Free Evadere by Sara V. Zook

through her hair and tossed it behind her back. “Well, I’ve been thinking about that.”
    “I’d like to hear this,” Rooney said in a belittling manner. “What’s your master plan for finding the castle?”
    She pressed her lips together. “That’s just it,” she told him. “I don’t think we can find the castle on our own. It’s too risky to try. We’ll be going into territory none of us are familiar with and putting our lives into serious danger.”
    “You haven’t considered yourself in serious danger at all this whole time?” Rooney asked smartly.  
    Jo ignored him. “Mostly all contributors hate us Scaves.”
    “No, all of them do,” Rooney said.
    “You’d think that, but one group isn’t as bad as the others.”
    I lowered my eyebrows. When had Jo even had the time to think about all of this? I wondered. Wasn’t she just as exhausted last night and passed right out, too?
    “Enlighten me, please,” Rooney said.
    “Every group of contributors has tried to kill me except one. Medical.”
    “Really?” Rooney ran his fingers along the tip of one of the spears he carried as we walked. “Do you know this from experience?”
    Jo nodded. “I tried to steal medicine from them once. They’re smart. They had nets set up waiting to trap me. Instead of killing me, they actually gave me the medicine I needed. See, I figure they’re this way because they save people’s lives. They strive to preserve life, even if it means the life of a Scave.”
    “Interesting,” Rooney said. “It does make sense. So say we do go and they don’t kill us. Then what?”
    Jo shrugged. “I’m not really sure.” She glanced my way. “I guess since there’s three of us, we need to make a big entrance, steal a lot . Hopefully we’ll get captured.”
    “And?” I asked, curious where this plan was leading.
    She flashed a nervous smile. “They’ll take us to the castle as captives?”
    Rooney sighed and crossed his arms. “Take us to the castle where we’ll get killed.”
    The thought of going to the castle was intriguing. I wondered how accepting of me they’d really be, these glorified contributors.  
    “We have Anna with us, a human,” she reminded him.  
    Their eyes turned to me, the alien. I took a deep breath, my nerves acting up.  
    “Yeah, and we all know how everyone feels about humans around here,” Rooney said, sarcastically. “Humans are just as bad if not more so than Scaves.”
    The label of being a human was haunting. Earth had this dirty reputation around here, and I seemed to be upholding the stereotype.  
    “Well,” Jo said, her hands resting on her hips. “Anna is my friend, human or not, and she needs to get home.”
    Rooney stood there for a few moments, his mind processing the scheme at hand and all of the possible awful scenarios that could happen as a result. Even my own mind spun with all sorts of terrible things that led to death as I wasn’t sure how I could get near, let alone trust, a contributor group to not kill us.  
    “All right,” he finally said. “Let’s go get captured.”

Chapter 6

    “Are you ready for this?” Jo whispered.
    I looked at the small Scave girl and thought what a coward I was compared to her. She was doing this all for me. She was getting nothing out of it. Oh, how I missed the normalcy of Earth, of being near Emry. Evadere was wearing on me. I was starving. I felt lethargic, as if I could just fall over. But I couldn’t whine about any of this, not to Jo or Rooney. They had been abandoned by their birth parents, taken in by the monster Karn and were true survivors by every sense of the word. They had to work for everything they ever had, which really wasn’t much. They could die right now and their lives mattered little to anyone else. They were cast away and forced to live rugged lives where life wasn’t meant to be one to enjoy, but merely to keep breathing. I couldn’t act like a spoiled human here. Not now. Not with them. Yet