The Society

By Elizabeth Phelleps

Kira Moriarity is a seventeen-year-old assassin, a pawn in an elaborate plan to remold the world. At least, that’s what she’s been raised to believe by the ominous Society, a shadowy establishment who loathes human weakness and abhors the sticky complications of life, love, and relationships.
Kira has been meticulously trained and prepared to complete an unthinkable mission: to kill her adoptive family. But when she meets and falls in love with Josh, she begins to doubt the plans The Society has made for her. Can a feeling this heady and powerful really be all that bad? Can she really betray the people that care about her most? At a crossroads, Kira abandons her mission and leads her family and friends on a cross-country flight toward safety...she hopes. Along the way, as Kira learns the stories of other Assassins and their families, her worldview shifts: what if The Society’s way isn’t, in fact, the better way to live?
In a mad dash for freedom, Kira must fight not only The Society, but her own wayward heart as well. As she dodges emotional and literal bullets, Kira begins to understand that instead of sacrificing her family to save herself, she may have to sacrifice herself to save her family. Hers is a story of self-discovery with no happy ending; in order to break free from The Society’s demands, Kira finds herself drawn inexplicably closer to their leader, until she realizes that there may be no way out for her, if she wants to save the ones she loves.
Told in the alternating viewpoints of Kira, her brother Theo, and her boyfriend Josh, The Society is a story of self-discovery, hope, and redemption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elizabeth Phelleps
• Release date: Nov 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310056291

Elizabeth Phelleps

Elizabeth Phelleps is an English language arts teacher and aspiring author living in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, PA with her husband and son.

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The Society

by Elizabeth Phelleps

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Elizabeth Phelleps

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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CHAPTER 1

KIRA

I repeated the mantra, with each footfall. My tennis shoes slapped the pavement like an exclamation point, emphasizing my thoughts: I am an assassin. Exhale. Inhale. I am an assassin.

It was disquieting that I had to remind myself of this, as I jogged in the cool morning fog of my neighborhood. I used to be so good at this, unquestioning, steadfast. I was coming completely come undone. And at such an inconvenient time.

Looking at me, you probably wouldn’t believe that I was trained to be a heartless killer. You’d probably just see a petite, doe-eyed seventeen-year-old with uncontrollably curly blonde hair and dimples in both cheeks, sweating and puffing as she passed by your house on her daily run.

But if that’s all you saw, you’d be making a grave mistake, a mistake that many people have made, and regretted. It wouldn’t be your fault. No one knows, and by the time they figure out the truth, it will already be too late.

I wished, as I rounded the corner past Kellan and Kayce’s house, that everything in my life could be as boringly normal as it seemed. Better than normal, even. I couldn’t even count the number of people who have told me how lucky I am, how blessed my family has been by me – blah, blah, blah. I’ve gotten really good at blinking my large, dewy eyes and nodding solemnly in agreement, though.

Growing up in an orphanage should have made me appreciative of this quiet neighborhood, with its stately brick homes, neat green lawns, and cheerful children. But it didn’t. Instead, each step I took led me closer to finally, blessedly, leaving it all behind forever.

I winced as I zipped past Josh’s house, picking up my speed in an attempt to outrun my pesky guilt.

I wasn’t sure why, but this morning run – one of my last, if all went well – was making me nostalgic. My mind wandered as I looped through an intersection, turning my feet back toward my parents’ house.

I remembered well the day my parents picked me up from the orphanage. My parents had seemed so desperately, palpably happy. It almost made me feel bad that they didn’t know what they were getting into, which then made me irritated for being so damn emotional. I frowned, surging forward, hoping that the physical pain of this run could diminish my nagging unease.

My shoes slapped the still-damp pavement as I silently recited my lessons. The monotony was comforting: loyalty, selflessness, bravery, honesty. Loyalty, selflessness, bravery, honesty.

It made complete sense to me, and not just because I’d been raised to believe it. Because I wanted the world to be better; I really, really did. War, espionage, crime, deceit – they all existed in our world because people were too short-sighted and selfish to act in the best interest of others. Too self-absorbed to do what needed to be done.

I could hear my teachers’ voices in my mind, reciting the ills of humanity: greed, doubtless, was at the root of the world’s problems. But so were ignorance, selfishness, and an unwillingness of the citizens of the world to stand up for one another. Loyalty was the antidote that could save the world. My loyalty was making the world a better, stronger place.

Reminding myself of this quelled my fears as I flew into the final stretch of my run. I was doing the right thing. I knew I was, definitely. I was ready for this, and all my hard work was about to pay off. Yes, definitely. Probably.

I slowed my pace and my thoughts, reaching the driveway of my house, looking up at the only home I had ever known. I doubted I would have time for fond remembrances and drawn-out good-byes later, so I took this moment, still catching my breath, to wish a silent farewell to the home that had reared me.

Needless to say, my parents had no idea what they were getting when they adopted me. They saw a tony blonde girl with enormous green eyes, wearing a tattered gray sweater dress and frowning thoughtfully. The perfect picture of an orphan – a carefully coached look, one designed to turn parents into putty.

But behind that staged innocence lived something much more menacing: a wicked smart, scarily shrewd mini-genius with kick-ass combat abilities and a hunting knife zippered into a secret compartment in designed-to-look tattered luggage.

My parents were, in a word, thrilled when they met me. My mother immediately teared up, kneeling in front of my and opening her arms, while my dad stood slightly behind her, mouth agape. The Warden who ran the orphanage, prodded me from behind into my new mom’s arms, and as soon as I entered her orbit, she crushed me into a hug that was brimming with love, sorrow, hope, and relief. It was like her emotions were palpable; I could feel them raining down on me like a shower with way too much water pressure.

I frowned at the memory, shaking out my ponytail to dislodge the thought. Nothing to be gained by dwelling on that, I told myself, looking up at the house. Just then, a rustle caught my eye in a second-story window. I squinted against the soft pink light of the dawn as a tiny brown head popped into view, waving down at me.

The hyperactive waves of the little boy bouncing about above me made me smile, against my better judgment. It was Theo, my seven-year-old brother: my parents’ miracle baby. An impossible bundle of energy, Theo had managed to complicate my life in ways both unanticipated and undesired over the past seven years. Along with a host of other mild problems, Theo was deaf.

Being a genius made it exceptionally easy for me to pick up sign language, which made it exceptionally easy for me to become close to him, which made it exceptionally easy for me to love him. It was a deep, visceral, protective love that had sprung up unbidden to surprise me one night as I lay awake, listening to him cry.

A mistake, I knew, but one that I hoped wouldn’t completely derail my mission. A mistake I could overcome, I assured myself, my breath and confidence returning to me as the sun finally fully burst over the horizon.

I stretched vigorously in my front yard, ignoring Theo and focusing instead on everything I had been taught, everything I had endured. I could do this: I could kill my family, complete my mission. I wouldn’t break, I wouldn’t back down.

Famous last words.

THEO

Most people think that because I’m deaf, I don’t know what’s going on. People in school always act like I’m dumb just because I can’t hear the birds chirping outside on a spring morning, because I don’t know all the lyrics of some stupid sappy pop song on the radio, because I can’t hear the way people exchange words super fast.

But I’m not dumb, and because I can’t hear, I can do a lot of other things really well – even better than most hearing people. Like I can look at someone’s face and tell you if they’re good or bad, nice or mean, honest or sneaky. Since I can’t listen to their words, I have to pay closer attention to what they look like and how they act.

So I’ve known pretty much my whole life that something was different about my sister. I would look at my parents’ faces, so open and eager, and look at Kira and just see something shuttered and wary. It didn’t matter how many times she hugged my mom or how many hours she shared on the couch with my dad watching cheesy Star Trek reruns – there was something missing from her when she was with them. Like she wasn’t letting them see her true self.

I have this idea that everyone has two selves: the true self and what I call their party self. The party self is the self that is always smart and rich and successful and perfect and makes everyone else secretly jealous. It’s the self that everyone shows when we go to the faculty Christmas party at my mom’s work every December. Everyone wants to seem perfect and wonderful and better than everyone else there.

That’s the self that Kira seemed to wear all the time around my parents. She was bright and spunky and more helpful than any kid should be.

The only reason I ever thought this was interesting was the Kira never showed her party self when she was with me. Then I could see her true self. Even though she was always nice and helpful and learned sign language so she could talk to me, there was something scared and wary about her eyes when she wasn’t with my parents. It was almost like she was always looking over her shoulder.

Really, it should have seemed weird to me – and my parents – that Kira had to go to special school on Saturdays to meet with her old orphanage friends and talk about their feelings on adoption. Most adopted kids don’t do that – at least, not my friend Tim who goes to my special hearing impaired school and sits next to me on our special bus.

Looking back, I think I ignored that weird feeling in the back of my head that told me something was wrong because I liked feeling closer to Kira than my parents – I liked having my secret knowledge about Kira’s true self, and feeling special that she had learned sign language before my parents so she could take care of me and protect me from the kids on the playground who made fun of me, or who thought it was ok to steal my toys and push me over just because I couldn’t hear. She was my hero, and that made it a lot easier to ignore everything that was wrong with her.

But Kira was always different when she came back from her adoption school. She was quieter, and laughed less, and liked to spend more time in her room alone. She always looked so serious, standing on the steps of the orphanage when Dad and I would pick her up and go out for our special weekend lunch.

Later, when I found out what really happened at Kira’s orphanage, I realized that the truth was way scarier than anything my mom and dad and I could have possibly imagined, and that things probably would have gone a lot smoother for us if my dad had tried to get Kira to talk to us at lunch – if he had made her show her true self, so he could have helped her instead of her trying to save all of us the way she did.

Mostly, if you really want to know the truth, I never wanted to provoke Kira at all because I loved the way she loved me. She might have grumbled if I ever called her out on it, but I could see it in her true self, in her eyes when she looked across the table at me at dinner. I could see it in the gentle curve of her hand when she signed a bedtime story to me. I could tell from the way she included me when her weird friends from the orphanage came over sometimes – a great hulking blonde boy and a fluttering blonde girl who camped out in her room and spent hours just talking with her, frown lines creasing their foreheads.

She always invited me to sit in her room with them while they talked about whatever teenagers talked about – God knows I couldn’t actually hear anything, and I’ve never been good at reading lips, but Kira would let me sit and play at her computer, and sometimes her friends would sign stories to me, just to make me feel included. Which, now that I mention it, was probably another weird thing I should have noticed – how did her friends know how to sign? I guess it’s like that thing my dad was always saying about hindsight or something.

And even though I always thought these things were kind of weird, I loved this odd relationship I had with my big sister. I loved her, and so I didn’t realize how life-and-death-important this careful, secretive way of my sister’s was until we had to run away – away from everything and everyone I’ve ever know, but toward everything and everyone that was truly important to me – and, in the end, to Kira.

JOSH

My life plan had never involved getting involved in a situation as utterly insane as this.

I had always lived my life quietly, setting reasonable goals and expecting nothing more ambitious than normalcy. I tend to blend into the background; I’d say my most noticeable quality is my invisibility. Most people tend to look through me instead of at me. I guess I don’t really blame them, I’m pretty average: average height, average weight, average brown hair, slightly-above average student, slightly below-average athlete. Unremarkable.

The thing that sucks about my life right now is that I finally met a girl who makes me feel above average, amazing, incredible, and it’s gotten me into a huge mess, one that I’m not sure I’ll ever get out of.

I remember the first time I saw her. It was the first day of fourth grade, and when you’re in fourth grade, every new kid is a total novelty. Mostly because each new kid is either an opportunity or a curse; if the new kid is weird, or ugly, or severely uncool in some way (it’s mean, I know, but when you’re 10? It’s totally true), then they’re your ticket off the bottom rung of the social ladder. On the other hand, if they’re beautiful, or talented, or smart, or amazing in any way, they just leapfrog over you, and add one more person standing between you and the Social Holy Land of popularity.

So my friends (all two of them), and I were sitting – right in the middle of the room, where we were sure to go unnoticed as always – debating what this new kid would be like, when she flounced into the room, on the heels of our hideously temperamental fourth grade teacher.

And I swear that the entire class stopped utterly. No one talked, no one moved, no one even breathed. We all just sat there, staring at this girl that had just entered our lives.

She stood there, head held high, and stared at us, almost defiantly. She had all this hair – this blonde, curly hair that fell over her shoulders in perfect ringlets – and green eyes that glinted in the fluorescent light. You could just tell right away that she was smart, too, a lethal combination. My heart sank, but not because I was worried about my steadily-falling place in line for the swings at recess, but because I knew I was a goner the minute I saw her. I was a goner, already falling for this tiny, fierce, blonde angel – and I knew I could never have her.

What did an average Joe (or Josh, I guess) like me have over the cool kids lounging in the back of the room? How could I compete with Cameron, our own resident Olympian-in-training who took great joy in pushing me off the monkey bars on a weekly basis? Or against Lucas, the black-haired Adonis with an IQ that tested off the charts even in fourth grade? I knew that the heart of this flaxen-haired maiden would never be mine. And so my fragile, decade-old heart sank into my stomach and sat there like a puddle, sloshing around uncomfortably whenever I shifted in my seat.

But then something amazing happened. As this girl’s eyes scanned the classroom, her frown deepened. I saw her take in Lucas and Cameron, who were staring at her from the back row, and something akin to disgust caused her cute-as-a-button nose to crinkle ever so slightly. Likewise for the gaggle of fourth grade girls who attended to these boys.

She skimmed over the brainiacs in the front row, hands poised over their flashcards (on the first day of school, I swear) without a second glance, and when her eyes alighted on me, safely tucked in the third row next to my friends, her face seemed to…relax. Her head tilted slightly to the side, and her eyes trained on me, causing me to blush the most embarrassing shade of red – a curse I inherited from my decidedly Irish mother. And then, just at the corner of one side of her mouth, a twitch that could almost – to a hopeful ten-year-old boy – be construed as a smile.

And before I knew it, she was sauntering down the aisle next to me, winking at me as she passed, and slipping into the seat behind me.

I could feel her body heat assaulting me in waves, and it took every ounce of willpower not to turn around and stare at her outright. Instead, I looked down at the floor and focused on my new Keds, swinging my feet back and forth in an effort to distract myself until the teacher started class.

Before she did, though, she made the girl introduce herself. Tell us your name, dear, the teacher prompted.

The girl behind me stood, and I could smell a soft, fruity smell waft forward as she stood. My name, the little girl said in a clear, dry voice, is Kira Moriarity. The teacher welcomed her, and she sat back down, and I can’t say that I focused on anything else for the entire rest of the day.

I tell you this not so you can laugh at how simple and silly my fourth-grade heart was, but so that you have some idea of how deeply invested I am in Kira. Why I found myself in the position I did, hiding away from the world, running for my life, fighting foes much stronger than I – all in the name of love.

And not just silly seventeen-year-old puppy-love either – but real, deep, knock-you-off-your-feet, love-at-first-sight, soulmate love. Although when I tell Kira that, her eyes go as cold as they were on that first day of fourth grade, and she snorts in a way meant to discourage me and crush my spirit.

Her little brother, though, he tells me I’m wrong. That I’m not seeing what’s really there, but what Kira wants me to see, for her own secret and often scary reasons.

I’m sure that my life could have gone on forever, boring and uneventful, if Kira hadn’t thrown me a bone our junior year and asked me to our fall formal, kicking off the most terrifying year of my life.

My two best friends – Dave and Henry – had stuck by me since the dog days of elementary school, and I remember when I told them I was going to the fall formal with Kira, Dave choked on his chicken nuggets and Henry shot milk out of his nose. Which was par for the course for my friends. In due time, they congratulated me and coached me on proper date etiquette (drawing on their own limited experiences, and the much vaster experiences of their older siblings) and were generally as supportive as a pair of teenage boys are capable of being.

Next to my parents, Dave and Henry are who I miss most.

But I guess I can’t complain too bitterly. When you wait seven years for the woman you love to finally notice you, you have to be willing to do whatever it takes to stay with her. Even if it means abandoning your home and putting your very life at stake. Right?

CHAPTER 2

KIRA

I’m sure that The Society and my Warden, and most of all the Chairwoman, blame me for everything that’s happened. But I could make the argument that it’s really all their fault.

It became clear to me pretty early on that I was a goner for my baby brother. This went completely against everything I had learned growing up in The Society – we could never love an individual as much as we loved the collective. So I hid my feelings for Theo from my Warden. When she asked how my family life was going, I was nonchalant and noncommittal, and made sure to mention him as little as possible, as though he mattered nothing to me.

But at home, I was Theo’s most vigilant keeper. I babysat him when my parents went out, I neglected my homework until the wee hours of the night to sit with him on the floor and play patty-cake, and I spent countless hours teaching him things: how to roll over, how to crawl and walk, how to tie his shoes, how to do his homework. I was completely smitten in a way that was both fulfilling and scary. It was the first time my heart had ever felt in a deep and meaningful way. I was terrified that someone from The Society would find out, so I made sure to steel myself extra from my parents, and most of all from the kids at school.

I had no real friends – save Kellan and Kayce, twins from the Orphanage who had been adopted by a local family as well – and though I playacted well with my parents at home, I never let either of them worm their way into my heart.

Dating also was completely out of the question. I was avowed to be a loyal Citizen, to do my duty as an Assassin and then rejoin the fold of The Society to help it grow and achieve its mission, and if Theo could work his way past my multitude of emotional barriers, I certainly wasn’t going to take the risk that some boy could do the same as well.

Which is why I say that everything that happened is much The Society’s fault as mine. They planted the seed of my downward spiral on a ridiculously sunny September morning.

My dad and Theo had dropped me off for my weekly adoptee counseling group as they always did before jetting off, to run errands and have some father-son bonding while my mom and I were otherwise indisposed. I waved them off, and stepped into the orphanage’s foyer, a dank, gray and uninspiring place. Waiting there already were two visions in blonde – Kellan and Kayce.

It is rare of The Society to produce a set of twins. Something about the bond that twins share can be dangerous to a group whose mission is to foster aloofness and detachment, but Kellan and Kayce were a special case.

As it happened, our small suburban town was the birthplace and sometimes home of a United States Senator and his wife, who were unable to have children. When Kellan and Kayce had been born, they had been earmarked for this job, and trained specially to work as a team. Our Warden had high expectations for them, to uncover the weaknesses of the current world governments, so that The Society might improve upon them and one day exploit them to the downfall of the rest of the world. Or something along those lines.

Kellan smiled wickedly at me as I entered the building. Had I been a normal teenage girl, I might have found Kellan absolutely irresistible, with his shock of white-blonde hair and his eyes so blue they seemed to be purple. He was tall and muscular, with a sharp wit and a deep, guttural laugh. Not to mention how smart and agile he was – there wasn’t a better or more intuitive fighter in our generation than Kellan (myself excluded, of course).

Next to him stood his twin sister, Kayce, Kellan’s delicate double. Kayce was thin as a whip, and just as smart, with blonde hair and violet eyes to match her brother’s. But where Kellan’s presence was large and his voice booming, Kayce was slight and quiet. She was keenly observant, and so damn adorable as to immediately engender the affection of every man, woman, and child around. There wasn’t a boy at school who wasn’t already madly in love with her, just as Kellan had a posse of female followers who flocked to him wherever he may be.

Together, they were a lethal pair.

Kellan punched me lightly in the arm as we wove our way past the reception desk and down a deserted hallway to a classroom at the back of the building. Once we had closed the door, Kellan shoved aside an oaken desk, revealing a trapdoor and a set of stairs.

Ladies first! he boomed merrily, sweeping his arm to the side and bowing chivalrously.

Kayce looked at him and rolled her eyes, bounding down the steps, with me close on her heels. We emerged into a brightly lit hallway with marble floors and antiseptically white walls. The three of us wove our way through the familiar corridors of the Training Floor, and ended up in a locker room with six or seven other adoptees suiting up for our weekly sparring session.

Our Warden liked to keep us in top condition, because, by her reasoning, you never knew when the time would come for you to kill and run. Usually Assassins that had completed their mission were absorbed by another Cell in another part of the country, disappearing so completely that the authorities investigating the deaths of the rest of the family begin to wonder if that strange, sullen adopted child ever existed at all.

I exchanged brief greetings with a few other adoptees while I changed into a padded jumpsuit and lightweight tennis shoes. I knew we would spend an hour or two at hand-to-hand combat before we were herded into the Training Floor’s small auditorium for our weekly debriefing.

By luck of the draw, I ended up sparring with Kellan. The Warden liked to make us fight people who were much larger and much smaller than we were, to get us used to combating people of various sizes and strengths. Much more realistic, she liked to say with her smug smile, made more severe by the tight ponytail she wore.

We meet again, Kellan said, his eyes smoldering behind his sparring helmet. He winked once at me, the perpetual flirt, while I raised my hand and bent low in a fighting stance.

I looked up at him and raised my eyebrows questioningly.

He jumped a few times, swinging his arms to warm up. Kellan was a gifted fighter, to be sure, and he never took our sparring sessions too seriously. He took it for granted that, at his size and with Kayce at his back, he’d easily be able to overcome his adopted parents, both rather petit. How’s the bro? he asked casually.

He always asked after Theo, and I was always wary in my response. I’m sure it was just Kellan trying to start a conversation long enough to distract me and get the upper hand, but part of me worried that somehow the Warden knew about the soft spot I held for Theo, and that I would be punished for my weakness. Kellan and Kayce, after all, had met Theo on a number of occasions when I had invited them over to feign the appearance of friends to my parents. The three of us (or four, I guess, since I always let Theo hang around) had huddled in my room on those occasions, talking about nothing, really – not that mattered around Theo. The kid was bright, but for some reason he had never been a gifted lip-reader.

Fine, I said curtly, hoping he’d let the subject drop.

His eyes bored into mine for a second, making my heart race nervously, then he shrugged, smiled his golden-boy smile and stepped in closer to engage me.

We sparred for