TRUE STORM

TRUE STORM - CHAPTER 1

All our lives, the Harvest Moon Masque was but a fairy tale for my twin sister, Margot, and me. The Masque follows the last of the country harvest, attended by the elite and upper crust in Dominion's Outskirts. It had been my sister's dream to dance at this riotous ball in a matching gown and mask. So it's a bitter-tinged irony that I'm here instead, without her.

The rules of Dominion's Upper Circle society aren't followed out here. Here, at Senator Theodore Nash's sprawling plantation home in the Outskirts, surrounded by verdant fields I've never seen the like of, the country folk follow their own gods. The Plague may be gobbling up these people, same as in Dominion. But here the wealthy farmers, their mercs and field hands, seem less worried about the death and starvation that perch on each street corner of Nor-Am's capital city. Out here, under a stretch of endless gray sky, people may die, but they don't starve by the bucketful. Here, Lasters and Splicers aren't so different.

Lasters are those near certain to die from Plague—or the empty bellies and hard times that come hand and hand with it. Lasters don't last. Splicers survive. The wealthy Splicers attend Splicing Clinics, where new DNA is sewn in to take over from that spoiled by Plague.

In Dominion, there's no mixing of these social worlds. The Lasters are our servants. They are the mercs who guard, our cooks, our caregivers, while Splicers—those from the elite Upper Circle, like me—take up positions as politicians, socialites, doctors, and lawmakers. Splicers run our world. Splicers will inherit the earth. Or so it seemed, once upon a time.

I know better now.

If anyone is to survive this brutal Plague and its endless destruction, it's to be the one group that I've not seen in and around Nash's country estate.

Laster, Splicer...True Born.

To be True Born means you can't catch the Plague, though you're a pariah in so many other ways. They say True Born DNA has all but jumped back in time. A natural defense mechanism against the wasting sickness, they say. True Borns have special rogue DNA that has burrowed back into our ancestral past, turning some into what we all once were: not fully human. Some True Borns have the strength of cheetahs or the speed and grace of gazelles. Some have the hirsute bodies of our furry ancestors and some the scaly skins of our reptilian cousins. Near all I've met, I reckon, are extraordinary in some way. Hated and feared by all, too.

But here, in Nash's well-appointed ballroom, it's only rich and poor, Laster and Splicer, who dance side by side. As level as death itself.

Margot would love the romance of the Masque: the high and mighty of our elite world hobnobbing it with the sons of farmers. As for me? I love it a lot less, though likely because the romance of the evening is not coming alive in the arms of my current partner, Gordon Preston the Third.

"Y'know, you sure are the prettiest little gal," the Third slurs with a half note of surprise. He slips his mask up on his forehead and blinks at me owlishly. Drunk as sure as I'm a Fox. Gordon has not been withholding on a number of things this evening, booze being one of them. His identity being another—despite the nature of the event we are currently attending.

What he hasn't told me is anything useful. Though I play the role of flirt and ingénue, I'm here less to dance than to gather information for my guardian and leader of the True Borns, Nolan Storm. I've buttered up Preston the Third in a thousand delicate and flattering ways, all to have him answer a handful of questions: Have people in the Outskirts heard tales of a new, miracle cure for the Plague? Do the farmers trust the newly elected Senator Nash? Are the Outskirts at all worried about the reach of Dominion's rabble-rousing preacher men?