The Circadia Chronicles: Omnibus: The Complete Colonization Sci-Fi Series Heather Heckadon (books that read to you .TXT) 📖

second was wasted before 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, okay, sweetheart?” he said as he flicked the tip of my nose. “Take her away, put her with the others,” I stared down 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. Though it was meant to make living quarters for refugees from Earth, it was now being used as a prison. The doors were padlocked, and a woman came forward with the keys from the group trailing behind us. Fiddling with the lock before it was unlatched, I peered inside to see nearly twenty-five people from 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, and she quickly turned away, doing her best to avoid me. I scoffed and entered the room. Once I was inside, my escorts left, closing the door behind me and locking it from the outside.

Straining 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 an original one-hundred of us 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 had seen where my group had gone, 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?”

“About an hour or two. I ran forever, or it felt like it, and then I hid for a while in the woods. 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 had happened, had happened within my team. I thought about how they must have felt, in the dark about everything. Apart from people I had to deal with every day, I never really had a chance to get to know the rest of the Originals sent with us.

“Smith was on the agricultural team with me. He was my friend. He’s also the one that 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 only one who had gotten us as far as we had come, and the one that had begged for us to fight the oppression that Leslie had brought to Circadia during his last moments.

‘We have to get out of here,” I said.

“We’ve tried, but when the architectural team built these houses, they were built tough. This was one of the earlier houses, so there’s 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 slaves.”

“What do you mean?”

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

Just before Leslie had killed Idris in front of all of us, he had rounded everyone up with his recently discovered army and made us listen to his monologue. He dictated to us the new rules that he would establish: everyone would be 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 that 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 backwards, 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 own 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.

In the morning, we waited for them to come, but they never did. Expecting a hard day of work ahead of us, I was anxious, 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 no windows, no air movement and being packed into a tiny area with twenty-five people, the heat was unbearable. People pounded on the door to be let out, only to be