He said it made people feel safer while they worked on a vaccine. Dude had to do something—it was an election year!

He won, by the way.

Inside, everything went to hell. Laws didn’t apply anymore. All the military and law enforcement we had in here peaced out and stopped showing up for work. Which, fair enough, considering they hadn’t been paid for like a year.

Eventually, the Q seceded from the US and we figured things out ourselves. Now the Q is ruled by two gangs—or families, as we usually refer to ourselves—the Spencers up north and the Lopez family down south. The Spencers are jerks and the Lopezes are geniuses who figured out the artificial organs that are keeping all our asses alive.

Oh wait, now Hadley is telling me to stop because she thinks I’ve broken too many of their arbitrary rules.

Well, for all of you still listening up here in the Q, I will end this history lesson because history is boring as shit.

Let’s get to the good stuff.

LENNON

THIS WAS NOT the first time Lennon Pierce had been kidnapped.

The first time was fifteen years earlier. He had no memory of it, but when he was four years old, he apparently wandered away from his parents at the farmers market. A woman had given him a cookie, scooped him up, and made a beeline for the parking lot.

His mom saw the kidnapper just in time, started screaming, and chased the woman down. According to his parents, he’d been completely unfazed by the whole thing. He was happily eating his cookie when his mom snatched him back from the stranger.

Later, the would-be kidnapper claimed she didn’t know that the young boy was the son of a congressman. She’d just thought he was cute.

She never gave much more of an explanation than that, which had always baffled Lennon. Impulse-kidnapping a small child just because you liked his chubby cheeks didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

This was not an impulse kidnapping. He’d glimpsed the bodies of his two secret service agents before the kidnappers had tied a blindfold over his eyes.

He was in some deep shit this time.

He’d lost track of how long he’d been in the van. For a while, he’d been able to see hints of sun from the bottom edge of his blindfold, if he tilted his head up. It had been a relief, because there’d been nothing but darkness since they grabbed him from a gas station.

But now it was dark again, and he could have sworn he’d been on this bumpy ride for at least two days. But that couldn’t be right.

His hands were cuffed behind his back. Everything ached. His wrists, where the cuffs dug in; his back; his ass, from sitting on the hard floor. They could have at least let him sit on a seat. Maybe this vehicle didn’t have them.

His stomach rumbled. They’d given him a few sips of water but no food, and he felt weak. He’d considered running, the first day. Or fighting back, when he got the chance. Now he was pretty sure that would not go so well.