Regret by Elana Johnson

simply go back to bed, plug in, show up for my appointment tomorrow morning at six thirty.
    But I couldn’t go back. What I’d learned had changed me, and the old me was gone for good. I felt like I should mourn him, and in a way I did. Sure, he’d known his world wasn’t perfect, but he’d been happy. Or at least willing to go with the flow.
    With my backpack shouldered and that one new chipresting in my pocket, I had a feeling any semblance of contentment lay solidly in my past. I stepped toward the front door. My mother had locked it down last night at ten, just like she always did. Beams of light swept from one side of the entryway to the other. Nothing I couldn’t handle.
    Step-step-shuffle. Pause. Step-back-pause-leap. I stood at the door, wishing I could say good-bye to Mom the right way. I’d tried last night, but it pretty much went like this: “Night, Mom.”
    “Good night, Gunn.”
    And then I’d stood in her doorway while she’d linked into her transmissions and closed her eyes. I didn’t get to hug her or tell her I loved her or anything. I buried the troubling good-bye; I couldn’t go back and change it.
    With one click and one scanner sweep, the front door hissed open. I’d barely melted into the shadows when someone spoke over the cache and straight into my head. Nice to see you.
    Trek Whiting = Raine’s tech genius. Every muscle in my body tensed. I was really doing this. Whatever this was. But I’d finally made my own choice. And it felt wild, dangerous. Perfect.
    First rule out here, Trek said over my cache, which echoed inside my mind because he’d used my personal cache code. I’d given it to Raine after school, secretly hoping she’d bethe one to contact me. My dreams crashed and burned, even though Trek’s reverberating voice over the cache meant the code had worked. He’d insisted that a coded cache wouldn’t be as detectable, and I had no experience to argue.
    No names. Do you know your location?
    Yes, I chatted over the cache to him, completely ticked at his condescending tone. Are we secure?
    Yeah, but there are always seeker-spiders lurking somewhere.
    And he spoke the truth, even if he wasn’t my favorite person on earth. I shivered at the thought of meeting a seeker-spider in the dead of night. Truth be told, I didn’t want to get in the way of a seeker at any time. Programmed by the higher-ups in the Tech Rise, seeker-spiders had a fourfold mission: find, detain, record, report.
    If I was found, well, I didn’t want to think about the “detain” part. I’d seen a few too many projections detailing exactly what the fist-sized spiders could do to a human body.
    As if the seeker-spiders weren’t bad enough, I could meet Enforcement Officers or trip some silent alarm or throw too many thoughts into the air. Any of those could bust me before I’d even begun. I couldn’t afford that. Director Hightower wanted me—but he wanted me clean.
    His daughter wanted me too.
    I wish she wanted me in more ways than one, I thought. But Raine just wanted me to join the Insiders. Earlier today she’d sent her instructions. She’d take me to the Insiders and make sure I got hooked up in an Insider-monitored flat.
    And I’d get a few hours to enjoy my life before it belonged to someone else. I seriously hoped Raine had something amazing planned for the night.
    Just then I picked up on her emotions. Wisps of feeling flitted across my awareness, telling me of her confidence and calmness. I shivered, but it had nothing to do with the freezing temps.
    I allowed Raine to fully form in my imagination. She rarely smiled, but when she did, my heart pulsed in my throat. She could wait, though. I had one more thing to do before I joined her rebels.
    I extracted the chip I hadn’t watched. With the tiniest of clicks, I slid it into the port on my wrist. My mom’s face filled my vision-screen, brightening it with her pale skin, dark blue eyes, and strawberry-blonde hair. Something like a sob