Citizen (Citizen Saga Book 3)

  Contents

  Title Page

  More Books By Nicola Claire

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: But This?

  Chapter 2: You're Dying

  Chapter 3: It Was Lena

  Chapter 4: I Can't Do It Alone

  Chapter 5: She Said You'd Come

  Chapter 6: Drawn To The Moment As Much As I Seemed To Be Drawn To The Woman Herself

  Chapter 7: I Didn’t Think

  Chapter 8: Here Goes Nothing

  Chapter 9: Bravado

  Chapter 10: And My Safe And Perfect World Shattered

  Chapter 11: Boss, You Gotta See This

  Chapter 12: In This There Was Only Each Other

  Chapter 13: It Was At That Point, That I Well And Truly Fucking Lost It

  Chapter 14: It Consumed Us

  Chapter 15: This Woman Completely Undid Me

  Chapter 16: And That Frightened Me

  Chapter 17: Oh, Fuck No

  Chapter 18: I Felt Beyond Sick

  Chapter 19: I Just Hadn’t Noticed

  Chapter 20: We’re Here

  Chapter 21: She Just Kept Smiling

  Chapter 22: So Full Of Him

  Chapter 23: Well I Never

  Chapter 24: It Was The Enormous Task Before Me

  Chapter 25: It Would Be A Sure-Fire Give-Away

  Chapter 26: And I Needed Lena

  Chapter 27: See?

  Chapter 28: I Kissed Her And She Kissed Me

  Chapter 29: Time For A Colour Change

  Chapter 30: I Wanted To Shake The Fucking Short-Wave To Get Him To Talk

  Chapter 31: Always

  Chapter 32: I Damn Well Said It

  Chapter 33: And Then He Was Gone

  Chapter 34: Oh

  Chapter 35: Deep And Sweet And Heart-Wrenchingly Desperate

  Chapter 36: This Has To Stop

  Chapter 37: I Smiled; It Was Probably Cunning

  Chapter 38: The Noise Was Deafening

  Chapter 39: Oh, Fuck

  Chapter 40: And Yet, Promised So Much

  Chapter 41: Because That Was Just Him

  Review Request

  Interview With Trent Masters

  Interview With Nicola Claire

  About The Author

  Citizen

  The Citizen Saga, Book Three

  By Nicola Claire

  Copyright © 2014, Nicola Claire

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN: 9780473295561

  nicolaclairebooks.blogspot.com

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  Cover Art by Nicola Claire

  Image credit: 123RF Stock Photo

  Image #24331832 & #6543817

  More books by Nicola Claire:

  Kindred Series

  Kindred

  Blood Life Seeker

  Forbidden Drink

  Giver of Light

  Dancing Dragon

  Shadow's Light

  Entwined With The Dark

  Kiss Of The Dragon

  Mixed Blessing Mystery Series

  Mixed Blessing

  Dark Shadow (Coming Soon)

  Sweet Seduction Series

  Sweet Seduction Sacrifice

  Sweet Seduction Serenade

  Sweet Seduction Shadow

  Sweet Seduction Surrender

  Sweet Seduction Shield

  Sweet Seduction Sabotage

  Sweet Seduction Stripped

  Sweet Seduction Secrets (Coming Soon)

  Elemental Awakening Series

  The Tempting Touch Of Fire

  The Soothing Scent Of Earth

  The Chilling Change Of Air

  The Tantalising Taste Of Water (Coming Soon)

  H.E.A.T. Series

  A Flare Of Heat

  A Touch Of Heat (Coming Soon)

  Elite Series

  Elite

  Cardinal

  Citizen

  For: As always, this series is for my loving family.

  And the adventures we undertake filled with so much laughter.

  Chapter 1

  But This?

  Lena

  I watched the ballet before me unfold in mute fascination. Flashing yellow-orange lights atop heavy machinery dancing a duet with their quarry. The beat of metal against metal - so like the clash of cymbals - an accompaniment to the choreography they performed. It was dazzling and strangely captivating.

  But then, I’d never seen a container ship being loaded before.

  In the distance lay the ocean. It might as well have been a desert away. To the sides were the darkened, disused, and derelict docks the Overseers had let run to ruin.

  Forty years we'd been cut off from the rest of the world. Our only access was to trade partners via the rusted container ship that was currently standing centre stage in a performance as foreign and as essential our city’s freedom.

  I'd watched the goods come off this morning. Corrugated metal containers full of necessary - and not so necessary, depending on where you sat on society’s ladder - items we were incapable of producing or manufacturing ourselves.

  But what was being loaded in their place now was the real question.

  I shifted my weight, stretching out first one leg and then the other, only to resume my crouch again, hidden from prying eyes. Ever present sweat ran in rivulets down between my shoulder blades, the breathable black skin-tight suit I was wearing stuck to me in the most uncomfortable of locations. It took everything in me to ignore the need to pull bits of my outfit from their slide into uninvited spaces.

  The scent of tobacco mixed with diesel and salt invaded my nostrils, giving me thankfully something else to focus on. Someone was smoking their ration nearby.

  I pulled a mirror from my pocket and peered around the corner of the air-con unit I was using as shelter. A lone Citizen worker in reflector-striped overalls leaned against a dusty wall and inhaled his Tyger Menthol cigarette. He let out a long sigh of contentment afterwards, then dropped the stub and crushed it beneath his scuffed boot. He headed back to his fellow workers, but not before he picked the cigarette butt up and disposed of it appropriately.

  He might have only been a Citizen, but he was model.

  The question was, why?

  Revolution had come to Wánměi. The order threatened. Two consecutive Chief Overseers assassinated. Disgruntlement and disillusionment rife on the city streets. But it still wasn't enough.

  Wipes were happening more and more frequently. Drones, controlled by Shiloh and not the Cardinals, were walking almost every single street. The public weren't even aware that Chew-wen Wang Chao had died when the Palace had burned. The Overseers continued to hold the nation by the throat and squeezed tightly. What they said, everyone blindly believed. Despite recent events making them question otherwise.

  I'd always known the battle was too hard for just one Elite. But I wasn't just one Elite anymore.

  "What's your plan, Lena?" came a familiar male voice over the earpiece I was wearing.

  I glanced around the immediate area and noted four dock workers, but no drones. They were dealing with a broken coupling on a container door that had just been set down too heavily on the dock, before being raised for loading on the ship.

  "It's now or never," I replied. "Have you got eyes on the office?"

  "Yeah, all quiet,"
Simon replied. "Windows clear." The windows overlooking the dock and the deck of the ship itself.

  "I need a distraction," I said, shifting my legs and getting ready to run. "Tan, can you arrange that?"

  "On it," came his reply and then a series of orders to his men. "Sixty seconds, Elite," he added, once he'd put his team in place.

  "Acknowledged," I whispered, studying my chosen access.

  Flakes of rust peeled off the anchor chain, leaving a grimy red tinged stain down the side of what was once black paint of the hull. But I wouldn't be using that unless I had to. I pulled my palm sized binoculars from my vest pocket and checked the main deck for movement. All eyes in the bridge would have been on the next container being lifted onto the deck by a gantry crane. All personnel on the decks were engaged in ensuring that container made it onto the ship safely.

  "Five seconds," Tan said quietly over the earpiece and I had a sudden thought I should have asked what the distraction would be.

  Tan had a way of looking at a problem differently than most. The rebels I'd been working with, including Si on the earpiece, would have wandered onto the dock at the far end and drawn people's attention in a non-confrontational way.

  Tan had a lot of pent up anger. His path would not be peaceful.

  A loud explosion sounded out over by the raised dock office, followed swiftly by an ominous creaking of wood as it splintered. Shouts and cries of alarm joined the cacophony, and then a whooping siren set the scene to chaotic.

  Great. He'd blown up one of the supporting poles beneath the building, making it teeter at a dangerous angle over the top of several dock workers and drones.

  I didn't have time to question his choice of distraction, I was up and running hell for leather towards the side of the dock and then springing from the platform into the air, covering the distance to a mooring rope. My glove covered hands wrapped around the thick, and alarmingly slimy rope, and I slid several feet towards the water.

  Lifting my legs up and wrapping my ankles around the rope helped to suspend my slide, and then I was moving hand over hand up the rope, hanging upside down with my focus solely on the pitted paintwork on the side of the ship.

  The mooring rope worked its way through a hole beneath the rim of the deck, leaving several feet between where it disappeared and where I needed to be to climb over. With nothing to cling onto, raising up my hands to grip the edge was out.

  In the background I heard the continued shouts of the dock workers and Shiloh's High-Anglisc voice issuing commands. Any moment now they'd turn their attention back to the ship, realising the attack was a distraction and not the real issue.

  I narrowed my eyes at the distance required to leap, and then started swinging my body beneath the tautly strung rope. It took six swings to gain the height I needed, but on the sixth I let go of the rope, my feet going up, up, up, and my right leg swinging out and over the side of the ship's deck railing.

  I came down with a hard thump on the metal handrail, all air being pushed from my lungs as black spots danced before my eyes. My body slid over onto the deck itself and I still hadn't managed to draw breath.

  "Lena!" came Si's urgent call through the earpiece. "Status."

  I gasped, couldn't quite get any air inside my lungs, but there was no way I was staying out in the open like this. I rolled over towards the wall of a container, already loaded earlier, and tried again for another breath. A small ragged inhale reached my straining lungs. My hands pressed on my stomach, trying to aid the return of normal diaphragm movement, my ears ringing with the effort of hearing any approaching sounds.

  A second breath, and then a third, and finally I rasped, "Fine. I'm fine."

  There was silence on the other end of the earpiece, but I could have sworn I heard the relief despite the lack of sound.

  I sprang to my feet and took in my surroundings, then turned my attention to the container I was hiding beside. The ship was almost fully loaded. Only a dozen or so containers were left to bring aboard. I'd had to wait for this late in the process to gain access in a way that would not be seen. This part of the ship already secured, the dock workers moving on to the other end.

  A container ship is loaded from the centre outwards. I hadn't realised this until I'd watched the process just a week ago. The small window of opportunity down one end of the ship's deck only came towards the last few minutes of loading.

  I didn't have much time.

  I scanned the door labels on the container closest to me, the writing was surprisingly in Anglisc. I'm not sure why I thought it would be in a foreign tongue. But despite the ease of which I could read it, the manifest label didn't reveal the contents, just instructions on how to open the container at the other end.

  Shouldn't there have been a list of what was inside?

  I moved on to the next and found the same lack of inventory listed. Like the last one, just a keypad to grant access. The risk of decoding it and opening the container could mean activating what lay on the inside. And if our intelligence was true, I did not want to start up what possibly lay inside one of these forty foot long containers. There could be a hell of a lot stored inside just one of those.

  I moved on to the next and the next container and kept coming up with the same instructions but no manifest. That left just one other avenue to explore.

  I glanced down the side of the ship and checked that the coast was clear, then moved through the shadows until I found a door. It squeaked as I pulled it open, the latch rusted almost completely through with salt spray.

  I frowned at the flakes of rusted paint that fell to the dull floor, sure a ship like this would need to be kept in good working order. But choosing not to dwell on the obvious lack of maintenance, I slipped through the opening and closed the door before someone came to investigate the sound.

  Not that they'd hear much over the last few containers being loaded, or the chaos that sounded out still on the dock. And inside, it was ominously quiet. Safety lighting on, but not nearly enough illumination for the normal function of a ship of this size.

  I cocked my head. Nothing. I inhaled through my nose. No scents to indicate a galley kitchen being utilised. I let a slow breath of air out and headed down the hallway, making sure to tread carefully, keeping any sound I made to a minimum just in case.

  But the further I went, the more sure I was that the innards of this container ship were barren. Were they all on deck loading the last of the containers? Or had shore leave not been completed?

  I checked the first room I came to and found a dust coated long wooden table secured to the floor, with benches either side. A painting of a ship on high seas was barely visible through a layer of grime on the opposite wall. The porthole windows on either side were equally as grimy.

  Another breath out and I moved on, finding the galley kitchen - empty. Cabins - empty. Toilets - empty. I finally came to rest at the bottom of the stairs that led up to the bridge.

  I stared up the narrow incline and waited to see movement behind the small window set high up in the door. Several silent seconds ticked by. Silent but for the the sound of a container being clanged against more containers out on the deck.

  "They're moving on to the last container now, Lena," Si advised.

  No words to hurry up. Only an update he knew I would take seriously.

  "Just checking something out," I whispered and started up the metal stairs to the door perched at the top of what felt like a very long and narrow stairwell.

  Any moment I expected someone to open the door at the top. Or come up behind me just as silently as I was on the stairs. I kept glancing over my shoulder, and stopping mid step, straining to hear a sound on the other side of the bridge door.

  Nothing.

  At last I made it, crouched beneath the window, staying just out of sight. No shadows moved behind the illuminated glass. No sounds other than the odd beep of electronics from within.

  Sucking in one last fortifying breath of air I lifted up onto the tip of my
toes and peered inside.

  Empty.

  Just flashing lights and winking buttons and security vid-screens.

  But they weren't showing the hallways of the internal part of the ship. They showed the decks. The greater area of the docks, which would become the sea once the ship departed port, and the containers as they sat stacked on top of each other, weathering any storms that the ship would have to sail through to reach its destination. Our trading partners.

  I stared at each screen. Each flickering LED light. Each empty seat that I could see.

  Then my fingers found the door handle and I twisted the knob and walked inside.

  The last container had been loaded outside the bank of windows across the front of the bridge, the gantry crane moving away down the far end of the dock for wherever it got housed between shipments. The workers on the pier lining up and being counted off by the drones. The lights outside so much brighter than in here I was sure I wouldn't be seen.

  I turned my attention back to the vacant bridge. Larger than I would have guessed. So open and empty. Aside from the banks of controls, stretching in a semi circle from one side of the bridge to the other. There were radar screens, and keyboards, levers and switches and dials. Several different old style handheld telephone receivers, and what had to be the ship's wheel and main accelerator.

  And a series of vid-screens I hadn't even glimpsed from the other side of the window.

  "Lena," Si said, interrupting my stunned and disbelieving gaze. "You have to get off there now. They're unhooking the mooring lines."

  A breath of air left me. I walked slowly closer to the vid-screens and scanned each one carefully just to be sure I hadn't made a mistake.

  I felt chilled to the bone. Utterly frozen solid. And that was saying something, humidity, even in here, had to be in the high eighties. My fingers twitched as I watched movement on the closest screen. They felt numb. My body quaked with shivers, a trembling I couldn't seem to contain.