Free Fervor by Chantal Boudreau

it’s not like you could stop him.”
    “ Why...because I’m a girl?” Fiona thought, with a hint of disgust. “Nathan may be able to out-muscle Royce, but I have my own ways of dealing with him. You have a lot to learn, little boy. You only learned what the minders and teachers chose for you to know. They left out a lot, believe me. Like a real family? To you, a real family is a minder and one or more children. That’s not a real family, Sam. You’ve never experienced one of those. Most of the children on this island either never did, or they don’t remember what it’s like. The only ones who could possibly recall what proper life was like are the Bigs, and for the most part, their mind doesn’t allow them to go that far back. I’m one of the exceptions. We weren’t supposed to remember, you know. We were too little ourselves at the time. They did that on purpose, I think, because they wanted us to be too young to remember. I was only two when they brought us over to Fervor. I remember anyway. The place that they brought us from, most children had parents, a mother and a father, and some children had siblings, brothers and sisters. I had parents, too, but something bad had happened to them. That’s why I ended up with the people who brought us to Fervor. They did some testing on children like us, who had lost our family and who were young enough. The ones that had whatever it was that they were looking for ended up here. I still recall the very long hover trip that it took to get here.”
    “ You remember? But that must have been more than ten years ago!” Sam exclaimed. “How could you possibly remember?”
    “ You have your gift, and I have mine, Sam. I remember things that I shouldn’t. I always have. I’ve never forgotten anything that anyone ever told me, and I can leaf through my memories like paging through a book. Of course, it got even better after I became Connected. Now I can touch on other people’s memories from time to time and add them to my own collection,” she admitted.
    “ Wow. So that’s what it means to be a Keeper. That explains why they chose you to maintain the buildings and to work the things that need magic. You remember any magic that the minders and teachers used in front of you. What about the hovers? Shouldn’t you be able to use them?” he questioned. She firmed up her walls a little at this, becoming somewhat resistant to his prying. He had touched on something that she didn’t like, another morsel of evidence suggesting that they had been manipulated towards this event from the very start.
    “ We lived within walking distance of the school. The few times that I ever rode in one, Martha, my minder, made sure that I was distracted when she got it going. Not that it really matters. I couldn’t use that magic even if I did remember it, Sam. Francis made it clear to me that using the hovers was forbidden by the Directives. Whoever did this to us, whoever brought us here, they don’t want us leaving Fervor. At least, they intend on keeping us here as long as it suits their purposes, whatever those happen to be.”
    Fiona grimaced as she mentioned the Teller’s name, her animosity towards him completely undisguised. It was not the same as Royce’s anger towards Sam. It was more on the basis of the girl’s perspective of an ethical stance on the Teller’s part. She didn’t fault Francis for her current circumstances, but she did see him as being cruel for withholding information.
    “ You can’t keep blaming Francis for all of this, Fiona. He’s just as stuck as we are. They’ve forced him to do the things that he does just as much as they have the rest of us. They just happened to have chosen the Tellers as their mouthpieces,” Sam argued in Francis’s defence. “None of us volunteered for this, it was thrust upon him just as much as upon you and me. They didn’t bring all of us here either. The Littles – they made us for this.”
    “ Made you? What do you