Read Online Ignite Me by Tahereh Mafi - Free Book Online

world, and you say you couldn’t even find your way around. It’s because you didn’t care,” he says. “You didn’t want to participate. If you did, you would’ve taken the initiative to learn as much as possible about your new home. You would’ve been beside yourself with excitement. Instead, you were apathetic. Indifferent.”
    I open my mouth to protest but I don’t have a chance.

    “I don’t blame you,” he says. “Their goals were unrealistic. I don’t care how flexible your limbs are or how many objects you can move with your mind. If you do not understand your opponent—or worse, if you underestimate your opponent—you are going to lose.” His jaw tightens. “I kept trying to tell you,” he says, “that Castle was going to lead your group into a massacre. He was too optimistic to be a proper leader, too hopeful to logically consider the odds stacked against him, and too ignorant of The Reestablishment to truly understand how they deal with voices of opposition.
    “The Reestablishment,” Warner says, “is not interested in maintaining a facade of kindness. The civilians are nothing more than peons to them. They want power,” he says to me, “and they want to be entertained. They are not interested in fixing our problems. They only want to make sure that they are as comfortable as possible as we dig our own graves.”
    “No.”
    “Yes,” he says. “It is exactly that simple. Everything else is just a joke to them. The texts, the artifacts, the languages. They just want to scare people, to keep them submissive, and to strip them of their individuality—to herd them into a singular mentality that serves no purpose but their own. This is why they can and will destroy all rebel movements. And this is a fact that your friends did not fully understand. And now,” he says, “they have suffered for their ignorance.”

    He stops the tank.
    Turns off the engine.
    Unlocks my door.
    And I’m still not ready to face this.

THIRTEEN
    Anyone would be able to find Omega Point now. Any citizen, any civilian, anyone with working vision would be able to tell you where the large crater in Sector 45 is located.
    Warner was right.
    I unbuckle myself slowly, reaching blindly for the door handle. I feel like I’m moving through fog, like my legs have been formed from fresh clay. I fail to account for the height of the tank above the ground and stumble into the open air.
    This is it.
    The empty, barren stretch of land I’d come to recognize as the area just around Omega Point; the land Castle told us was once lush with greenery and vegetation. He said it’d been the ideal hiding place for Omega Point. But this was before things started changing. Before the weather warped and the plants struggled to flourish. Now it’s a graveyard. Skeletal trees and howling winds, a thin layer of snow powdered over the cold, packed earth.
    Omega Point is gone.
    It’s nothing but a huge, gaping hole in the ground about a mile across and 50 feet deep. It’s a bowlful of innards, of death and destruction, silent in the wake of tragedy. Years of effort, so much time and energy spent toward a specificgoal, one purpose: a plan to save humanity.
    Obliterated overnight.
    A gust of wind climbs into my clothes then, wraps itself around my bones. Icy fingers tiptoe up my pant legs, clench their fists around my knees and pull; suddenly I’m not sure how I’m still standing. My blood feels frozen, brittle. My hands are covering my mouth and I don’t know who put them there.
    Something heavy falls onto my shoulders. A coat.
    I look back to find that Warner is watching me. He holds out a pair of gloves.
    I take the gloves and tug them on over my frozen fingers and wonder why I’m not waking up yet, why no one has reached out to tell me it’s okay, it’s just a bad dream, that everything is going to be fine.
    I feel as though I’ve been scooped out from the inside, like someone has spooned out all the organs I need to function and