The Weapon (The Hourglass Series Book 2) Read online

  THE WEAPON

  THE HOURGLASS SERIES

  PART 2

  Casey Donaldson

  Text Copyright © Casey Donaldson 2015

  For the readers who wanted more.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Prologue

  One hundred years ago the world’s population was decimated by new, horrifying diseases, destroying cities and toppling governments. A new world government, the Collective, was established. This soon split into two factions: the Covenant and the Accord. Differing in their opinion on how they should manage the disease, they waged war.

  The disease petered out.

  The war never ended.

  This is Sarah’s world. She is fourteen years old.

  Behind both the Covenant and the Accord exists the Hourglass Group. Responsible for manufacturing the vast majority of weapons for both sides of the conflict, the Group is more powerful than either of the warring parties.

  Sarah has their logo burnt onto her shoulder. She doesn’t know why.

  A simple misunderstanding with a stolen pie leads to Sarah’s incarceration in a juvenile prison ship. It should have been easy. Keep your head down. Do your time. Get out. But the Hourglass Group had other plans. Plans that included illegally kidnapping the inmates for use in weapon experimentation. Sarah, along with her friends Finn and Marland, managed to escape the clutches of the Hourglass Group with the help of one of the prison guards. Just before the prison guard died, he told Sarah that she was the key to ending the war. She had to be, he had said. After all, she had the scar.

  Chapter One

  “Did you hear that?” asked Finn.

  Sarah and Marland stopped behind him, listening.

  Nothing.

  Only the usual forest noises disrupted the stillness.

  “Never mind,” mumbled Finn, but he continued to look around cautiously as they continued.

  “It was probably just my stomach,” muttered Sarah darkly under her breath.

  They had been tramping through the forest for a day and a half. They were tired, hungry, thirsty and dirty, and had no idea where they were. Granted, escaping from the clutches of the Hourglass Group hadn’t exactly left them much time to plan ahead, but it wasn’t exactly how she had imagined life on the outside.

  Finn stopped. This time Sarah and Marland had heard it too. There had been a definite crack. Finn turned back to them and was about to say something when a man stepped out of the bushes.

  He had a gun.

  It was directed at them.

  “Don’t move a muscle,” he said, and then added oddly, “I would hate to have to kill you.”

  “Oh good,” replied Finn nervously, hands raised slightly in surrender. “We would hate to have to die.”

  Chapter Two

  The man with the gun was shortly joined by five others, also carrying guns. Surrounded, they were led through the forest, occasionally breaking to check their location via an old fashioned compass that their leader, a stern-looking woman, was holding. It was, Sarah felt, extremely intimidating. At least, it was until she noticed that one of their captors, a boy about their age, was making eyes at Marland. She would have been concerned, but Marland seemed to be making eyes back. None of their captors, she was relieved to see, were wearing the Hourglass Group insignia. After six more hours of tramping, the tree line finally broke and they found themselves at the edge of a small, friendly-looking town. They were steered into a rather drab building on the outskirts of the town and seated along one side of a large table in the centre of a mostly empty room. The woman, who Sarah had decided was their leader, took the seat opposite them. Watching the three of them as she sat down, the woman drew her handgun from her belt and laid it on the table in front of them. The clunk as it came to rest on the table seemed to reverberate around the room. Two of the men drew up seats next to the woman. The others positioned themselves around the rest of the room, watching. Involuntarily, Sarah’s eyes kept on sliding away from the woman and down to the handgun on the table.

  “What are your names?”

  “Wren,” Sarah said.

  “Lucas,” mumbled Finn.

  Marland said, “Holly.”

  “Well, those are lies.” There was no doubt in the woman’s voice. She had known they were lying as surely as she knew her own name. “But we can return to that. What were you doing out in the woods?”

  “We wanted to get away from home,” said Finn. “There was nothing there left for us.”

  “Right,” said the woman, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “So the alarm from the Hourglass compound that went off two days ago had nothing to do with you? And I suppose that those barcodes burnt onto each of your wrists doesn’t mean you were prisoners either? Young prisoners, maybe,” she conceded, “but prisoners all the same.” Their hands, the ones with the barcodes, all twitched simultaneously. They had known that the barcodes could be a problem that would need fixing. They had just hoped that they would have had more time to fix it.

  “Are you going to turn us in?” asked Sarah, biting her lip. The woman didn’t need any more proof in order to turn them back over to the prison system. Or the Hourglass Group, she added mentally, if that was who they worked for, although by this point she thought that extremely unlikely.

  “That depends on what you tell me,” said the woman.

  The three of them exchanged glances. They all shrugged imperceptibly. It was not like they had much choice.

  Sarah went to blurt out their story and then hesitated. “Are you… first, would you tell us who you’re with?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Which side does the town belong to? The Covenant or the Accord? Or… the Hourglass Group?”

  “We’re neither. Especially not the Hourglass Group. This town is independent.”

  Sarah blinked, confused. She heard Marland drawing in an awed breath next to her. How was that even possible? There were no independent towns or cities. Even if a town had wanted to stay neutral it wouldn’t have been able to access medicines or food supplies without an alliance. The militaries controlled the supply of everything.

  “How does that even work?” asked Finn, voicing Sarah’s thoughts. “How can you not have all starved to death? Or died of disease or something?”

  “We have our methods,” replied the woman enigmatically. “For now though, I’m interested in you.”

  The man sitting next to her pulled out his own gun and laid it on the table in front of him with a clunk, a repeat of the woma
n’s act earlier and a demoralising reminder of the predicament they were in.

  “Ah, right.” Sarah swallowed nervously. “Ok, so we were on a prison ship, we-”

  “Which one?” cut in the woman.

  “Er, the Anoscosa.”

  The woman and man exchanged a quick glance. “Go on.”

  “Yes, right. So we were on the prison ship, but for stupid things. We’re not, like, murderers or anything. I was in there for petty theft, he was there for forgery and she, um, destroyed a shed.” Sarah trailed off a little here. Marland actually burnt down her mother’s shed without really thinking of the consequences. Arson was an ugly, ugly crime and could hurt many people, which thankfully didn’t happen in Marland’s case, but at the same time Sarah was loathe to reveal the truth in case it pushed their abductors into a decision against their favour.

  “You shouldn’t have been on a prison ship for that.”

  “If only,” muttered Finn. The woman looked at him questioningly. “We were meant to be sent to a farm,” he elaborated, “but there had been bombings and the farms were off limits so we all got sent to the ships.”

  “And then the Hourglass Group kidnapped us to use in their experiments,” added in Marland, still seething. “Those two managed to escape and came and got me out,” she flashed them a grateful smile.

  The woman’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “You two escaped a prison ship? Or the Hourglass Group?” She sounded impressed with either version.

  “We had help,” said Sarah. The image of Mr Wall falling over the edge of the ship after being shot by the warden flashed through her mind. She shivered. Mr Wall had aided their escape. He also thought Sarah’s Hourglass insignia scar meant something. She only wished she knew what that was as well.

  “So why weren’t you with the others?” asked the man, speaking for the first time.

  “The others?”

  “The rest of the escapees from the Hourglass Group’s compound," she explained. “Most of them were picked up by Hourglass personnel within an hour after the alarm went off. We watched it.”

  “Oh,” said Marland softly. She seemed to deflate a little.

  Sarah thought of the Queen and felt a small wave of relief. The Queen was a fellow inmate who had terrorised her, Marland and Finn over the past few weeks, promising bodily harm if they disappointed her. Sarah couldn’t help but feel a little bit happy about the fact that she was still locked up.

  “We escaped first,” said Finn. “We left the others keys to get out. Some of them weren’t exactly friendly.”

  “But you still let them out?” asked the woman.

  “Like we could leave them to an organisation such as the Hourglass Group,” snorted Marland contemptuously.

  This time the woman regarded Marland with something close to regard. The boy who had been making eyes at Marland during the hike over there positively beamed at her from his positioned in the background. The woman smiled at them.

  “When was the last time you had something to eat?”

  ****

  Most of their captors left them to it, except for one man guarding the door. The boy returned a few minutes later with food and water. To Sarah’s amusement he sat himself down at the table and stared at them in wonder as they tucked hungrily into the food. It was a thick soup with potatoes and lentils and heavily seasoned. Sarah thought she had never tasted anything so delicious in her life. After holding out for a full thirty seconds, the boy punctured the silence made by their eating.

  “My name’s Gary,” he said happily. “I just want to say, wow. I mean, wow,” he repeated again. Sarah and Finn exchanged an amused glance that was completely lost on Gary.

  “I mean,” he continued, “what you guys went through? The people that you defied? It just blows my mind. I mean, we’ve been trying to get something on the Hourglass Group for ever, and then you guys-”

  “Gary,” growled the man warningly at the door.

  Gary looked a little sheepish. “Ah, right, I’m meant to leave it to Harmony to tell you what’s going on.”

  The man at the door groaned again. Sarah got the impression Gary wasn’t supposed to give out names just yet. She also figured that Gary was often like this.

  “Wait,” said Marland, “so you’re like, some kind of resistance group?” she looked impressed.

  Gary glowed. “Well, I-”

  “Gary!” snapped the man at the door.

  Gary winced. “Maybe I’ll come back later,” he muttered. He glanced up at Marland. “Definitely come back later,” he adjusted. Marland blushed and Gary got up to leave the room. As he exited, the leader, Harmony, Sarah now supposed, came back in. She looked at Gary leaving and then back up to the guard.

  “How much did he tell them?” she asked, her voice already defeated.

  “Well, they know your name,” replied the guard.

  Harmony sighed and continued into the room.

  “Good,” she said, looking at their bowls which had been scrapped clean. “I’ll give you the tour.”

  Harmony took them around town, explaining how things worked. It was a small town, only a few hundred people or so. They grew all their own crops and farmed their own animals. They had a large, ancient, industrial water filter that had been running ever since the war had started to claim all the smaller towns as well as the cities. It was looked after almost religiously, every nut and bolt cleaned and kept free of rust, every filter rinsed and dried on schedule. They had a resident “medic”, who had been trained by the previous medic, and him by the person before. Originally there had been a doctor, and although the current medic’s skills weren’t quite as proficient, they generally managed fairly well. The town, ironically enough, was split into two factions. Those who wanted to live as peacefully and as anonymously as possible, wanting to do nothing that could draw the attention of either the Accord or the Covenant, and those who wanted to actively fight against the two regimes for a better, independent life for other people and towns currently under the thumb of either one of the main political groups. The group that Harmony led were part of the latter group. They had gone to investigate the alarm that had issued from the Hourglass Group’s compound, which they had been keeping a close eye on in case any opportunity arose for sabotage. It was shortly afterwards that they had spotted the three of them.

  “Harmony?” asked Sarah as they ended the tour, “how did you know our names weren’t Wren, Lucas and Holly?”

  “We heard you discussing aliases before we nabbed you,” said Harmony, her face splitting into a barely contained grin.

  Sarah blushed. “Oh.”

  Chapter Three

  Over the next day or so Sarah, Marland and Finn were gradually allowed more freedom around the town. Some of the townspeople, especially those who wanted nothing to do with the military or any outsiders, gave them less then welcoming attention, but most were friendly and pleasant and sympathetic to their cause. Some were outright excited. Gary, in particular, was dogging their steps wherever they went. Or rather, he was dogging Marland’s steps. They seemed to agree on almost everything.

  On the fourth day, Gary ran up to them, his face hardly able to contain his grin.

  “Guys, come with me,” he said, grabbing Marland by the hand, “Harmony wants to talk to you.” Marland had glanced back at Sarah and Finn excitedly as she had been hauled off after Gary. Sarah and Finn exchanged a more wary glance.

  “Gary’s excited,” commented Sarah darkly.

  “I know what you mean,” replied Finn. “Gary gets excited about sneaking into secret lab facilities where they do terrible, terrible things. Gary being excited,” he summarised, “is not a good thing.”

  Nevertheless they followed after Gary and Marland to a small, private garden where Harmony and one of her lieutenants were already seated on a bench.

  “Marland, Sarah, Finn,” said Harmony, greeting them all individually as they arrived and nodding to the benches in front of her. They sat down, Gary and Marland eagerly, Fin
n and Sarah cautiously.

  “How are you finding our little town?” asked Harmony pleasantly. “Settling in I hope?”

  “It’s fantastic!” gushed Marland. “I didn’t even know a place like this was possible!”

  “Excellent!” beamed Harmony. “Finn? Sarah? Is everything all right?”

  “Um, Marland’s right, it’s a lovely town,” said Sarah.

  “Lovely,” echoed Finn, rather unnecessarily.

  “I’m glad you’re settling in,” said Harmony. There was a pause and then Harmony, clearly not one for subtlety, jumped right in to it. “You’ve probably guessed by now that I didn’t just invite you here to make sure you’re making friends. Actually maybe you already know why I’ve asked you here,” she added with a wry glance at Gary, who managed to look both offended and joyously excited at the same time. “When we went to investigate the alarm going off at the Hourglass Group, it wasn’t just in the hope of sabotage, like I told you earlier. Our main hope was actually to find survivors. You see, for some time we have been hoping to expand our activities, and in order to do that we need more people on our side. We need more people who know what is actually going on in the outside world, that is, the atrocities the Covenant, the Accord, even the Hourglass Group are actually committing for power. We have an idea, but we needed proof. You three are our proof.”

  Marland’s jaw dropped open. “You want us to be whistle-blowers?”

  “We want you to tell your story,” said Harmony persuasively, mistaking Marland’s amazement for horror. “So everyone knows what you’ve had to survive. And you’ve got those barcodes to prove it. People might finally listen! They might finally accept that this war needs to end, and that we, the common people, can end it.”

  Sarah was afraid that Harmony was going to launch into a full speech about duty to the people and country when Marland cut her off joyously.