War Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 5) by Aaron Ritchey (find a book to read TXT) 📗

Table of Contents

Summary

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Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Memorare

Glossary of Historical Figures, Slang, and Technology

Books, Mailing List, and Reviews

Thank You for Reading War Girls

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Books by Shadow Alley Press

Books by Black Forge

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Copyright

About the Author

About the Publisher

Summary

AIN'T NO COLD LIKE the Cold of War

Cavatica Weller has lost everything. Her home. Her family. Her courage. She's back in the World, in Kansas, where she has electricity, friends, a life, only being alive feels like being dead. She made a deal with the devil and she needs out. Her only hope is her wit, her rage, and a host of new allies.

Once more, she must return to the Juniper Wars, in search of an ex-president and the location of the secret ARK facility. But this time, she’s not herself, and the woman she is becoming might kill everyone she’s ever loved.

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HISTORY IS A CRUEL storyteller. History doesn’t take into account an individual’s thoughts, feelings, sorrows, and joys. History only tells the one story, the one footprint we made. Textbooks have reduced me to a single heel mark, captured in clay, a sad kind of cuneiform.

—Burke, Sally Brown, My Apologies, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2076

(i)

Holy Mary, Mother of God, when you looked upon your son nailed to that tree, did you think the world was too hard to save? Did you want to give up? Or did angels carry you through?

They say Juniper angels have broken wings. That’s what you get when you work salvage: a bunch of stuff that only works half the time if it works at all. I’d grown up living in a junk pile, if you wanted to be nice about it, and a prison if you didn’t.

The Juniper was what the world called the five western American states affected by the electromagnetic field in what used to be Yellowstone National Park. For reasons unknown, the Chinese nuked Yellowstone during the Sino-American War. Long story short, it created a stable EM field and knocked out power in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana. Snap your fingers and President Jack Kanton made those states territories. Snap your fingers again and all hell broke loose.

My mama went in to run salvage out and made a bundle of money, which she sank into the rising cattle industry. She used more cash than she should’ve to send me to school to study electrical engineering since she was certain the buzz would come back any minute. She also went into debt to a cattle baron by the name of Dob Howerter. We owed him millions of dollars with our ranch as collateral.

That was why my family took the cattle west in the first place, to save the ranch. Only, we never got paid for our headcount in Nevada. Instead, we got locked up and had to break out of jail and take it on the run. Worse than that? The ranch was blown to pieces when the Outlaw Warlord June Mai Angel attacked Burlington. No way would Howerter get his money back ’cause we were penniless.

June Mai was a veteran of the Sino-American War, a Lady in Waiting, who had been shipped to the Juniper once she got back home ten years after the end of the Sino. The U.S. didn’t want to try and fix their broken veterans, so it offered them a crappy deal to live in the territories in return for some cash. Before they made that deal, though, the U.S. passed the SISBI laws, which put up a fence around the affected territories and required all American citizens to submit to eye scans and register themselves. So, if you weren’t an American citizen in 2055, chances were, you’d never become one.

The Sino veterans weren’t the only ones sent to live in the penal colony: convicts, crazy people, the morally questionable, all were sent to the Juniper. The U.S. was in the grips of a religious frenzy. The New Morality had become a force in American society, a kind of pseudo-religion that came with closeminded intolerance and fashion sensibilities heavy on the gray and formless. It proclaimed that heterosexual monogamy was God’s will, and if you couldn’t get a man, you should be proud of your chastity; all that was ironic given the circumstances of the Sterility Epidemic.

I’d gotten a taste for irony.

On the cattle drive, we found a boy who had the cure to the Sterility Epidemic in his pocket. Starting around the start of the Sino, male birth rates dropped to around 10%. Of boys born, 90% were sterile.

To think, in the junkyard of the Juniper, I’d found a viable boy, but he turned out to be more damaged than anything. Another broken thing that no amount of duct tape could fix.

We called him Micaiah, but his real name was Micah Hoyt and he was supposedly the son of the richest jackerdan in the world, Tiberius “Tibbs” Hoyt, the president and CEO of the American Reproduction Knowledge Initiative. Everyone called it the ARK. Hoyt said he was researching the cure for the Sterility Epidemic, but he wasn’t: he was making bank selling Male Product and brewing up nightmare armies in a single secret research facility.

Micaiah gave me some hints about where the secret ARK base might be; it was where he’d been engineered. Yes, as impossible as it seemed, Micaiah was a clone. Same genetics as Tibbs Hoyt. Same scheming, treacherous mind.

Micaiah betrayed me. He claimed he stuck a knife in my back to save us all: my oldest sister Sharlotte, my gunslinging sister Wren, Father Pilate, and various other adopted family members we picked up on our adventures. Nichola Nichols was like our crazy grandmother who had designed the