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

Gonzalez presented the facts quickly and efficiently. He’d shortened the ghastly history so much that it would probably give any decent historian a heart attack, but this was not the time for a long lecture. This was the time to be concise.

Eloise looked at him, confused. She had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

‘Why the hell would anyone slaughter for gold? Why couldn’t they just buy it! And why colonise and subjugate a local population to slavery? It’s not true! It’s bad! It wouldn’t have been allowed.’ She knew she sounded like a five-year-old, but she was too confused to be eloquent.

Ingram and Gonzalez sighed in unison. How the hell do you present centuries of history to someone who has been conditioned not to believe it had happened in the first place?

‘Ms Moretti… Eloise’—Gonzalez found it odd to use her first name even now—‘today you saw for yourself one man smashing another person’s head into a metal pole for no reason. Not in self-defence, not in fear and certainly not by accident. You have seen yourself how the Leeches in Lyon’s slums live: the poverty, the sickness and the hopelessness of the situation. Is it really so hard to believe the human race made all sorts of reprehensible mistakes in the past? After all, something had to have brought the world to the brink of extinction before the Great Collapse.’

Eloise focused her eyes on Gonzalez. She could work with a probability assessment. That made far more sense, and she nodded slowly but firmly.

‘No, it is not hard to believe,’ she acknowledged. She lifted her mug to her lips. The liquid was still warmer than she preferred, but she needed to occupy her hands with something. Finally, she pulled the mug away and inhaled sharply. ‘That still doesn’t explain why the poor, the subjugated, the enslaved would let that happen. If all the Leeches joined together, they could fight, they could take what is rightly theirs!’

Ingram sighed again, this time far more impatiently.

‘You are acting like a close-minded bitch,’ she snapped. ‘The situation deteriorated so slowly no one even saw it coming at first. The poor, the Leeches, had every right to expect the Elite would finally get off their ass to sort it all out. There are enough resources in the Alliance to fix it! Especially now, with nano-tech so readily available.

‘By the time it became clear there was no help coming—and believe me, it is very easy to cling to hope until it’s too late—there were literally no resources left among the Leeches. We could arm some of them, but it would be pitifully little. And we’re not just talking about guns. What about transport and logistics across vast distances? Food? Water? Medicines! I had a hard time coming up with it for just the two of us in the slums—now imagine doing it on a massive scale. Leeches live day to day, too busy fighting for basic necessities to have the energy or time to think about the future.

‘How do you expect all the Leeches to even communicate together? We don’t even know how many there are scattered around the Alliance anymore. How do you reach them? How do you co-ordinate? How do you decide what it is you are about to do in the first place and get everyone to agree with you? How do you stop it from turning itself into the biggest massacre humanity has seen since the events leading to the Great Collapse?

‘If somehow all the Leeches managed to unite to go after the Elite, it would be a bloodbath. The Elite perfected their weapons during the Freedom Wars, fighting against the Asian Coalition of the Free Nations for decades. They can kill from so far away that the Leeches wouldn’t even know what hit them. They wouldn’t stand a chance.

‘Those Elite giving orders wouldn’t care how many Leeches died. In fact, if all of them died it would solve the problem. No more Leeches. Until, of course, the human race began the same process all over again, creating another class system. And they would do it over and over again, thanks to dumb, ignorant people like you. You’ve had all the information about the world and history right at your fingertips all these years, and you’ve done fuck all to verify the propaganda you were fed at Elite schools.’

‘Sarge!’

‘You were blissfully happy and ignorant, playing right into their hands. You—’

‘Sarge! Enough!’ This time Gonzalez’s voice was more forceful, and Ingram sighed. She was too invested to speak calmly.

‘I’m done, sir,’ she apologised. ‘Nothing I could say would make any difference. You need to want to see the truth to believe it.’

Eloise flinched. For the first time an insult thrown at her hit its mark. Did she really choose not to want to see the truth? Was she really blind on purpose? Not oblivious and ignorant, but actually blind on purpose? Was it possible that all these years she had known the truth but chosen to ignore it?

She shivered hard, tea spilling over her hands and legs, but she hardly noticed as her head snapped up to Ingram.

‘You… you voluntarily went undercover as a Leech. You volunteered for this,’ she stuttered, remembering yesterday’s conversation.

Ingram shot Gonzalez a look before opening her mouth again, but the man only nodded, giving her permission to answer. There had been no time to dwell on this before, and there was precious little of it now, but the time had come for Eloise to learn. Whatever it took.

‘Yes, I did. DCI Gonzalez needed someone among the gendarmes to spy for him. Someone who could help establish his cover.’ Such a neat little phrase to describe how Gonzalez had needed someone he could punch and push around to look like a suitably casual and brutal police officer. That it had spared other gendarmes who had done nothing wrong except for being born a Leech. At least