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

XST’s manoeuvrability. I saw you fight your way through the slums. I saw you take down that gang, sensing their presence behind you. You dodged the missiles during the Final Strike with the same primal awareness with which you dodged the knives in the Underground City. Your body moves and thinks just the same.’ Eloise paused, her expression thoughtful. ‘I guess I did see it. I did see something familiar. Something…’ She trailed off. Frankly, she was disappointed with herself for not noticing it before. She should have; she wrote the Final Strike VRP herself, not even twenty years ago, and why the military cancelled the request had puzzled her for years. The clues were all there.

Dammit, I’m useless at dealing with stress. I’m epically useless at trying to function under stress, and apparently the real world is nothing but stress.

Ingram glared at Eloise.

‘Molina Ortega was a Leech,’ she said coldly. ‘She was used and abused by the System. Her mother died after her pimp beat the shit out of her for daring to have limits and she couldn’t afford nano-meds. Her brother killed for the Syndicate to feed the family, before they disposed of him for failing to assassinate a target. Ortega never got to meet her father, who was dead before she was even born. She was alone, in the slums, by the time she was thirteen. Her mother begged her to stay away from the Syndicate, but it was that or VR prostitution. She didn’t want to go down the way her mother did, forced to degrade herself for filthy Elites and their pleasure. The Syndicate gave her pride, gave her strength.

‘And then the military took her away, and her pride and her strength, before she turned seventeen, and the true horrors were only just beginning. Suddenly, she had to degrade herself for someone’s filthy pleasure, for the right to breathe, for the privilege of eating. Since the battle of Balkhash in 2692 decimated the Alliance’s troops, every month the military enlisted or pressed thousands of fresh Leech recruits. Whole communities and settlements died out when all able bodies were taken away. Hundreds of thousands of Leeches died in training before they even saw the enemy.

‘For two years, since entering front-line aircombat in 2702, Ortega defied the statistics, coming back from every mission. She wasn’t a corporal when the Final Strike was launched. She was an uneducated, weak and pathetic Leech, and those did not get promoted. She got the promotion posthumously, because the Alliance was too embarrassed to say that a rank-less Leech won the Wars that had claimed millions. But they couldn’t let her live. They couldn’t let her tell her own story. So they killed her.

‘They actually had the whole fucking funeral transmitted all over the Alliance. The brave soldier who died for everyone’s freedom. Fucking Freedom Wars. There is no freedom! Ortega wasn’t a hero. The heroes were those that died nameless, those that were tortured to death by their own training instructors, those who committed suicide to escape the exploitation and injustice. Those were the heroes. But no one fucking cares. No one cares what a Leech does. Ortega was a Leech and there was nothing she could have done. Nothing mattered. She was a Leech.’ Ingram could feel her cheeks burning, but there was no stopping her now. ‘If anyone deserved to be elevated to the status of Elite, it was her. She earned it ten times over. But they didn’t do it, did they? They killed her. They were going to kill me. The doctors were ordered to kill me and make it look like the crash damaged Ortega’s body beyond repair. It was a fluke I made it. I didn’t find out until years later why I lived but Ortega didn’t. She was slaughtered by the Alliance, among millions of others. I’m not her. Ortega is dead. I’m not her!’

Without realising it, Ingram was out of her chair, storming across the room. She needed out; she was suffocating. She had never realised how much she hated her old self for what a meek and pathetic sheep she had been. Trotting to the slaughter just like all the other Leeches. Too desperate to survive to stop and think. She hated the feeling of powerlessness she had carried her whole life. Watching her mother die, and countless others, because she was too weak to stop it.

‘Sarge!’ Gonzalez’s voice made her stop just short of the door. Damn, she needed out, she couldn’t stay. She couldn’t stop the tears pouring down her face. She hadn’t cried in years. Out! She needed out. ‘Carlotta… Aisha,’ he corrected himself softly, and she gave in, letting her forehead rest against the cool surface of the door.

She understood it all. She understood why Gonzalez had made Eloise watch that VR recording over and over again. Why he had encouraged her to tell Eloise about Ortega, knowing what the memories booming back to life would do to her. She understood why he had tried to make Eloise understand the plight of the Leeches and the corruption of the System on a visceral level. She didn’t even have it in herself to feel used and angry that he would play with her emotions like that. He had the right to do so. He had earned the right to do so, for he always achieved his goals. He didn’t waste her sacrifice. He wasn’t like the others.

‘Take five,’ he ordered, but she shook her head, her forehead rolling sidewise against the door.

‘I’m fine,’ she replied, wiping her tears away. Hands in tight fists to control the shaking, she crossed the room and sat down again. In her Leech past, she was weak and she couldn’t fight. Not anymore.

Gonzalez gave her a long, probing look, but said nothing. She had earned the right to deal with her demons in her own way.

Dammit, this is going to be some epic moral hangover for all of us, a small voice at the