Read Online Children of the Uprising by Trevor Shane - Free Book Online Page A

was marching him past people who were standing right in front of him, staring at him. He had to believe that another route existed. He was sure that the building had a back door. He and Max could have come at a different time. He wondered if Max was doing this on purpose, if Max was trying to prove some sort of point. But what point could it be and who was he trying to prove it to? Christopher didn’t know and couldn’t figure it out. Max barely seemed to notice the oglers. Or at least, he didn’t seem to care about them. He made eye contact with only one person, the confused-looking woman in the corner with the light brown hair. Christopher had an urge to run from all of this, to cut back out the door they’d just walked through and never look back. He didn’t run, though. In the few days he’d known Max, he’d begun to trust him. He figured he had to trust somebody.
    Christopher had slept for almost the entire twenty-six-hour drive from Montreal to this strange building hidden in the Florida swamps. He’d tried to catch up on the sleep that he’d lost over the two days after he killed the men in the woods. To Christopher, those moments in the darkness in those woods already seemed like an eternity ago. His memory of that night was dim and impersonal, like the memory of a movie he’d seen when he was a kid. This two-day emotional roller-coaster ride had him all off-kilter. He wasn’t ready when Max pulled the car up to the building, put it in park, and told Christopher that they were “here.” Christopher didn’t even know what he wasn’t ready for. And where the fuck was “here” anyway? Max sensed Christopher’s unease. In a lot of ways, Christopher was the same as all the other people Max had found and brought to this building to be cleaned and sent back out into the world. Max knew that the ways that Christopher was the same weren’t important. All that mattered was how Christopher was different. “It’s okay, Christopher,” Max assured him. “You’re safe here. The guy I’m going to introduce you to, he’s someone you’re going to want to meet.”
    So Christopher followed Max into the compound and felt the eyes of all those people staring at him. Instead of meeting their gazes, Christopher put his head down and walked. No one made a sound. When they were a few steps into the hallway on the other side of the crowded room, Christopher asked Max in a whisper, “Is it always this quiet?”
    Max looked at Christopher. Christopher still had no idea who he was or what he represented. “No,” Max answered.

Nine
    Reggie could hear Christopher and Max coming down the hall. He could hear the wall of silence that surrounded them. Reggie was nervous. He could barely remember the last time that he’d been this nervous. He’d been scared plenty of times, but the last time he could remember being nervous was more than eighteen years ago when he was hiding in a tiny apartment in New York with a woman he didn’t know while running from the War for the first time. That felt like a very long time ago.
    Max led Christopher into Reggie’s office. Like all the others, Reggie stared at the boy. He had a different reason for staring, though. Even though Reggie had never seen Christopher before, he would have recognized him instantly, anywhere. It was the shape of his eyes more than anything else. It was like looking at a shadow of a reflection of someone he knew a long time ago. Reggie tried to reconcile the image of the boy standing in front of him with everything else that he knew. He tried to really look at the person standing in front of him, forgetting about the boy’s history, forgetting about the power that the boy unknowingly had at his fingertips and what someone could do with that power, remembering only a promise that he’d made a long time ago.
    Reggie stood up from his desk and took a