She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door. The muscles in her shoulders were tight as angry fists from the long hours spent huddling over the pages, but she needed every word to be seared into her memory. Her life depended on it. The pain from her shoulders and the soreness from the beatings she took the day before might trouble her now, but once the trial began, she knew they would cease to matter. All that mattered was the knowledge she could retain from the book. It was the only thing that they didn’t have, and they would never suspect that she did.

She wasn’t too small, thank god for that, or they might have been able to break her bones, but they did enough damage to make her wonder wether she should’ve closed her eyes and let them wash her life away with their fists. Her stomach clenched with doubt about her ability to survive another day. Her right foot was so swollen that every step sent a shot of pain straight up her leg, she couldn’t lift her left arm higher than her chest and she hadn’t seen her face but she felt the heat coming off of the swelling by her right eye. “No.” she thought, “Don’t think about that. Concentrate on the book.” She pushed the thoughts away and slowed her breathing. She was clever. Too clever to let them suspect. They had underestimated her because of what they saw on the outside and she was about to make them pay. 



The memory of each page in the book floated past her eyes as if on a carousel. Her mind raced through the images, the descriptions, the precious words as her muscles twitched in anticipation of each movement and each unformed word on her lips. Sorting through the pages mentally, she pulled forward the ones she would need to open the walls and make objects dense enough to become shields. Simple physics to her. Some of them would have this knowledge, but so many of the books were burned, and there was so trace of the knowledge on the network.

 The network had been scrubbed clean more than a century ago in hopes of preventing the angry masses from opening the airlocks mid-flight between planets or sending an unsuspecting Scientist into deep space with only their threats of banishment to Earth 1 to protect them. When the Scientific party took control of parliament at the beginning of the age of interstellar colonization, they promised radical change to the structure of government. More education, less red tape, more jobs, increased security on the new colonies, but to get there, they needed to have more control over the media channels and network controls. The votes poured in to support the party and little by little, access to news in the new colonies and the flood of new discoveries dwindled to a trickle. 



Anyone caught trading “secure information” regarding new discoveries over the network was sent straight back to Earth 1 which meant death by cancer in less than 10 years, 20 if you had good genetics. It became so dangerous to transmit information, desperate people had resorted to writing books and smuggling the new information by transport between the planets. The books were so rare that the Scientists only had transport guards scan for digital information for the first 50 years of their reign, but now everything was checked. She knew she had one of the only remaining copies and it hurt her to leave it behind, but once she was through, she’d download her memories directly onto the network...