Rising Tomorrow (Roc de Chere Book 1) by Mariana Morgan (essential reading txt) 📕

side, did wonders for her resolve. Abigail, Lukas, Fatima, Nathan, Karif, Carmen, Ashley, Mae, Luigi, Chantelle, Manuel, James… young men and women. Leeches. Their lives extinguished before they even began, and not even in a peaceful way. Their bodies told a story of weeks, sometimes months, of horrors no human should ever experience.

For months the MIS had no conclusive leads, nowhere to go, only dead bodies washed out of the River Rhône at irregular intervals. Colonel Larsen, on the other hand, must have had a connection linking the atrocities to powerful Elites within the government, and the military itself. With no actual case to build, however, the reports were quickly compiled and filed away out of pure anal obsessive retentiveness and Colonel Larsen’s hatred of the idea that any human life could be extinguished without anyone remembering. Officially, he argued that he sensed something suspicious, which, given the sudden increase in the number of dead bodies, could not have been denied. Technically, he didn’t have to argue anything. As a leader of one of the MIS’s teams, he had the freedom to pursue the case. To an outside observer he might have looked like a desperate madman chasing ghosts. Toscano knew better.

And then, a single, badly damaged sexual-entertainment Virtual Reality Program (VRP) landed on the colonel’s desk, confirming his sixth sense to anyone who had ever doubted it. The police had lost interest in it pretty quickly, finding it to be a dead end, and Colonel Larsen was able to acquire it for the MIS to study.

The adult VRP wasn’t much to go on, but the fragmented content chilled their blood. The body-recognition software confirmed a young man featured in the VRP to be one of the victims fished out of the Rhône a few months earlier. The information coded in the VRP could have given them far more information, but most of it was impossible to decipher. The MIS experts differed in opinions; some claimed the impossible, that it had been surgically removed, while others stated that the VRP was just too mangled from physical damage which had allowed the water to corrupt it.

The ensuing investigation ground to a halt. Neither Major Toscano nor Colonel Larsen had any doubts as to just how deeply the Elites within the military supporting the System were involved, which made it an internal investigation right up the MIS’s alley, but neither did they have any proof. The few names they did have, thanks to the adult VRP, were people too powerful to go after without bulletproof evidence. Even a hint that the MIS was after them could have terrible consequences. The power those corrupted individuals wielded could make anyone vanish while those guilty of the atrocities would slip so deep into hiding that the investigation would have to start from square one.

The young Leeches, kidnapped to be used as sex slaves, didn’t have that time. The bodies recovered from the river were likely the tip of the iceberg.

The law on the sex industry was clear within the Afro-European Alliance and hadn’t changed in over two hundred years. Sex was legal in all its glory. Selling sexual services, either in real life or in VR, was also perfectly legal as long as it remained consensual for everyone involved. In fact, somewhere in the years of equality being rammed chapter and verse down everyone’s throat, the selling of sexual services stopped being taboo. Both men and women felt comfortable and empowered to either offer or seek such services.

Small snag: the recovered VRP was everything but consensual.

The word corruption wasn’t sick enough to accurately describe the rot that had set in at the highest levels of the government and the military to allow such organised crime to thrive. Every day, Toscano made herself look at the victims and all the gruesome details on the War Wall; it kept her focused and motivated. There was, of course, a small chance that some of the dead were simply victims of the rough Leech life, but there were no doubts that the great majority had been disposed of because the psychopathic Elite got bored with their toys and chose to replace them with newer models. All in the name of entertainment for the rich.

Months passed with nothing but suspicions tying various high-ranking officials and dignitaries to the crimes. The case went virtually cold, yet again, while their efforts were required elsewhere. Until Alexa Valentino.

That one was not a Leech. Alexa wasn’t the child of a jobless and forgotten couple. She was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Engaged in a community project in the slums on the East Side of Lyon, she disappeared. The police investigation that followed puzzled Larsen and his team. Valentino’s family was a force to be reckoned with. Their resources were virtually limitless and their powers enough to burn anyone who failed to bring their precious Alexa back.

When the girl didn’t turn up for days and no heads rolled, Larsen’s team followed the case more closely, first on the colonel’s hunch and then like a pack of starving vultures zeroing in on the feast. After the girl’s body was scraped off Lyon’s main sanitation dam, things started moving with astounding speed. One day the police demanded the return of the adult VRP, and the next day an excessive number of heads rolled.

As expected, those who took the blame were not the Elite police officers giving orders but the common gendarmes of Leech origin. It was a purge, not the arrest of a single scapegoat. The official report was so vague it looked like no one had actually bothered to maintain any pretence. Someone, somehow, was powerful enough to sweep even the death of the Valentinos’ girl under the carpet.

The best of Colonel Larsen’s hackers, Sergeant Selissa Bassett, literally lived in front of her computer for days. She observed the events in real time, forcefully cyberbreaking into what she couldn’t simply access with official passcodes.

Selissa herself was technically a Leech, though no one