Free Safe (The Shielded Series Book 1) by Christine DePetrillo Page A

Probably not since she was a little girl and her parents owned a cottage
in Maine on a gorgeous lake. They’d spent summers there. She, Deo, and Dixon
were wild children, running free—and often barefoot—through the grass, playing
hide-and-seek in the woods, swimming like fish in the refreshing waters of the
lake.
    That seems so long ago.
    She felt as if she’d lived a hundred lifetimes since those carefree days
when she had her whole family together and survival wasn’t her main goal. Back
then, she and her brothers had been invincible. Now every day brought more
challenges to her existence such as what they were going to eat next, staying
plague-free, catching the next person to go crazy on the streets, protecting
genius doctors from people that wanted to kill them. Deo and Dixon had been
cheated out of their futures too. Shit, she missed them.
    Zeke turned around and gave her a smile.
    At least I have him. And Ghared. She had people. She wasn’t
totally alone. Sometimes, however, when she stared at the cracked ceiling in
her tiny bedroom at night, she felt alone and burdened.
    And furious.
    She hated what her life had become. She hated that Zeke had to live in
the world that now existed. She hated that she didn’t have time to do anything
else but hunt down bad guys or, as in the case right now, protect what appeared
to be the good guy. She hated that there wasn’t anything else to do anyway. She
hated that everything had depended so heavily on technology that one flick of
the proverbial switch had upended the entire globe. She hated that people were
dying because some crazy chemist had a warped mission of cleansing and
restarting the human population.
    She hated that sometimes she thought his mission wasn’t a bad idea.
    “Can you get us lower?” Foster asked, leaning toward Ghared. “I’ll be
able to pick out my property if we’re a little closer to the ground.”
    She looked out the window again. Every once and a while, a break in the
treetops indicated cleared land. Off to the east, mountains pointed up at the
hovercopter, and Darina had an urge to climb to the top of one and scream her
lungs out. Maybe then she’d be rid of the perpetual frustration swirling inside
her.
    “Descending,” Ghared said. “Zeke, what do you have on radar? Anyone
following us?”
    Darina smiled. Though Ghared wasn’t a cop, he thought like one. Actually,
he thought like a soldier—and a tech geek—and that was even better sometimes.
She was glad to have him as backup on this assignment that had become much more
than an easy paycheck.
    She probably should have let Emerge Tech take care of its own people. The
huge company had been under fire for erecting its walls and seemingly shutting
out the outside world, but Darina knew its employees were working on solutions.
They couldn’t do that if the plague reached them. They couldn’t do that if they
didn’t have labs to work in. They couldn’t do that on broken down city streets.
She was probably one of the few people who got it. That didn’t mean she liked
it. The idea of rich bastards and bitches living the high life while she and
the rest of the regular folk lived like homeless wretches didn’t sit well in
her stomach.
    But if they can bring change for the better…
    If they could do that, they’d be an answer to a prayer.
    “No one is following us,” Zeke reported, a note of confidence in his
voice. Flying with Ghared always made him happy. The kid was good at it too. 
    “There.” Foster shot his arm into the front between Ghared and Zeke’s
seats. “To the northwest. See that open patch and the lake?”
    “Got it. Can I land in the open patch?” Ghared asked.
    “Yes.”
    Darina pushed closer to her window. She squinted at parallel lines etched
into multiple fields adjacent to the open patch. “Are those… are those rows of
crops?” She turned back to Foster to see him smiling.
    He waved his hands, wiggling his fingers. “Be prepared to be shocked