, Mathew Berkley is using a highly illegal object: our very outdated solar gadget. On sunny days, it gives us limited access to the wired.
    “No news on Midian?” I ask. Up until the night of the air-raid, we kept contact with Midian’s resistance.
    He shakes his head. “We haven’t received pigeons either. Fanny has been praying for their souls.”
    Fanny is Mathew’s pregnant wife. At twenty-two, Mathew’s been married for six years and is expecting his second child. Starvillers think getting engaged at thirteen and married at sixteen is natural. It isn’t. It’s an aftereffect of war and recruitment.
    I throw some bread crumbs to the floor whistling “The Dove,” my dad’s favorite song. Mathew joins me. Our messenger doves magically appear and fight for the bread crumbs. Most gadgets are traceable, but a trained dove delivers the message only to someone who knows the password. We write in codes that later translate into the Comanche language.
    When I return to the mirror room,