The Girl Who Dared to Think 7: The Girl Who Dared to Fight

He fired at Henry’s left leg before I could scream out for him to stop, and then Henry was crying out and crumpling to the floor.

“No!” I gasped and rushed to him, pressing my hands down around his wound to stem the blood flow while he writhed in pain against the carpet.

“I told you to leave!” my father hissed. “Now, before my children come down here.”

“No, wait! I need to call an—”

My father’s hand closed hard around my wrist and he yanked me up from the floor, then grabbed Henry by the arm and hauled him up, too. His strength was enough to allow him to drag us both out the front door, and he cast one last glowering look at me before he slammed it shut behind us.

Henry collapsed again the second my father let go of him, and I stumbled to help him back up, even as my whole body trembled in shock. Adrenaline lent me strength I didn’t know I possessed, and I managed to support the hobbling six-foot boy down the steps and out onto the street.

I staggered down the sidewalk with him, praying our neighbors were in and would allow us to make a call. It wasn’t a fatal wound, and if an ambulance arrived quickly, I knew Henry would be okay.

But I also knew then that, barring a miracle, the baby I gave birth to would never be mine.





Chapter 1





Two years later…





I stared at the girl in the mirror. At her long, dirty-blond hair. At her light hazel eyes. At her narrow bone structure and thin lips. She was me, and yet she was a me I was still getting used to.

Two years can do a lot to a person. And just about everything that could have gone wrong in a person’s life had gone wrong in mine.

And yet, here I stood. A survivor.

It would be a lie to say, though, that I hadn’t been convinced I would break—more than a few times. The days had been dark and long after my adoptive father banished me from home. I had no choice but to move in with Henry and his family, and it was there that I experienced what life was like outside of my comfy little bubble for the first time. I experienced what life was like for the unprivileged.

I was forced to quit my private school, with no means of affording the tuition, and wound up getting a job at the same clothes factory in which Henry worked during the week. The pay there was a pittance, just enough to cover living and travel expenses, given that I was still under eighteen and had no prior work experience.

And then, when I could no longer work due to my pregnancy, it became a waiting game—waiting for the day my baby was born, and a member of the Ministry for Welfare arrived to inform me that unfortunately, I was not eligible to keep my child.

I became a victim of the same system that had punished my birth parents, all those years ago, when they were forced to give me up. The Child Redistribution Adoption System, the CRAS, aimed at the poorest of society. President Burchard’s genius idea to solve the Great Crisis our country found itself in, which was, if we were to believe the news channels, precipitated by the spike in family welfare costs over the past century, thanks to our country’s deteriorating morals. When it reached the point where taxes rose to unprecedented heights to meet the expense of welfare, his regime swooped in to solve the problem by instituting the CRAS, whereby only those who could afford it—the wealthy of our society—would shoulder the “burden.” They would take in children under the age of three, which allowed for an easier adjustment period than older kids, thus relieving the government, and everyone else, of the expense. The system would work particularly well, they argued, because many upper-and middle-class families with career wives tended to have few or no biological children anyway, and wanted to adopt.

I lit up as a bright red flag on the Ministry’s audit system, labelled as someone who would sap too many resources from the government because I didn’t have adequate means to support my child. I became part of the bottom 20 percent of the population—those who were in danger of being targeted. In fact, I was probably closer to the bottom 5 percent.

And so a minister arrived the day she was born. My beautiful baby girl, whom, during those few precious hours I got to hold her in my arms, I named Hope.

Because she was my Hope, on that bright, sunny morning. That someday, things would change. That someday, I would live in a world where I could see her again.

I cried and whispered to her that I would find her, though it was a promise that was virtually impossible to keep, given that it was illegal for parents to seek out their children after they had been resituated, and detailed adoption records were kept in cyber vaults.

It was the same reason that my birth parents had never found me—because I was sure they would’ve sought me out if they could.

If they had experienced anything like I had, that day I gave birth, then it was a certainty. I had never thought I’d be the kind of girl to have a baby before her mid-to late-twenties, with the academic path carved out for me by my parents. But when I held Hope, it felt like a huge piece of my life had been missing until her arrival, and I didn’t know how I could’ve lived without her. Couldn’t bear even imagining a life without her.

But I had to.

The tears stopped after a week, once the Ministry took her away, and numbness settled into their place. The ordeal took its toll on Henry and me, as a couple—although, to be honest, I’d felt the beginnings of a crack in our relationship when my father shot him in the leg.

Not that I could blame the poor boy. He was probably afraid to have anything more to do with a governor’s daughter after that—even an ex-governor’s daughter. And the time he spent with me during the pregnancy and birth was more out of duty than anything else. Henry would never admit it, but it became clearer to me in the months that followed that my father had been right about one thing: he hadn’t been intending to commit to me anytime soon. We’d both been caught up in the passion of a first-time, forbidden summer romance, and had let it go too far. I’d thought that maybe our relationship could survive it, but after the baby was taken away, it became clear that she had been the only thing holding us together. Once she was gone, Henry announced that he had accepted a job transfer to another factory up north, and left.

I guessed different people reacted differently to trauma. Some people drew closer together, while others drifted apart. Our relationship was never as deep as I had thought it was, in my na?ve seventeen-year-old mind, which was why he hadn’t proposed until he’d been guilt-tripped into it.

In any case, we lost touch, and if he’d started seeing another girl in his new town, I honestly couldn’t say I would have minded, or even felt the smallest twinge of jealousy.

Hope’s absence ate at my soul, and I could barely even think of anything else.

I moved out of Henry’s parents’ small apartment as quickly as I could, to get away from the memories it held, and managed to get another job in a factory—as I had given up my previous one to have the baby. I found a little cabin in the woods to call home, and it was where I lived to this day.

The sound of barking outside my window made me start, and I turned away from the mirror. I padded out of my little five-by-seven bedroom, over the rough wooden floorboards, and into my only slightly larger living room, toward the front door. I pulled it open with a creak and switched on the lantern outside. The beams illuminated a small pack of local wolves I had befriended, standing in the darkness of the late evening. They had basically become part-time pets—ever since I’d allowed them to sleep in my living room last winter, during a particularly bad storm.

“No food today, boys,” I muttered, bending down to stroke their silky fur. They nuzzled against my face, and I kissed them each gently on the nose.