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  The Circadia Chronicles: GOVERN

  The Circadia Chronicles, Volume 2

  Heather Heckadon

  Published by Bold & Bound Publishing, 2019.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  THE CIRCADIA CHRONICLES: GOVERN

  First edition. May 14, 2019.

  Copyright © 2019 Heather Heckadon.

  Written by Heather Heckadon.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also By Heather Heckadon

  Dedication

  GOVERN | Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  To Shayne: I'll be your warrior forever, even after.

  GOVERN

  Chapter One

  The woods looked to be miles away, but I ran as an army of nearly three hundred men chased me. My feet pounded hard on the dirt. Sweat streamed down my face. Breaths came rapid and shallow, as legs powered through the pain. “Stop!” they yelled, but I kept running. The axe in my hand was heavy, but I held on.

  The tree line was fast approaching, which would provide me with a chance to get ahead. I knew these woods better than anyone behind me, that was for damn sure. As I glided in under the canopy of the trees, quiet overtook me. The chaos of the outside world felt like it faded away, but I knew better. The tall purple trees and enormous roots on the ground were both cover and obstacles I needed to maneuver around and over. I continued forward even though I heard the men following me stop to conspire at the edge of the field, their voices carrying through the trees.

  Night began to fall, and the leaves of the trees made dusk even darker. Shadows crept from the trees, urging me to stay alert. My run had slowed to a quick sneak. If I couldn’t hear my footsteps, then neither could they. Keeping my breathing quiet and my eyes wide open, I made good time through the vast timber.

  I kept my ears open for my friends, my colleagues. I knew that some of them had escaped the takeover, so I didn’t doubt that they’d be hiding in these woods, trying to escape the pre-determined fate the new world leader planned for us. My eyes darted back and forth searching for any sign of movement, but I never saw one.

  After an hour of trucking along, I crouched beside one of the large tree trunks and sat quietly as I listened for any footsteps or whispers. I heard nothing. Absolute silence. I waited another hour. If someone was going to be heard, it would be now. People are prone to noise and folly, especially when they think they are on the offensive, so I waited. Still nothing.

  I stood, then turned and saw a silhouette in the about three trees behind me. A man. “Garrett?” I asked. Hoping that it was him, I walked forward, but he said nothing in return. I slipped my axe down and behind me so it wasn’t shown to the person standing in front of me. “Hello? It’s okay, they’re gone.” As I walked closer, the face became more pronounced, and the hair color more prominent. The red hair struck me first, then the glaring eyes. It was Smith.

  “Hello, Aella,” he said.

  “How did you find me?” I asked.

  “Wasn’t hard,” he said. “When we reached the woods, I knew you would try to outsmart us. Told them to let me go on my own, so I followed you. I thought I lost you for a moment, but I waited. Waited a very long time, and just when I was ready to give up, you stood and looked around.” He smiled at the ground until his eyes shot up to meet mine. “I’m sorry about what happened back there.”

  I gritted my teeth together until I was able to speak. “You killed Idris. You killed our leader. He was the only one in this whole process who gave a damn about us, and you betrayed him. You betrayed us.”

  “When you say it like that, it sounds awful,” he said, as he clutched his chest. “I’m not the bad guy in this, Aella. You know that. We’re friends.”

  “Were. We were friends. That ended about two hours ago,” I said.

  “Well, if we weren’t friends, I would have had all the crews come out here to collect you, but I thought I should give you a chance. You can still be part of this world, a big part, just like you wanted. You could probably even be a level two citizen with the right recommendation,” he said, obviously in love with himself. “Maybe we could even make this work, right?”

  “Make what work?” I asked.

  “You and me. Now that Garrett’s out of the picture...”

  My heart raced and my face turned hot. “What did you do to him?” I screamed. “Where is he?”

  “Calm down, he’ll be fine. As long as you cooperate,” Smith said.

  The axe in my hand dropped a little behind my right leg, ready to swing. “I will never be what you want me to be. I will never work for Leslie. I will never want you and I will never stop trying to kill you,” I said as I swung the axe up. The heaviness in my hands turned to power as it arched over my head to deliver the wrath of its weight and my force on Smith.

  His hand rose and caught the axe handle, and instantaneously the momentum of the weapon came to a stop. “I don’t think so,” he said, ripping the axe from my grasp.

  “Guys!” he announced to the empty woods. “Come get her!” Three-hundred strong appeared from behind the shadows of the trees. Some tried to stay hidden, keeping cover, but it was obvious. The whole crew was out there. Two large men latched onto my arms and shoved me to my knees to await Smith’s interrogation. He brushed off his shirt where dirt from the axe had fallen onto him and fixed his hair. Walking over to me, he came inches from my face and said, “Guess you don’t really have a choice, do you? Now, where are your friends?”

  “You followed me out here. You know I don’t know,” I spat back.

  “I have a pretty good idea that you’ve been coming out here for a while, am I right? I’m guessing you all have this fun little spot that everyone goes to, to get away from it all. Right?” His piercing eyes drilled into mine.

  “Smith, I swear if I knew where they were—which I don’t—I wouldn’t lead you to them.”

  One of the crew members who was holding onto my arm spoke up. “You think she’s lying? They’ve gotta be out here somewhere. We watched a hundred people run into these woods and you’re telling me they’re all gone, now? I don’t think so,” he said.

  Smith barked back at him, “Well, do you see them anywhere?”

  The man cowered away and returned to his duties.

  Smith returned his gaze to me and worked his jaw back and forth. “Aella, I’m going to give you one last chance. Tell me where they are.”

  “I really have no idea. I swear.”

  “Fine, then. Let’s go have a chat with Leslie, see what he thinks.”

  Chapter Two

  The two large men grabbed my arms and pulled me to my feet. As we walked through the woods toward the open fields, I stole one glance back toward the depths of the darkness, searching for a hundred people who seemed to have vanished, only to be met with disappointment. I wondered what awaited me back at camp. Smith said he was taking me to see Leslie, the director of the reality TV show that brought us to Circadia. The same man who came to visit shortly after Earth’s demise, and took over our planet. He’d left millions of people on Earth to die in exchange for money, and he didn’t seem to care. Yet, here I was, being dragged to an audience with the man I hated most.

  Leslie was the director of ‘Grow.’ During one of
Earth’s darkest moments, a crowdfunding effort led by him sent a reality TV show to the new world that had entered our orbit. Funds to visit Earth’s new neighbor were quickly raised. Everyone was led to believe science was at the heart of the mission. We quickly realized soon after, though, that Circadia’s colonists—us—were only sent to the new planet to make Leslie money. We were ill-prepared and ill-informed. That didn’t stop him or Earth’s leaders from using us as a refugee camp when Earth’s nuclear powers collided, and it didn’t stop him from charging people billions of dollars for a ticket to Circadia to escape their fate on Earth. Leslie was an evil, manipulative person who had stolen away everything I loved.

  Smith led the way through the dark fields toward the camp, which was lit by the power we created. I could see it was much more empty than usual. My heart sank a little, knowing that it was my friends who were missing from the picture. Each step I took broke my heart.

  When we approached the camp, Smith dashed forward to speak with Leslie alone. The men holding me stopped just out of hearing range of the conversation. I did my best to watch their lips, trying to determine each word, to no avail. When they noticed my intent scrutiny the conversation abruptly stopped. When Smith returned, he winked at me then ordered the men to take me to the gathering area. I fought their efforts, but it was useless. My options were walk, or be dragged. After moving about twenty feet to the left and around a few huts, we reached the dusty location known as the gathering area.

  They shoved me to the ground. I landed on my hands and knees. Pain spiked through my palms and wrists as they caught most of the force. I looked down at my stinging hands to see blood mixing with the dirt and tiny specks of rock from the ground. Tears pricked at my eyes, but I quickly shunted them away. I didn’t want the others to see any weakness. Even if the only emotions I was capable of feeling at the moment were anger and weakness. Powerless, maybe. The two men on either side of me didn’t make a move, just stood ready. Smith sat on the ground near me, also waiting. The group was quiet, but I heard footsteps swooshing through the grass toward the gathering place. When I looked up, I saw boots crushing the flower weed underneath them. As my gaze rose further, Leslie’s smile gleamed back at me.

  His blonde comb-over was a mess from the recent debacle but his clothes looked clean and pressed. Even on Circadia where most of us made use of very little and lived simple lives, Leslie lived high on the hog. Lavish housing, unlimited food, and a lack of labor had treated him well. He actually looked comfortable in his skin, in contrast to the rest of our skeleton-like bodies.

  “Aella, I’m so glad we found you,” he said. “Out of all the talent we’ve acquired in the short amount of time we’ve had control, I am most excited to have you on board. I mean, you treated me so well when I first got here, right?”

  I remembered driving my fist into his face over and over. Just the thought gave me some relief, but not enough. What I wouldn’t do to punch your stupid face in right now, I thought. I wished I hadn’t stopped hitting him before. I wouldn’t have, if I’d known what was going to happen.

  He continued in the voice he so much loved to hear. “I gave all of this to you. To all of you—and this is how you repay me?”

  “Why couldn’t you be happy with your fair share? You could have lived in harmony with us. Why kill Idris?” My eyes bulged out of my head as I spoke. I tried to keep a steady tone, but it was impossible. My voice came out crackly and hoarse. I was letting my emotions get the best of me. Once I stopped to wait for a reply, I drew a deep breath to calm myself.

  His words sounded more like a growl as they left his lips. “My fair share is more than yours, and don’t you ever forget it. I worked tooth and nail to get you here, do you understand that? This is mine! This is all mine.” He calmed himself and inhaled deeply. “As for Idris, the man tried to cause trouble with his superiors.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means he tried to tell me what I could and couldn’t do on my planet. He needed to be taught a lesson. When he wouldn’t take it, I made an example of him,” he said.

  “This is not your planet, Leslie. All you did was make a martyr of him. People loved Idris. You’ll pay for what you’ve done here, I promise you,” I said.

  Not a second later, I felt the sting of his hand across my face. My head snapped sideways and my jaw ached. I was already exhausted, and the pain heightened the fatigue.

  “You do not speak to me like that, do you understand? You’re in my world, now. you play by my rules, sweetheart,” he said as he flicked the tip of my nose. “Take her away, put her with the others.” I stared at the ground, broken. “And by the way, Aella, your friends are as good as dead out there.”

  The men dragged me to one of the new apartment buildings. It was more of a large townhouse that Ronald had built but was subdivided into smaller rooms. Although it was meant as living quarters for refugees from Earth, it was now being used as a prison. The doors were padlocked. A woman from the group trailing behind us came forward with the keys. She fiddled with the lock before it unlatched. When the door opened, I peered inside to see nearly twenty-five of our original colonists sitting in the small, dark room.

  “Go on,” the woman with the key said. I looked up to make eye contact with her but she quickly turned away, doing her best to avoid me. I scoffed and entered the room. Once I was inside, my escorts left, then closed the door behind me and locked it from the outside.

  I strained to see into the black room surrounding me, searching for a familiar face. I found only a few that I had even talked to before in passing. Of course, everyone’s faces were familiar, as there had only been one hundred of us originally sent here to Circadia—experts from a variety of fields—but the familiarity only gave me so much comfort.

  “Did they capture you guys in the woods or did they get you when the whole thing went down?” I asked. I wondered if any of them saw where my group went, and when the last time was that they were seen. It was strange I hadn’t found them in the woods.

  “Most of us were caught up when the whole mutiny happened. Some were caught shortly after trying to run through the fields to hide,” an older woman answered.

  “How far did you make it?” one man asked. “How long were you out there before you were caught?”

  “Roughly an hour or two. I ran forever, or it felt like it, and then I hid in the woods for a while. They knew where I was, though. Smith caught me.” My head dropped to my chest in disappointment.

  “Who’s Smith?” the older woman asked. It had never occurred to me that most of what happened, did so within my team. I thought about how they must have felt, in the dark about everything. Apart from the people I dealt with every day, I never really had a chance to get acquainted with the rest of the Originals.

  “Smith was on the agricultural team with me. He was my friend. He’s also the one who stabbed Idris,” I said with a heavy heart. At first, I scanned the crowd to see reactions and was met with anger, then empathy. “Did you all know Idris very well?”

  Everyone nodded, and some began to cry. It was easy to see that Idris had an effect on everyone he met. Idris had not only been the fearless leader of the entire program but had also been a friend to every single person sent here. He was the one who brought us as far as we had come, and the one who begged us during his last moments to fight the oppression that Leslie had brought to Circadia.

  ‘We have to get out of here,” I said.

  “We’ve tried, but when the architectural team built these houses, they built them tough. This was one of the earlier houses, so there are no windows and the whole exterior is green wood. There’s no way out,” one man answered. Several more echoed his last words, “There’s no way out.” The hopelessness from the group was palpable.

  I frowned. “Well, they’ve gotta let us out of here sometime, right?”

  “I assume they’ll let us out tomorrow,” one man said. “But from what I understand, we’re basically gonna be treated as sl
aves.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re level three citizens now, remember?”

  Just before Leslie killed Idris in front of all of us, he had rounded everyone up with his recently-revealed army and made us listen to his monologue. He dictated the new rules he’d established: everyone was subject to a three-level citizenship hierarchy. Level one was the highest level of citizenship you could have and included Leslie and the people who had paid to live here. Level two citizenship included Leslie’s military, and level three included the original hundred who built the new world. Each level up would have better rations and accommodations than the next, as well as easier labor.

  The entire system was backward, but greed had a funny way of turning everything upside down. When we built Circadia, we dreamed of a world without the constraint and corruption of currency. A planet where the fruits of your labor would determine your wealth, and work wasn’t a prison, it was a right. One that could be a sense of pride. Instead, Earth’s evil had followed us.

  Small rays of sunlight shown through the small hole in the wall, previously meant for woodstove pipe, giving us a little visibility. We knew it was morning, so we waited for the crew’s men to come, but they never did. I was anxious since I’d expected a hard day of work ahead of us, but the relief never came. Neither did the food. As the day progressed, I was sure that they would come, at least to feed us, but they never did. No water, either.

  The long day brought with it the heat of Circadia’s summer, and we nearly melted. With twenty-five people packed into a tiny area with no windows and no air movement, the heat was unbearable. People pounded on the door to be let out, only to be met with silence. At times we listened through the walls, attempting to figure out what they were doing out there. Other times we all sat silent and tried to pretend we were somewhere else.