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City of the Sun [Secure eReader]
eBook by Sarah Bryant
eBook Category: Suspense/Thriller/Mainstream
eBook Description: Ravaged by nuclear war and the most terrifying dictator since Stalin, Russia's future lies in the hands of one gifted child. In the aftermath of nuclear war, Russia cowers in the shadow of Solntse, a dictator with a chilling idea of utopia and a plan to bring it to life. The lynchpin of his plan is Sifte Pierson, a child so gifted that he has gambled his entire future on her obedience. Confined at Institute 1, an isolated school which produces the most powerful minds and bodies to serve Solntse, Sifte has grown up without knowledge of her parents or the life she was stolen from. When a new teacher arrives with a dangerous agenda and clues to her past, Sifte and her closest friends uncover a secret history with the power to destroy Solntse's empire. When the secrets leak to the Socialist rebels in the slums of St. Petersburg, their dreams of revolution begin to take solid form. And as Sifte and her friends work to uncover Solntse's plans for Utopia, she comes to realize that her identity and future are vital not only to Russia's freedom, but to all humankind.
eBook Publisher: Snowbooks/Snowbooks
Fictionwise Release Date: November 2006
 
Sasha looked up through the shattered ceiling. Across the
square, a rim of crumbling walls still bore traces of green
paint and gold leaf, and the limbs of trees in the courtyard
gardens reached up like the hands of famine victims. From
the violet billows of evening sky, the angel of the Aleksander
Column met her look with one of mild retribution.
?It?s too quiet,? Sasha told the angel, drifting in a haze of
blood loss and hunger and fever. It wasn't delirium. There
ought to have been women calling between their cooking
fires, dogs fighting for food scraps, children?s whoops and
shrieks as they paddled in the Moyka in the summer dusk,
but there was only a recondite silence. Sasha hadn't heard
anything to indicate a raid, but Dvortsovaya Square had been
oddly still now for almost a day. Moreover, the midwife, who
had promised to come in the morning, had never showed.
Olga had told her several days before that somebody had
talked. The officials knew that she was in the city, and worse,
they knew about the baby. If the delivery hadn't been so
difficult, she would have been far away from Myortvograd
by now. She was still too weak to travel, though, still
dangerously reliant on her friends; she could only hide and
hope the officials didn't come looking.
It was a faint hope at best. The Pomoshchniki?the
Auxiliaries of Solntse?s Platonic state?had been searching
for her since Stepan had been arrested, and given the child,
the Opyekuni might well be involved, too. The thought
of the Opyekuni, the Guardians, filled Sasha with cold, creeping panic. She clutched the baby, who opened her eyes.
They weren't the pale blue of most babies? eyes, but deep
hazel, both luminous and dark. They were her father?s eyes.
Her fuzzy white hair stuck up from her head, giving her a
comically wild appearance, like her father had looked in the
morning, thought Sasha, choking over something between a
laugh and a sob.
The baby blinked. The next moment Sasha heard the
footsteps, the thought of which had haunted the seven nights
and days since her daughter?s birth. They ricocheted off the
ruined walls, echoed through bereft streets. The first face
appeared in the hole in the roof, flat and slick as the painted
face of a mummy. The face of an Opyekun. Fear closed over
Sasha like ice over a winter river. With the remnants of her
own Opyekun training, she had tried to distance herself
from the child, to prepare herself for this moment, but she
could never have imagined the anguish of its reality. Her
resolution to stay calm evaporated into wild panic.
?Please,? she cried in a shredded voice, ?don't take her!?
There were three of them, two men and one woman in
gray uniforms with Solntse?s golden sun on the sleeve. The
men climbed down into the basement room, and one held
Sasha?s arms while the other took the wailing child. Sasha
tore free, flung herself at his feet.
?Kill us both!?
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