Rising Tomorrow (Roc de Chere Book 1), Mariana Morgan [epub e ink reader .TXT] 📗

made it out of the slums, couldn’t possibly hope to patrol all of the vast wilderness between Lyon and the Alps hoping to spot one single, primitive car. They would have to make some choices. They would have to—

‘Shut it, girl. Too late for second thoughts. Just keep driving.’

The chances of someone finding them after they had disappeared into the slums for three days were statistically small, but not improbable. It wasn’t even clear to Ingram whether someone was still after them, but she listened to her instincts. Maybe those instincts were heavily flavoured with paranoia and sleep deprivation, but even now, hours into the exhausting drive, her gut feeling didn’t question the choice. She would rather face exhaustion and insanity, driving along windy roads, than Wagner’s goons any day.

She hadn’t shared her real-life story with anyone in the slums. Even if someone had reported to the Elite on the presence of two strangers, they couldn’t have possibly guessed what she was going to do next. She knew she’d lied convincingly, but at the same time, being on a tight schedule meant her story had glaring gaps. There hadn’t been any upfront, careful planning involved to map out their way through the Underground City. It had been pure instinct and desperation.

‘And a lot of making shit up as I went along.’

Ingram had counted on speed. She had recognised that someone with a working brain and connections in the Elite world must have reported the two women making their way through the slums. It wasn’t often that someone with her highly trained skills, which screamed soldier or mercenary, would choose to smuggle someone of Elite origin through one of the worst hellholes in the Afro-European Alliance.

She wouldn’t even blame the Leeches for selling information. For a Leech, it might be the difference between their children starving to death or living to see another day. Sometimes it was hard to define what constituted a traitor. It wasn’t like she had nicely explained why she needed them to keep quiet. She had simply hoped that she could move faster than Wagner’s minions were likely to respond. And to make unexpected choices, like heading south-east for the better part of a hundred kilometres while what she really ought to have been doing was heading north-east like all the escapees from Lyon’s slums usually did in the hope of finding safety past the Contaminated Zone.

The Contaminated Zone made it both easier and more difficult for Ingram to find safety. It had been abandoned by the Elite in shame and denial after their own experiment had turned out to be a spoilt brat. That meant there would be no regular checkpoints, military bases or other infrastructure on her way. But it was a hostile environment.

When the cities of the new world started to blossom at the beginning of the 23rd century, rebuilt after the savage wars, riots and ecological catastrophes preceding the Great Collapse, it had been the desire of the World Government to keep any factories and research posts—and possible contamination—away from the residential zones and the splendid new cities. The French Alps and Prealps seemed the perfect place for industrial experiments. Their ecosystems were already in shreds and they had been abandoned by humans in the decades leading up to the Great Collapse. The few decades since had allowed nature to regenerate somewhat, but it still wasn’t a place Elites wanted to visit for fun. And so the greedy industry, booming fast after the decades of austerity, claimed the long stretches of the West Prealps: Vercors Massif, the Chartreuse, the Bauges and further afield into the foothills of the Jura Mountains.

Maybe they had thought it was so far from where civilisation had settled that they could experiment without anyone ever suffering any consequences. Or maybe they were as short-sighted as the lazy humans of the 21st century who had nearly choked the whole planet with plastic and pollution.

Somewhere around the 2250s, the second nano-tech revolution began. The boom was fast and a huge number of semi-legal research facilities popped up in a matter of years. Using caverns dug in the limestone of the Prealps might have seemed like a good idea, but the highly porous rocks did nothing to protect the environment from the heavy contaminants. The experiments, while successful in the creation of the first fully functioning nanobots, led to nearly ten thousand square kilometres of terrain—a quarter of 21st-century Switzerland—becoming poisonous to all living creatures. The pollutants seeped through the limestone, reached underground water and springs and then spread wide. The majority of the contaminated streams and rivers emptied into the Rhône.

The World Government was appalled at the destruction, and the experiments were halted and banned until scientists could offer an environmentally safe alternative. The guilty were severely punished. But the damage had been done.

Every river joining the Rhône between Lake Geneva and Lyon was provided with a sanitation dam. The Rhône itself had almost a dozen of them, spread throughout the two hundred and fifty kilometres of the potentially affected riverbed. The last three dams protected Lyon itself. The third dam was placed almost directly north of the old airport, the second roughly where the Rhône turned south to cross Lyon and the first right before the confluence of the Rhône and the Saône.

Well, it certainly kept Lyon safe for a while, but did nothing to clear the toxins out of the soil and the ravaged ecosystem. The Prealps became a wasteland, and with time the contamination spread around the Rhône basin.

In the meantime, the dams had been under huge strain. When it became obvious the soil itself was beyond salvation with the means available at the time, the dams further up the Rhône and its tributaries were abandoned. Without new filters they began to fail, letting through more and more toxins. But more importantly, now that they weren’t being monitored, branches and other floating debris clogged up the dams, the pressure eventually shattering the structures.

By the end of the 24th