Free A World of Ash: The Territory 3 by Justin Woolley

birds in the Center for Disease Control but Squid knew they wouldn’t be able to get them. They wouldn’t be able to get back inside. He could feel the key around his neck bouncing gently against his skin as the Holy Order led them away. He should have given it to Ernest and told him how to use it to get inside the dome, because at least then Ernest could collect more of the vaccine. He would have if he’d known what was going to happen. Now, as he was dragged forward and the coarse rope burned his wrists, he couldn’t even raise his hands to his neck and he couldn’t risk saying anything otherwise the Holy Order would take it for themselves.
    “Ernest!” he called. “Don’t try and go back. You can’t get—”
    Squid heard the crack against his cheek less like an audible sound and more like a reverberation inside his head. He was on the ground, his knees and forearms in the dirt, pain blooming from where he’d been struck. The sandy soil beneath him was similar to that of his uncle’s farm. When you looked at it up close you noticed how what seemed to be a vast unending blanket of red was really made up of many millions and millions of grains of different colors, red, orange, brown, gold, all blending together. There was a lesson in that, he was sure, something he should remember: that no matter how different people were, when enough of them got together they all seemed the same, or maybe they were all made to be the same.
    Squid heard shouting. It was Nim. He tried to return his focus to the scene around him. It was only when he saw the Holy Order clergyman standing over him brandishing his mechanical rifle, the butt end pointed down at Squid, that he realized he must have been hit in the face with it.
    “Get up!”
    As the clergyman with the rope pulled hard, Squid felt his elbows yanked out from under him. His face landed in the dirt.
    “Leave him alone!” Nim yelled. “He can’t get up if you do that!” He was trying to reach down and help Squid but as the rope was pulled again Nim’s hands were tugged away.
    Squid felt the clergyman lifting him roughly back to his feet. He looked behind them. Ernest and the Reach Border Patrol were watching, but they weren’t moving. They didn’t do anything as Squid and Nim were led out past the low-roofed buildings of the outpost toward a waiting bio-truck, where they were loaded onto bench seats in the back and, sitting among the red-cloaks, were driven away, headed back to the subterranean prison of Pitt.

CHAPTER 9
    Lynn leaned back against the cold and slightly wet wall of her cell. She looked up and felt a drip land on her forehead just above her right eye. Staring at the stone ceiling she watched another drip form, a glistening protrusion of water that grew slowly until its own weight pulled it away from the rock and it dropped down through the air and landed on her skin in the exact same place as the first. The water pumped around the building must have been leaking from the pipes, she thought, and working its way through the spaces in the stone.
    Once, before all this, she had lived in a wealthy household. She had lived in the kind of house that could only be afforded by the very rich or, in the case of her father, those in the government. Back then she’d had access to what she’d thought was an endless supply of water and mechanical energy. She could remember her father lecturing her for wasting both from time to time, but she’d never really thought about it. She’d never wanted for anything. Now, as she watched the water leak through the walls of the cathedral, she felt anger at the waste and excess. There were people outside the walls of Alice who barely had enough to drink and yet here in the Cathedral of Glorious God the Redeemer, the heart of the Church that claimed to protect those people, there was such disdain for the needs of others that water was left to leak down the walls of a prison cell.
    The stone around her was thick and the door was