Naturals

Naturals

a lost souls novel

Tiffany Truitt

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Tiffany Truitt. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

Entangled Publishing, LLC

2614 South Timberline Road

Suite 109

Fort Collins, CO 80525

Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

Edited by Stacy Abrams

Cover design by Heather Howland

Print ISBN 978-1-62061-147-0

Ebook ISBN 978-1-62061-148-7

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition April 2013

To Grandma Judy, Mema, my sister, and Mom—thank you for teaching me what the word strength means.

.

Prologue

I would fight.

I would rage.

I would do it for the girl who lived inside of me—

The girl taught all the wrong things growing up.

The girl who was never supposed to learn what it was to want.

Who was warned about lust, but not about love.

Who knew how to lose power, but wanted to gain it.

Who sought out the answers she needed to survive.

The girl who wouldn’t be damned by anyone.

Chapter 1

Two days. That was all that separated my old life from my new one. Two days that we spent walking through the woods, each step taking us closer and closer to the new place I would call home—a community of Isolationists.

Isolationists. A word I had always been taught to fear.

And I was running to them.

Two days, nowhere near the Isolationist camp, and I was already in danger.

I could literally smell it.

The smell was familiar in the way that an idea you promised yourself never to think of again sneaks up on you in the darkest moments of the night—your palms begin to sweat, your stomach tightens, your skin prickles, every part of you unable to deny what you have tried so hard to repress.

It was the smell of death.

This was the stench that had almost knocked me over during my first day at Templeton, when I cleaned up the blood from where a defective chosen one had been murdered. It was my sister dying as she tried to produce life where none was meant to exist. It was the bodies of the young chosen ones I had helped bury, chosen ones Henry had aided in killing in the name of some war I hadn’t even realized was happening.

It was my life before I went on the run—the life I thought I left behind. But nothing stayed buried. The darkness always found a way to get back in.

McNair, the leader of the trio of Isolationists who had come to my rescue from Templeton, held up his hand and we all stopped. Henry and Robert, friends from my life back at the compound who had aided in my escape, instantly flanked my side and waited for whatever came next. McNair seemed older than the other two men who traveled with him, Eric and Jones, by a good twenty years. The men from the borderlands were built, evidence that living in the woods meant no longer sitting by while the work was done for you. This was quite different from the lives of the naturals who lived in the council-built and protected compounds. Forced to live in these communal buildings, naturals no longer worked or went to school. Any sense of purpose was taken away from us. We were to live and wait to die.

The council insisted it was for our own good, to protect us. But with the arrival of the chosen ones, genetically engineered superhumans created as a military force to fight the war and keep order, us naturals, those born of man and woman and not in a lab, had nothing to add to the new world that war and science had birthed.

The naturals were a generation of mankind that had been born and bred to be compliant, and despite sharing our natural status, these Isolationist men were already startlingly different than the people I grew up with. Their hair was shaggy and their beards unkempt. And while their clothes were dirty and worn, they didn’t carry themselves like some outcasts. They didn’t fit the definition created for them by the council—but then again, who did?

These men and women sought no government. When the war that tore my country apart came, tough decisions had to be made by the generations of naturals before me. Most of the survivors who lived in the western sector chose to move to the shanty towns protected by the strong arm of the council. In trade for the protection of the council, many of my people slowly gave up their rights. We couldn’t select the books we read or the music we listened to. Soon, we wouldn’t be able to decide where or how we lived.

It was for our own good, or so we were told.

According to the teachings of our government, it was our humanity, our weakness, that led to the war in the first place. We couldn’t be trusted not to put our own selfish wants before the good of our country, so we allowed the council to shut us away in compounds. We no longer made decisions for ourselves. We no longer made any decisions at all.

But not the Isolationists.

They fled into the wilds, places abandoned because many thought they were uninhabitable as a result of the damage they suffered during the fighting. These people weren’t pioneers but heathens, choosing to live in filth and sin rather than accept the protection of the government and its chosen ones.

They followed no laws. They answered to no one.

But here, traveling through the wild, they were gods. I saw it in every movement. These men were comfortable in the woods, a place all naturals were taught to fear. The council told us we couldn’t be protected, not in the chaotic bursts of dizzying varieties of greens and browns I’d only read about, so different from the cold grays of the world in which we lived. In these woods existed the men who wanted no council, men who couldn’t be trusted because they didn’t believe in anything at all.

And now they were my guides.

It had been two days since our run-in with the chosen ones. Two days since I said good-bye to my old life. Good-bye to my sister Louisa. Good-bye to James.

The council made sure they took everything from me.

I had been proclaimed a threat. When I’d gone in for my inspection, a rite of passage for all girls, they found that I could do what the others couldn’t—when, or if, I wanted to have children, I could. I wasn’t plagued by the illness that took so many, including my own sister.

This was another reason for the creation of the chosen ones. Because of the many years of bloodshed, the naturals lost millions to the war. This, combined with our women’s inability to produce, caused my people to come dangerously close to extinction.

So the council convinced us to allow them to create the chosen ones. Without a birth mother or father, these beings were designed and raised in laboratories. Once they turned thirteen, they were sent to training centers, where they were programmed and trained to despise the very people we were told they had been made to protect. Us. Naturals. Unlimited strength, artfully beautiful, and gifted with beyond-human powers, the chosen ones were the new generation for the council to mold into the perfect patriots.

They merely had to wait for my people to die out.

But I was proof my species could survive. The whole reason they created chosen ones was to replace my people’s depleting numbers, but if hope was allowed to exist, some proof that maybe our species wouldn’t die out, what could the council hold over our heads?

I still didn’t know why I could do what so many women around me could not, but I had made enemies because of it.

There were other reasons my government hated me, though.

They hated me because I’d fallen in love with a chosen one. James. Sentenced to serve time because my sister broke the rules against procreating, I met him while working at the training center, Templeton. And my whole world changed. I’d discovered the chosen ones weren’t something to fear. At least not all of them. Sure, they were more powerful than I could ever hope to be, at least physically, but they were human. James laughed and cried. He felt things. He wasn’t some creature created in a lab with no sense of self. He helped set me free.

They hated me because of the things I saw at Templeton. Girls abused because no one had taught them how to speak for themselves. The council killing chosen ones because the creators could simply create more. Realizing, if we let them, the council would take everything from us—including anything that made us human at all. They would do this for the greater good. But their definition of what that meant and mine never quite matched up.

They hated me because I was my father’s daughter. He fought for the resistance. He didn’t want this life for me, but his blood ran through my veins and his dreams lived inside my head. I had to fight, too.

They hated me because of who I was. The girl I fought so hard to discover. A girl who wanted
more
, even if the simple act of wanting anything at all left one vulnerable.

They tried to take my very life, but I ran. And no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t take my memories of James. I would hold on tightly to those for as long as I lived. I would remember how his fingers danced with mine across the keys of the piano during my early days at Templeton. The slight smile that graced his face as he learned my name, not to report me but because I intrigued him. The sound of his voice as we read books deemed forbidden to my kind.

The way he taught me desire. Taught me to want.

And in that way, a chosen one had taught a natural how to be human.

I would remember him as long as I lived, and I hoped that would be a long time.

With the exception of the heavy, tension-filled silence that trapped us like a cage during our journey, the adventure had been uneventful.

But this felt like trouble.

The odor slithered into my throat. I could taste it—sour, pungent, rotten. I tried to hold in the coughs, but the taste burned against my throat and my body wanted it out. I doubled over and choked on the ragged heaves that issued from me. Henry, my oldest friend, placed a comforting hand on my back. Like me, the council had wronged Henry. They had murdered his family for trying to escape when he was a child. So, when the time came to run, he didn’t hesitate to escape with me. I didn’t know if he ran because of his hatred of the council or because of his feelings for me.

I managed to look up at him; his face had gone white and his eyes were watering.

“You don’t think…” the man named Eric whispered.

McNair merely nodded, and Eric’s shoulders slumped. McNair ran a hand across his jaw, took a deep breath, and looked to Robert. “This isn’t gonna be pretty, but I don’t see any way around it.”

Robert, my brother-in-law, nodded. There was no hint of what they were discussing to be found on his face. He was stoic. In control. He
was
a chosen one, after all.

“Do you think it’s a trap?” he asked.

“Tough to say. There’s a compound not a mile away. If it’s what I think it is, then they’re probably long gone—no need to protect the place anymore. We’ve been getting intel that this sort of thing had started going down.”

“A compound? This far out?” I asked.

“These outskirt compounds are much smaller. They deal with more specialized chosen ones,” Robert replied.

“Specialized? I don’t like the sound of that,” I said under my breath to Henry.

“What do you think?” McNair asked the third Isolationist. I hadn’t heard the man named Jones speak once during the entire trip.

I didn’t blame him for his silence. He didn’t know me at all, and he was out in the woods risking his life for me. I wondered about the home lives of the Isolationist men. Their loved ones. Neither Robert nor Henry had much of anything back at the compound, but these men could have families waiting for them. Maybe it was thoughts of his people that kept Jones so quiet. Rescuing me, traveling into council lands the Isolationists were smart enough to flee from years ago, seemed like an awful big risk.

As I looked to Jones, I wanted him to have a family. I needed to believe they all had someone waiting for them on the other side of these woods—that they had something worth walking toward. Something beyond this space in time, beyond whatever horror awaited us. I already knew what I was leaving behind.

I had to believe I had chosen the better life.

Jones walked over to McNair and whispered in his ear. I wondered why he felt the need to be so secretive, but one look at the way his eyes darted toward Robert made it all clear—he didn’t trust him.

There was a part of me that could understand Jones’s mistrust. It wasn’t long ago that I didn’t trust Robert, either, but that had nothing to do with him being a chosen one. His betrayal came before I even knew what he was at all. When he had entered our compound and I sensed the way my sister, Emma, felt about him, Robert had promised me he would protect her. But she got pregnant and died. And for the longest time, I could only blame him. I didn’t understand what it was to love then; I only saw in their relationship manipulation and trickery.

But Robert had done quite a bit to aid in my rescue, and my feelings for him were muddled at best.

When Jones was done, McNair proceeded to tear a strip from his plaid shirt and hand it to me. “Use this to cover your mouth and nose. It’s only going to get worse.”

I took the cloth and pressed it to my face. Without wasting another moment, McNair started to walk and we followed suit. Even with the cloth, the smell grew stronger and stronger. Never in my life had I experienced anything so odious, so overwhelming in its control over my body. I was sure the stench would stay with me, creeping its way into my very pores. Even if I could forget these moments in the woods, the all-consuming feeling that I would never make it through them, I was certain the smell would linger on me forever.

And then I saw it. We came across the clearing so quickly that I didn’t have time to prepare myself, though that seemed to be a running theme in my life. It was a compound. That I recognized. But what sort of people lived so nestled in the woods? Yes, my compound had been surrounded, but not like this, not so deep inside the vast greenery, vainly hoping it could hide. No. This compound didn’t belong here.

Yet here it stood—a reminder there were still naturals alive and breathing, still existing. Maybe we didn’t have long as a people, but we were still here. “Shouldn’t we be running away from this place?” I asked, my heart quickening. A compound meant chosen ones, and that seemed like the last place any fugitive would want to be.

“We’ve got nothing to fear here, child,” McNair replied. “Damage has already been done.”