Hard Wired Trilogy DeAnna Pearce (if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud txt) 📖

please don’t waste our time with asinine questions. You children are all so predictable, skirting your responsibility to your country. The question you should ask is, what I’m going to do with you and your newfound abilities?” He stepped purposefully, careful not to dirty his shoes on the dusty road.

“I’ll go back to school,” Ari lied. “I just wanted to see my dad.”

Williams gave a small sound of disapproval. “I’ve been watching you and your brother for a long time. Your brother is a waste of space, and at first, I worried you’d be just like him. I have to admit, I misjudged you. That was why it took so long for me to see what you really are.”

“Really are?” Her gut clenched as she realized he knew about her abilities. She could only play stupid for so long as he closed the distance between them. This was a VR, she reminded herself. He couldn’t hurt her in there. She was stronger than him.

“Don’t get me wrong. The signs were all there for a warper, but it took me hours of combing through footage to see the truth.” He stood mere feet away, watching her closely. “And even though you are gifted far above what you deserve, you still can’t be trusted. You’ll be taken immediately to a new facility, one that can help guide you through your true responsibilities. You can be shaped into the tool we need.”

Her head snapped up, her body poised and ready to flee. Dave was right. She had never thought Advisor Williams was a saint, but deep down she hadn’t believed the horror stories about warpers. How in the hell could she get out of this? Reed! If Williams was in here, they must have Reed already.

“You children think you’re so special and deserve so much. You started from nothing and deserve nothing. Your only worth is what you can give your country.” His tone turned dark, and disgust painted his face ugly.

“I’ve never asked for a handout.” She stepped back, a bit frightened, never having seen so much emotion on Williams face before.

“Your life is a handout. Detain.” The last word he said out loud as if talking to someone else.

Before she could respond, metal links tied her hands in front of her. “What the hell?” Her wrists hurt where the chains bit into her skin. It took her a second to remind herself it wasn’t real. She blinked to find the code, and it took her several more seconds to remove the links binding her hands.

“You’re too slow and untrained. Do you really want to play this with me? I’ll give you nightmares you’ll never forget.” He pointed forward.

Fast, like lightening, pain erupted across her thigh, and she cried out. Red blossomed on her jeans. She couldn’t figure out what Williams did, but it hurt like the devil. Why was this hurting so bad? VR programs were meant to dull pain receptors.

Williams spoke again, something she couldn’t make out, and the pain in Ari’s chest brought her to her knees.

Every breath she took was painful.

He stepped forward. “Do you like this little program? An addition I created when needed to motivate individuals.”

Her eyes widened. She’d never thought anything like this was possible. With his next step forward, blinding pain erupted along her spine. She closed her eyes and dropped her head to the ground. She tried to force her way out of the program, but nothing happened. She tried again and again, screaming in frustration. Why couldn’t she leave? A coppery taste of blood entered her mouth, and she thought she would die. No, she wanted to die.

“After several months at school, you still don’t know your way around a VR. How disappointing.” He crouched close to her prone form, his voice creeping inside her mind. “This is my little invention. It’s modified to obey certain commands and protected by walls you’ve never seen.”

The code. She searched deep into the program. Numbers and letters flew by and she recognized certain specifics, grass, sky, and more. But there was something she had never seen before. Totally unfamiliar, she tried to delete it, to wipe it out, but nothing happened.

“You’re not the first warper I’ve had to drag in kicking and screaming.”

He touched her temple and a blinding pain stabbed inside her mind. Past her screams, the pain reminded her of another time, the day in the VR, when someone had destroyed her drive. The blank file hurt like hell to try to navigate. There was nothing but pain. She still remembered the ringing in her ears and the migraine she’d had for hours. Before she could think too long about her decision, she erased everything she could see, all characters in the code. She hoped that by destroying all the data Williams’s program needed to run, she would be free. Rage fueled her power, and she deleted everything. When her mind began to spin, she pulled out.

Unsure if she made it, she struggled for breath in the darkness. Snippets of light in the room she left flashed in front of her. She struggled to make things out as pools of black swam in her vision and code scattered across the darkness. Her wrists ached, restrained in front of her, and she realized she was back in reality. She glimpsed a guard as she tried to turn her head, the wires pinching her neck.

He reached for her neck to pull out her cable. He spoke, but the words were mumbled as if she were underwater. She wrestled under her restraints. It took another minute of panic until her vision came fully back.

Even though her wounds took place in the VR, her body ached, and her head throbbed. She ignored the pain and trying to search the room. “Reed!”

A soldier pushed her back down. “Quiet.”

She fought as another man’s rough hands pulled the cables out. “Reed,” she screamed again, panicking as she tried to find him.

Reed called her name from somewhere afar but was cut