Purgatory City

  Through The Gates Book One

  Rebecca Royce

  Skye MacKinnon

  Copyright © 2020 by Rebecca Royce & Skye MacKinnon

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Covers by Peryton Covers.

  Published by Peryton Press.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  About Rebecca Royce

  About Skye MacKinnon

  Also by Rebecca Royce

  Also By Skye MacKinnon

  1

  The gates loomed in front of me like hungry jaws waiting to swallow me whole. This was the moment they'd decide whether I lived or died. There was no other option. No returning to the Blastlands, no chance of ever seeing my friends again. These gates only went one way. Maybe they spit out the bones of the dead at some point, but they didn't let anyone leave alive.

  Was I ready to die? I nodded. Yes, I was. There was no future for me in the Blastlands, no way of surviving for much longer. Everyone was starving and killing each other. Going through the gates might actually be a quicker, better way to die than staying out here.

  Slowly, the queue moved forward, and with it, the stench of sweat and sickness drifted across the air. It was particularly hot today, absolutely scorching. No wonder people around me were smelly. I was, too, but I didn't want to examine that further. I already felt less than human, and knowing how much I stank would just increase that feeling.

  One by one, the people in front of me walked through the gates, each of them swallowed by the darkness beyond. Nobody knew exactly what the city on the other side of the Wall looked like. All we had were rumors of beauty, wealth, and as much good as you can eat. Even if the stories were exaggerated, there had to be a nugget of truth behind the myth.

  A man behind me stumbled, and I turned to help him up, but two guards were faster, pulling him out of the queue. They dragged him to a small building next to the gates and pushed him inside. I wasn't sure if I wanted to know what was going to happen to him. We were coming here to work. That was going to be our purpose in Purgatory City. If we weren't strong enough to work, then we weren't of any use for the people ruling this place.

  Finally, the woman in front of me stepped into the darkness. It was my turn. Now that I was standing in front of the gates, it was clear that it wasn't actual darkness, just shadows hiding whatever lay beyond. That was a little more reassuring.

  The guards held me back, their white uniforms a stark contrast to all the dust-covered people around them. They wore gloves that by now were full of dirt from touching us. I wondered what they had to think of us. People living outside the City, unclean, uneducated, wild. Sickness was rife in the Blastlands and many of us died long before we reached old age.

  "Go now." One of the guards grunted and pointed toward the gates. I took a deep breath and started to walk into the shadows. It was time for my new life to begin and hopefully not end.

  I braced for death to come for me right there. I didn’t know what it would be like, since no one who died ever returned to tell us about the experience. Nothing happened.

  “Step forward.”

  The instructions came from a voice farther along, where I couldn’t see, somewhere in the shadows. That had to be a good sign. Didn’t it? Rumors always said if death came, it came instantly, but maybe they were wrong, maybe it came later.

  “Eileen Paine.” The voice repeated my name a second before what light there was around me went black and the gate banged shut. I jumped, my hand coming reflexively up to my throat. “Age twenty. Parents: John and Lauren Paine. Both deceased. You are seeking refuge in Purgatory City. Say confirm if you confirm all of this to be true.”

  I hadn’t given anyone this information about me, but it didn’t surprise me that whoever it was making these decisions today knew everything about us.

  “You are strong. Healthy. You are of above-average intelligence and hold no specific genetic markers that will make you get sick in the future.”

  Well… I supposed that was all good. “Um… thanks. Yes, I think I am those things. Confirmed or whatever.”

  “Approved. Step forward.”

  Darkness surrounded me. Where exactly did they want me to walk? I couldn’t screw this up now. Not with my above-average intelligence. I steeled my spine. If they were trying to kill me, they’d have done so by now, and more easily than giving me impossible instructions to follow. I stepped forward. There was ground beneath my feet. That was good news. I kept walking. A light appeared ahead.

  I forced myself to keep going, to stride toward that light. Light meant hope, light meant a future, light meant…

  Cage doors shut around me, forming a perfect cube encasing my body. I grabbed onto the bars. What was happening? This wasn’t what was supposed to be happening.

  “Relax, Eileen Paine. When you wake up, you will be in what your people call Purgatory City. Welcome to the Game.”

  To the what?

  A cool liquid coated my body. Where had that come from? I backed up, hitting the bars on the other side of the cage. I didn’t understand. None of this made sense. All I wanted was a chance, a future. Not…

  Whatever I would have thought vanished as blackness overtook me, taking me down, pulling me into sleep, whether I wanted to go or not.

  With only distant awareness of what was happening to me, I collapsed in my cage, the bars on the bottom stopping my full descent but allowing my legs to dangle through toward a bottomless cavern. Or maybe I imagined that. In the place between wakefulness and sleep, I struggled and failed to remain conscious.

  I dreamed.

  I was back with my parents, before the bombs had taken out our home. My mother was young, beautiful, not beat up as she would be later. She reached out, caressing the side of my face gently. “I love you, Eileen. I’ll never let anything happen to you.”

  When she’d uttered those words, I’d been young enough to believe that promises couldn’t be broken.

  Somehow, I remained cognizant that this was a dream, and I clung to her words, unwilling to let her go. I didn't have any pictures of my parents. Dreams were the only way I still got to see them. In my memory, they'd turned to shapeless figures kept alive by sheer determination, but at night, they came alive again.

  "Everything will be all right," my mother whispered.

  "We're going to look after you," my father added, hugging me tight, as if he knew that something bad was about to happen. Even in dreams, though, it was hard to imagine the sheer craziness of what my future was about to hold.

  I woke with a gasp as icy water drenched me. Screaming, I jumped to my feet, ready to fight whoever had woken me in this barbaric fashion. There was nobody to attack. Just the strange cage and at the top of it, an opening through which the water must have been pumped. I shook my fist at it, then looked around. I was no longer alone.

  There were similar cages to both sides, each of them containing one person. There was someone lying in the one on my left, but to my right, a young man waved at me, a goofy smile on his face that would have seemed nice if his eyes hadn't been bloodshot with madness.

  "New here?" he asked, his voice rough.

  "I suppose so," I muttered, finding it a little strange to be talking to this guy without having a clue what was going on. We were caged, for goodness sake, like animals.

  "Look at your arm," he said cheerily, hints of hysteria lacing his words. I almost didn't want to do it, but curiosity got the better of me. Besides, I could feel a strange tension in my left arm that I had ignored until now.

  I bit back a scream when I saw what he'd been talking about. There was a machine embedded in my arm. Two metal rings, thin as elegant bracelets, were pressing into my flesh, one just above the wrist, the other a few inches below my elbow. They were fused with my skin somehow, and the thought of that almost made me puke. Someone had branded me with silver. How dare they! I'd come here prepared to die, but I wasn't about to be humiliated, treated like a beast.

  TOUCH.

  Bright green letters suddenly appeared on my arm between the two rings. They weren't painted onto my skin, but seemed to run just beneath it, as if the ink was now flowing inside my body rather than blood. This time, I really gagged.

  "You better do what they say," the young man giggled. "Although, I'm sure they're going to show you what they can do."

  Gingerly, I ran my right index finger over the words. They hovered there for a second, then disappeared as if they'd never been there in the first place.

  "What now?" I asked when nothing happened.

  "Now, the Games begin."

  The man wrapped his hands around the bars of his cage and stared into the darkness. That was all there was around u
s. Just some bright lights illuminating the endless row of cages and darkness all around. I had no idea whether we were inside Purgatory City or somewhere else entirely.

  A sharp pain made me look at my arm again.

  GET READY.

  "For what?" I asked. Did this machine even understand me? Could I talk to it? Or was it purely for instructions?

  "The Games, silly," the young man snickered. "They're about to begin."

  "What even are the Games? Could someone please tell me what's going on?"

  I tried to keep the panic out of my voice, but I struggled. I'd never liked being kept in the dark, and this was an entirely new level.

  "It's my third time," the man muttered. His knuckles were white from how hard he gripped the bars of his cage. "They make you do it again if you fail your probation year. Again and again and again until you're dead." He cackled madly. "This is just the beginning, sweetheart. Even if you survive, you'll have to get through an entire year inside the City. Then the tests. Then they decide whether you get to go to Eden or enter the games again. Or get killed. Some choose that rather than doing it all again." He sighed, sounding almost lucid for a second. "Maybe I should have taken that option. Too late now. Too late."

  "But what are we playing?" I asked, dreading the answer.

  He laughed. "We're not playing anything. We're the pawns. We do what we're told via our implants. If they tell you to go left, you go left. If they tell you to walk through fire, you walk through fire. And if they order me to kill you... well, it's all part of the Games. We don't have a say in this. We're the chess pieces in someone else's match."

  I gaped at him. He couldn't be serious. All the talks of how living in Purgatory City would be amazing, how it was worth the risk of being killed at the entrance.

  This was wrong. I glared at my implant, almost hoping that new words would appear so I could disobey them.

  TOUCH YOUR RIGHT EAR.

  I stared at the words on my arm. Touch my ear? I stared at the crazy guy in the cage nearby. No one else was talking. If they heard me, they didn’t comment or maybe they were all passed out. I’d gotten by for years now on my instincts and they were screaming for me to be hesitant with the guy in the cage. He was good-looking, young. But he’d clearly lost his wits. I had to look out for myself in whatever happened here. I couldn’t be worrying about the crazy man in the other cage.

  Even if he was blond, and I’d always been a sucker for blond bad boys. Was he that or just bonkers?

  I touched my ear. That seemed easy enough. Of course, if my ear suddenly cut off my finger, I was going to regret listening to the instructions.

  “Good job.” A male’s voice blasted into my ear, and I jumped. “Hold on. Sorry. Volume was turned way up. This better?”

  I swallowed. Oh my, I was about to be as crazed as the boy in the cage. I was hearing voices in my ear.

  “No.” The man sighed. “You’re not crazy, and you can answer me. In fact, you’d better. Take it as a direction. I can put it on your wristband, or you can just do it. Are you going to be difficult?”

  “I… I can hear you. Volume’s fine.”

  Blondie groaned. “Oh, of course. Yours talks to you. Mine won’t say a word to me in a year, but you? Sure. They speak to you.”

  I ignored him as the man in my ear spoke again. “Great. So, you’re Eileen. I see that here. And I bet you’re confused. That’s normal. Let me start from the beginning. You can call me Tim. I am your Guide. You and me? We’re going to get you probation in Purgatory City so that you can move on.”

  I needed a guide? I pulled my knees up to my forehead. All right, I needed to breathe. This all seemed like too much, but it was happening, and I had to deal. I’d chosen this. I’d lined up for the chance.

  Blondie sighed. “It’s a lot. And the Guides are assholes. Mine sucked. It’s his fault I’m in round three here.”

  “Oh, I can hear what you do now. Ignore him. That’s Kenneth, they call him Kenny. He might be on his way to execution. You want to ignore everything he says to you and pay attention to me.”

  I scowled. All right, they could see me, and now random voice Tim wanted me to pay no attention to the person trying to help me and explain things to listen to him just because he somehow got access to my ear? No, that wasn’t going to happen.

  “You don’t say much or maybe you don’t trust me. That’s fine. All I can tell you is that I have as much invested in this as you do. First things first, you need to earn the right to get out of that cage.”

  I cleared my throat. “How do I do that?”

  "By learning to do what you're told. The stakes are too high for you to fail me."

  I grimaced at my arm, hoping that there wasn't a secret camera under my skin. I wouldn't have put it past them. How was he even talking in my head? Had they put an implant in there, too? The thought of that made my skin crawl. Not just because it was creepy to think that they'd done it all without my permission, but also because of the technology that made it all possible. The potential of it. Out in the Blastlands, people were dying because they didn't have clean water. There was no fuel for the few remaining cars that would have still worked and barely any electricity. And here I was with stuff embedded into my body that was probably worth more than my life. Worth more money than my entire family had ever owned. Crazy.

  "Who are you?" I asked, feeling a little rebellious. Probably a bad idea. "Why do you think you can order me around?"

  Suddenly, I was on my knees, burying my head in my hands as agonizing pain crashed into me from all sides. My skin felt like it was being peeled off my flesh in long strips, while my head was close to exploding. It only lasted seconds, but when it was over, my cheeks were streaked with tears and my throat hurt from screaming.

  "That's who I am," Tim said calmly. "I bought you, you're mine. I have the right to make you do what I say and punish you if you don't. Do you understand?"

  I didn't reply. He'd hurt me just to prove a point. I looked down at my bare arms and legs, almost expecting them to be drenched in blood. Nothing. It had all been in my mind. Whatever they'd done to me must have given them the ability to make me feel pain without my body suffering any damage. How convenient for them.

  "Are you ready to prove your worth?" Tim asked.

  Again, I stayed quiet. He could kiss my ass. I was not going to jump for him like a monkey.

  "Take off your shirt."

  Instinctively, I crossed my arms over my chest. I was still wearing the same clothes I had arrived in, tattered and old, but good at concealing my body. If you wanted to survive as a woman in the Blastlands, you had to make sure not to look attractive in the slightest. I never wore anything but baggy clothes and didn't go near a comb to untangle my hair. Sometimes it felt like an insult to my mother, who'd always taken care that we all looked presentable, no matter the poor quality of our clothes. It was better than being raped and killed, though.

  "I'd do what he ordered you to do," crazy blond guy said. I glared at him.

  "You don't even know what he's said," I snapped.

  "They always make you do something you don't want at the beginning." He grinned. "I'll guess from the way you're clutching your shirt, he wants you to strip?"

  I sighed. “Yes. So turn around. I don’t want you looking, Kenny.” I glared at him. “He told me your name.”

  The crazy yet somewhat hot guy turned around in his cage. “If he’s so chatty, maybe you could ask him why I don’t have anyone in my ear and haven’t for days.”

  I wasn’t going to ask this Tim that. If anything, I was going to keep my interaction with this person who claimed he’d paid for me to a minimum. We’d use each other for whatever he got out of this, and then move on with our lives when I got out of Purgatory and got on with the real agenda, which was getting to Paradise.