Total pages in book: 149
Estimated words: 138217 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138217 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
That had been right at the start, when Theo had still thought it all a mistake.
She hadn’t thought that for a long time, and she behaved herself with Colette. Because after so many months, she understood that if she made Colette’s job easy, then Colette would leave her alone.
That was better than being watched, being punished.
Now that Theo had learned how to feed herself the right amounts of nutrients for her age, Colette didn’t even interrupt her work to make sure Theo was fed.
The only time they interacted was the daily one-hour walk that they took outside the apartment. Colette had told her it was a mandated health walk, the second part of Theo’s exercise regimen. Theo was very careful to behave on those walks, the air freedom in her lungs. She couldn’t risk losing the walks. Otherwise the screaming inside her head might come out.
Except for those scheduled walks, as long as she behaved and did her schoolwork on the computronic system in her room, no one cared what Theodora Marshall was doing.
That was how she’d managed to hack into the family’s systems.
She knew she was too young to do it. That was probably why no one had thought to firewall her school system from the main system. But Theo had a lot of time. She didn’t have Pax to talk to or play with anymore, and she made sure to finish her schoolwork right on time or just after. Before, she’d used to finish early.
And learned that the school program would give her more work in return.
So now she dragged things out while using a walled-off part of the system to hack into the family’s files. It had taken her a whole month to set up those walls. She’d learned how to do it by going on the human and changeling Internet.
Her gut got a gnawing feeling. Like a small animal inside was biting at her.
She’d stolen the tablet she used to go on the Internet. It had been on one of the walks; Colette had been distracted by a colleague who’d stopped to chat with her. That was when Theo had seen the tablet abandoned on a park bench.
She’d had it in her coat pocket before she could think about it.
Her heart had thump-thumped all the way home. She’d been so scared of being found out that she’d waited until Colette was asleep before she took the tablet out of the hiding place where she’d shoved it after getting home.
Even though it was an old and cheap model, she’d known she shouldn’t have taken it. She should’ve handed it in somewhere. She’d felt a little better when she’d powered it up and seen that it wasn’t registered to anyone and had no password. It was too basic to even have a fingerprint lock, but it wasn’t so old that she couldn’t charge it using the charging table she used for her school tablet.
It looked like someone had used it to read the news sites and play games.
Theo had told herself they wouldn’t miss it if they had a tablet just for that stuff, but she still felt bad. She wasn’t a thief. She’d never been a thief. But Colette had blocked the Internet from her devices except for authorized educational sites. Theo had known that if she tried to break through that block, it would set off an alarm, get her in trouble.
At first, she’d planned to use the Internet to connect to her brother. She missed Pax so much. They’d never been apart from each other for this long and it hurt her. She’d thought she could set up an email and get him the address and then he could set up an email, and they could talk that way.
Only . . . she didn’t know how to get her email address to him.
Colette never took her to the family house. And all of Theo’s psychic pathways were muffled, as if someone had thrown a big blanket over her. She wouldn’t even have any idea if Pax was alive if she didn’t have the knowing inside her. That, nobody could block. She knew her brother was alive the same way she knew she had two arms and two legs. It was just a knowing.
That was when she’d decided to hack the family’s systems.
It had taken her a long time.
And what she’d found was so confusing. She wasn’t listed as Pax’s twin anymore. They had her down as a younger sister. She’d also seen a note about someone of whom she had no memory: Keja, a sixteen-year-old sister of their mother’s who’d died when Theo and Pax were about two years old.
Like Theo, Keja had been a Gradient 2, though she’d been 2.3 to Theo’s 2.7.
It had taken another month for Theo to realize what she’d found. She’d been cut from the family because she was weak. Maybe that had happened to Keja, too. Only Keja hadn’t survived. She’d died. And no one had cared. No one ever talked about her.