The First Unforgivable Thing

By Zoe Cannon

When a dissident working undercover as an interrogator is ordered to torture a confession from the only girl he’s ever loved, he chooses to defy both the totalitarian regime and the resistance by helping her escape—but she has an agenda of her own...

This New Adult dystopian novella is approximately 14,000 words long, or about 50 print pages. Set in the world of the Internal Defense series, it takes place between Necessary Sacrifices and No Return, but can also be read as a stand-alone story.

This novella is also available as part of the Darkest Worlds dystopian anthology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zoe Cannon
• Release date: Dec 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311209702

Zoe Cannon

Zoe Cannon writes about the things that fascinate her: outsiders, societies no sane person would want to live in, questions with no easy answers, and the inner workings of the mind. If she couldn't be a writer, she would probably be a psychologist, a penniless philosopher, or a hermit in a cave somewhere. While she'll read anything that isn't nailed down, she considers herself a YA reader and writer at heart. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and a giant teddy bear of a dog, and spends entirely too much time on the internet.

Book preview

The First Unforgivable Thing

An Internal Defense Novella

Zoe Cannon

Copyright © 2013 Zoe Cannon

http://www.zoecannon.com

Smashwords Edition

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Cover Art:

kwest19 / Bigstock.com

Cover Design:

Zoe Cannon

This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

About the Author

More Books by Zoe Cannon

Chapter One

The harsh light of the interrogation room burned the shadows from the corners as it illuminated every detail. The single chair in the center, the gleaming white floor with all traces of the previous interrogation scrubbed away, the camera recording every detail from its safe perch in the corner. The instruments on their sterile silver tray—positioned directly in front of the chair, where the prisoner couldn’t help but look—all polished as clean as the floor and laid out in perfect rows.

When Lucas stepped into the room, he didn’t see any of it.

All he saw was the prisoner cuffed to the chair, head drooped to her chest, tears running down to wet the tips of her wiry curls. The perfect picture of despair.

All he saw was the only girl he had ever loved.

Damn you. Goddamn you. A rush of fury, sudden and all-consuming, surged through him. He didn’t know who it was directed toward—the faceless resistance full of people who didn’t have to get their own hands dirty, Simone for finally getting herself caught, his own cowardice for driving him here. This whole godforsaken country, just for existing. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t change any of it now. The anger burned and burned, powerless.

He took a step back. Would have stepped back and back and back until he left the room, until he left the building and maybe left town entirely, but his mentor had already entered the room behind him, and she shut the door with a soft click as if she knew what he was thinking.

She placed a hand on his shoulder. It’s all right, said Raleigh Dalcourt, the woman admired and feared in equal measure throughout the country for her skill at interrogation, the woman who planned to teach him everything she knew. She pitched her words for his ears only. You’ll do fine. She gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze that reminded him of what he’d like to do to her neck.

The prisoner—Simone, it was really her, he had been hoping until that moment that he was wrong but it was really her—opened her eyes.

Lucas could see the exact moment when she recognized him. It was the moment her eyes widened in pain—as if the torture had already begun—and then narrowed in hatred. Her lips straightened into a thin line. She said nothing.

Do you remember the objectives? Raleigh asked, still speaking too quietly for the prisoner to hear.

Lucas nodded. Find out her name. The circumstances of her arrest. At least one weakness that can be used against her. And meanwhile Raleigh had all the right answers locked away in a file somewhere. What kind of a test would it be otherwise?

Only after he had proved himself, after he had showed Raleigh that he could get information from a live prisoner as effectively as he could from the simulations, would Simone’s real interrogation begin.

Damn you, Simone, I told you to give all this up. Too late now. For her; for both of them. Instead of convincing her to keep herself safe, he had joined her in her madness.

Raleigh nudged him forward. His feet stayed locked in place. Maybe he would stand there forever, held in place by equal and opposite forces. Raleigh on one side, Simone on the other. His purpose