The Defiant

For Alex McAulay for eternity

T
HANK YOU TO MY
brilliant agent, Mollie Glick, at Foundry Literary + Media. Without her advice and wisdom, the Forsaken Trilogy never would have come to life. I cannot thank her enough for all of her help and encouragement, and I am extremely grateful to her. Big thanks also to Rachel Hecht, Kathleen Hamblin, Hannah Brown Gordon, Stéphanie Abou, and the entire team at Foundry, as well as Shari Smiley at Resolution.

Gigantic thanks to my fantastic editor, Zareen Jaffery at Simon & Schuster. She helped shape this incredible journey, and gave me great notes and edits. Working with her is always a lot of fun. Thanks also to Julia Maguire, Lydia Finn, Lucille Rettino, Michelle Fadlalla, Venessa Carson, Dawn Ryan, Bernadette Cruz, Kelly Stidham, Sooji Kim, Mara Anastas, Brian Kelleher, Justin Chanda, Jon Anderson, and everyone else at Simon & Schuster. Thanks to Lizzy Bromley too, for the great cover designs!

I'd also like to thank the many librarians, booksellers, and readers that I've met along the way. Thank you for your dedication, passion, and friendship.

As always, much love and thanks to my family and friends—especially my husband, Alex McAulay, who has been with me every step of the way.

A
VOICE WHISPERS MY
name: “Alenna.”

I try to respond, but I can't. Besides, I don't even know if the voice is real. It's probably an auditory hallucination.

I have no senses. I can't see, hear, taste, or smell. I can't feel anything. And all around me is darkness. Blacker than any night you could imagine. I am totally disconnected from my flesh. My senses have been stripped away, like bark from a tree. My nerves are deadened, and I don't feel hunger or thirst.

I could have been like this for hours, or weeks, or months. Sometimes I sleep, and sometimes I'm awake. It's hard to tell the difference.

Often I want to scream. Other times, I want to break down and cry. But I am capable of neither.

I have no memory of how I ended up here, but I know that one of two things must have happened. Either I got captured somehow and placed in some sort of isolation pod, or else I died and now I'm stuck in limbo. It's worse than anything else I've ever experienced.

Over and over, I try to figure out the last memory I have before everything went black. It's a memory of a few weeks after we
liberated everyone on Prison Island Alpha, the place also known as “the wheel.” The specimen archive—where the captured kids were being held in stasis—was destroyed along with the flying machines known as “feelers,” and we retook the island.

Most of the brainwashed drones converted to our side, once their minds were free of the government chemicals. Some didn't, and they formed guerilla groups in the forest that would attack us every night.

But even those attacks started dying down. Our plan was going well. Island Alpha was becoming our new home base, just like we intended. The different tribes on the island—the rebels, the scientists, and the travelers—were working together to turn the island into our staging ground for our assault on the continental United Northern Alliance, better known as the UNA.

But obviously something went wrong.
Was I captured and poisoned by rogue drones?
Maybe I hit my head, or was given some kind of drug along the way. My memory is so fuzzy. Trying to think about things too hard makes my head hurt, like looking through glasses with the wrong prescription.

The last thing I remember is helping build a cabin with my boyfriend, Liam, as we were working on a team constructing a new fortified village on the island. Liam and I were laughing and playing around. Things were good. I felt safe—for once.

My only lingering sadness was over David's death. David was the boy whom I'd woken up with the first day I'd gotten banished to Island Alpha by the UNA. He sacrificed himself by destroying the cooling core of the specimen archive, which halted the government machinery running the wheel. He did it so that the rest of us could live. And also so that the kids who were frozen in the specimen archive could survive. I still thought about him every
night before I slept, and he appeared sometimes in my dreams. Often we were lost in the forest on Island Alpha together, on a dark hidden trail, and he was beckoning for me to follow him deeper into the darkness. Sometimes I would wake up crying.

I hid these dreams from Liam. I don't know why. Maybe I didn't want him to know how strong my feelings for David were. Maybe I didn't even realize how strong they were myself, until after David was gone. I was still sorting out my feelings, more than two months after his death. David and I shared a deep connection. When he died, it felt like I lost a piece of myself.

I will never know exactly how David felt about me. I suspect that he liked me more than he ever let on. His final words to me—“Keep me in your thoughts, Alenna”—linger in my mind. I keep wishing that we had done things differently, and that David was still alive.

Other than David, my other friends survived our massive battle with the army of drones. Liam, Gadya, Rika, and I found Cass and Emma alive but injured after the assault on the elevated highway. Both of them were still recovering but doing well.

I try to think past that final memory of me and Liam working in the village together, but there is only blackness. I'm suffering some form of amnesia.

I remember that our attack on the continental UNA was several months away. For once, I had felt so peaceful. It had seemed like we were free from worry—at least for a while.
Did someone attack us on that day?

The final image in my head is that of Liam's smiling face gazing at me. After that there is nothing. No matter how hard I try, I can't bring any more memories to my mind.

Then, out of nowhere, I hear more voices crackling in my ear,
saying my name. They are too loud and sharp to be imaginary.

“It's time to bring her up,” a voice says.

“Alenna? Can you hear us?” another one asks.

“Say something if you're still sane in there!” the first voice commands.

The voices are familiar. Oddly reassuring. I realize that I must be wearing an earpiece.
Am I back in the UNA?
I try to touch my ear but I can't feel anything, not even my own hands.

Yes, I can hear you
,
I struggle to answer. But I can't speak. Then I try to say it again, and this time, I hear the words crackling back at me in my ear. My hearing is returning. “What happened? Where am I?”

“Hang on,” another voice calls out. It's a girl. I recognize her voice at once.
Gadya
.
She's one of my closest friends.

“Gadya?” I ask, confused. But as soon as I say her name, I feel a strong tugging sensation on my arms and legs. Other senses are returning. I'm floating in thick, warm liquid. And the substance around me is flowing and shifting, like a slow-moving river.

It startles me to feel any sensation. I must be in some kind of sensory deprivation chamber. I feel relieved to still be alive, but very confused about where I am—and why I got put here.

My sense of direction is skewed. I can't tell what is up, and what is down. Only that I'm finally moving.

My arms and legs start to throb, and my head begins pulsing. I'm being pulled up through the jelly-like liquid. It reminds me of the material that the barrier around the gray zone was built from. I struggle to kick and move my arms. I thrash and flail, and this time I can feel the motion. All my senses are returning at once, and they make my body ache. I see a circle of light appear directly above me. Shimmering and fluctuating. Growing larger as I'm pulled upward.

“Hey! What's going on?” I call out.

I feel wires tugging and pinching my flesh, like intravenous tubes. They feel like they're going to rip right out of my skin.

I cry out in pain.

“It's okay! Stay calm! You're doing great,” I hear Gadya's voice say in my earpiece. “Don't mess up now!”

“Mess what up?” I ask, confused.

Air bubbles burst around me in the oily liquid. I realize there's a tube in my nose. I try to yank it out, but it hurts too much. I taste copper and realize that I'm bleeding.

I keep moving, wrestling with the tubes sticking into my body. I feel restraints and wires pulling away from me, setting me free.

And then I'm pulled out of the fluid and into harsh white sunlight. I yell in pain, as tubes whip out of my flesh one by one.

I'm in a bamboo hammock attached to a small metal crane. It's carrying my body up through a large metal hatch in the top of a giant isolation tank, and over to a stone walkway in a jungle clearing.
I must be on Island Alpha
.
Rows of other isolation tanks sit next to the one that I was inside, monitored by scientists in white lab coats.

There is no sign of Gadya or my other friends. And my memory hasn't come back either.

The fresh air flays my skin. Every nerve feels like it's burning, as though I've been tossed onto a funeral pyre. The light is so bright, I can't even hold my eyes open. I clench them shut. Even with them closed, it's too bright for me. I see a burning red color on the inside of my eyelids.

“Gadya?” I call out, as I struggle to orient myself on the hammock. I put a hand to my ear and try to adjust the earpiece. “Where are you?”

“Right here.”

“Where?”

“Watching you on a monitor.”

I try to put the pieces together. I gasp for air. I feel like a fish from the river, thrown onto a rock and tortured by small children. I'm dressed only in my underwear.

“Stop flailing!” Gadya yells into my earpiece, her voice distorting. “Or else they'll fail you!”

“Quit helping her,” another voice grouses faintly in my earpiece. “She has to do this on her own. If she fails, she fails.”

“You mean like you did, Cass?” I hear Gadya retort.

Cass
. Another friend. One whom I met at Destiny Station in Australia, when Liam and I first escaped from the wheel.

“I didn't fail the test!” Cass snaps back. “I was disqualified due to my injuries! There's a difference.”

Their voices are loud and crackly in my earpiece. “Stop arguing!” I yell at them. “My head hurts!”
What test are they talking about?

I finally manage to get my eyes to open again, into narrow slits. The crane is bringing my hammock to the ground. I keep shifting and writhing. It feels like my body has to keep moving, like I have insects under my skin, crawling around. I finally get deposited on cold stones. I curl up. Everything is throbbing.

“Surfacing is hard. But you need to stay calm,” Gadya says. I adjust my earpiece to hear her voice better. “The scientists are judging you right now.”

I take deep, shuddering breaths of air, lying on my side on the stone. I never realized how thin and cool fresh air felt before.