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T H E I N F I N I T E

S E A

THE SECOND BOOK OF THE 5 WAVE

R i c k Y a n c e Y

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONSAN IMPRINT OF PENGUIN GROUP (USA)

TH

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G. P. PUTNAM’S SONSPublished by the Penguin Group

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataYancey, Richard.

The infinite sea / Rick Yancey.pages cm.—(5th wave)

Summary: “Cassie Sullivan and her companions lived through the Others’ four waves of destruction. Now, with the human race nearly exterminated and the 5th Wave rolling across

the landscape, they face a choice: brace for winter and hope for Evan Walker’s return, or set out in search of other survivors before the enemy closes in”—Provided by publisher.

[1. Extraterrestrial beings—Fiction. 2. Survival—Fiction. 3. War—Fiction. 4. Science fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.Y19197Inf 2014 [Fic]—dc23 2014022058

Printed in the United States of America.ISBN 978-0-399-16242-81 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Design by Ryan Thomann. Text set in Sabon.Cassiopeia photo copyright © iStockphoto.com/Manfred_Konrad.


My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep; the more I give to thee,

The more I have; for both are infinite.

—William Shakespeare


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THE WHEATTHERE WOULD BE no harvest.

The spring rains woke the dormant tillers, and bright green

shoots sprang from the moist earth and rose like sleepers stretch-

ing after a long nap. As spring gave way to summer, the bright

green stalks darkened, became tan, turned golden brown. The

days grew long and hot. Thick towers of swirling black clouds

brought rain, and the brown stems glistened in the perpetual twi-

light that dwelled beneath the canopy. The wheat rose and the

ripening heads bent in the prairie wind, a rippling curtain, an end-

less, undulating sea that stretched to the horizon.

At harvesttime, there was no farmer to pluck a head from the

stalk, rub the head between his callused hands, and blow the chaff

from the grain. There was no reaper to chew the kernels or feel

the delicate skin crack between his teeth. The farmer had died of

the plague, and the remnants of his family had fled to the nearest

town, where they, too, succumbed, adding their numbers to the

billions who perished in the 3rd Wave. The old house built by the

farmer’s grandfather was now a deserted island surrounded by an

infinite sea of brown. The days grew short and the nights turned

cool, and the wheat crackled in the dry wind.

The wheat had survived the hail and lightning of the summer

storms, but luck could not deliver it from the cold. By the time the

refugees took shelter in the old house, the wheat was dead, killed

by the hard fist of a deep frost.


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Five men and two women, strangers to one another on the eve

of that final growing season, now bound by the unspoken promise

that the least of them was greater than the sum of all of them.

The men rotated watches on the porch. During the day the

cloudless sky was a polished, brilliant blue and the sun riding low

on the horizon painted the dull brown of the wheat a shimmering

gold. The nights did not come gently but seemed to slam down

angrily upon the Earth, and starlight transformed the golden

brown of the wheat to the color of polished silver.

The mechanized world had died. Earthquakes and tsunamis

had obliterated the coasts. Plague had consumed billions.

And the men on the porch watched the wheat and wondered

what might come next.

Early one afternoon, the man on watch saw the dead sea of

grain parting and knew someone was coming, crashing through

the wheat toward the old farmhouse. He called to the others in-

side, and one of the women came out and stood with him on the

porch, and together they watched the tall stalks disappearing into

the sea of brown as if the Earth itself were sucking them under.

Whoever—or whatever—it was could not be seen above the sur-

face of the wheat. The man stepped off the porch. He leveled his

rifle at the wheat. He waited in the yard and the woman waited

on the porch and the rest waited inside the house, pressing their

faces against the windows, and no one spoke. They waited for the

curtain of wheat to part.

When it did, a child emerged, and the stillness of the waiting

was broken. The woman ran from the porch and shoved the bar-

rel of the rifle down. He’s just a baby. Would you shoot a child?

And the man’s face was twisted with indecision and the rage of

everything ever taken for granted betrayed. How do we know?


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he demanded of the woman. How can we be sure of anything any-

more? The child stumbled from the wheat and fell. The woman ran

to him and scooped him up, pressing the boy’s filthy face against

her breast, and the man with the gun stepped in front of her. He’s

freezing. We have to get him inside. And the man felt a great pres-

sure inside his chest. He was squeezed between what the world had

been and what the world had become, who he was before and who

he was now, and the cost of all the unspoken promises weighing on

his heart. He’s just a baby. Would you shoot a child? The woman

walked past him, up the steps, onto the porch, into the house, and

the man bowed his head as if in prayer, then lifted his head as if in

supplication. He waited a few minutes to see if anyone else emerged

from the wheat, for it seemed incredible to him that a toddler might

survive this long, alone and defenseless, with no one to protect him.

How could such a thing be possible?

When he stepped inside the parlor of the old farmhouse, he

saw the woman holding the child in her lap. She had wrapped a

blanket around him and brought him water, little fingers slapped

red by the cold wrapped around the cup, and the others had gath-

ered in the room and no one spoke, but they stared at the child

with dumbstruck wonder. How could such a thing be? The child

whimpered. His eyes skittered from face to face, searching for the

familiar, but they were strangers to him as they had been strangers

to one another before the world ended. He whined that he was

cold and said that his throat hurt. He had a bad owie in his throat.

The woman holding him prodded the child to open his mouth.

She saw the inflamed tissue at the back of his mouth, but she

did not see the hair-thin wire embedded near the opening of his

throat. She could not see the wire or the tiny capsule connected to

the wire’s end. She could not know, as she bent over the child to


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peer into his mouth, that the device inside the child was calibrated

to detect the carbon dioxide in her breath.

Our breath the trigger.

Our child the weapon.

The explosion vaporized the old farmhouse instantly.

The wheat took longer. Nothing was left of the farmhouse

or the outbuildings or the silo that in every other year had held

the abundant harvest. But the dry, lithe stalks consumed by fire

turned to ash, and at sunset, a stiff northerly wind swept over the

prairie and lifted the ash into the sky and carried it hundreds of

miles before the ash came down, a gray and black snow, to settle

indifferently on barren ground.


BOOK ONE


I

THE PROBLEM OF RATS


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1THE WORLD IS a clock winding down.

I hear it in the wind’s icy fingers scratching against the window.

I smell it in the mildewed carpeting and the rotting wallpaper

of the old hotel. And I feel it in Teacup’s chest as she sleeps. The

hammering of her heart, the rhythm of her breath, warm in the

freezing air, the clock winding down.

Across the room, Cassie Sullivan keeps watch by the window.

Moonlight seeps through the tiny crack in the curtains behind

her, lighting up the plumes of frozen breath exploding from her

mouth. Her little brother sleeps in the bed closest to her, a tiny

lump beneath the mounded covers. Window, bed, back again, her

head turns like a pendulum swinging. The turning of her head,

the rhythm of her breath, like Nugget’s, like Teacup’s, like mine,

marking the time of the clock winding down.

I ease out of bed. Teacup moans in her sleep and burrows

deeper under the covers. The cold clamps down, squeezing my

chest, though I’m fully dressed except for my boots and the parka,

which I grab from the foot of the bed. Sullivan watches as I pull

on the boots, then when I go to the closet for my rucksack and

rifle. I join her by the window. I feel like I should say something

before I leave. We might not see each other again.

“So this is it,” she says. Her fair skin glows in the milky light.

The spray of freckles seems to float above her nose and cheeks.

I adjust the rifle on my shoulder. “This is it.”


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“You know, Dumbo I get. The big ears. And Nugget, because

Sam is so small. Teacup, too. Zombie I don’t get so much—Ben

won’t say—and I’m guessing Poundcake has something to do

with his roly-poly-ness. But why Ringer?”

I sense where this is going. Besides Zombie and her brother, she

isn’t sure of anyone anymore. The name Ringer gives her paranoia

a nudge. “I’m human.”

“Yeah.” She looks through the crack in the curtains to the park-

ing lot two stories below, shimmering with ice. “Someone else told

me that, too. And, like a dummy, I believed him.”

“Not so dumb, given the circumstances.”

“Don’t pretend, Ringer,” she snaps. “I know you don’t believe

me about Evan.”

“I believe you. It’s his story that doesn’t make sense.”

I head for the door before she tears into me. You don’t push

Cassie Sullivan on the Evan Walker question. I don’t hold it against

her. Evan is the little branch growing out of the cliff that she clings

to, and the fact that he’s gone makes her hang on even tighter.

Teacup doesn’t make a sound, but I feel her eyes on me; I know

she’s awake. I go back to the bed.

“Take me with you,” she whispers.

I shake my head. We’ve been through this a hundred times. “I

won’t be gone long. A couple days.”

“Promise?”

No way, Teacup. Promises are the only currency left. They must

be spent wisely. Her bottom lip quivers; her eyes mist. “Hey,” I say

softly. “What did I tell you about that, soldier?” I resist the im-

pulse to touch her. “What’s the first priority?”

“No bad thoughts,” she answers dutifully.

“Because bad thoughts do what?”


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“Make us soft.”

“And what happens if we go soft?”

“We die.”

“And do we want to die?”

She shakes her head. “Not yet.”

I touch her face. Cold cheek, warm tears. Not yet. With no time

left on the human clock, this little girl has probably reached middle

age. Sullivan and me, we’re old. And Zombie? The ancient of days.

He’s waiting for me in the lobby, wearing a ski jacket over a

bright yellow hoodie, both scavenged from the remains inside the

hotel: Zombie escaped from Camp Haven wearing only a flimsy

pair of scrubs. Beneath his scruffy beard, his face is the telltale

scarlet of fever. The bullet wound I gave him, ripped open in his

escape from Camp Haven and patched up by our twelve-year-old

medic, must be infected. He leans against the counter, pressing his

hand against his side and trying to look like everything’s cool.

“I was starting to think you changed your mind,” Zombie says,

dark eyes sparkling as if he’s teasing, though that could be the fever.

I shake my head. “Teacup.”

“She’ll be okay.” To reassure me, he releases his killer smile

from its cage. Zombie doesn’t fully appreciate the pricelessness of

promises or he wouldn’t toss them out so casually.

“It’s not Teacup I’m worried about. You look like shit, Zombie.”

“It’s this weather. Wreaks havoc on my complexion.” A second

smile leaps out at the punch line. He leans forward, willing me to

answer with my own. “One day, Private Ringer, you’re going to

smile at something I say and the world will break in half.”

“I’m not prepared to take on that responsibility.”

He laughs and maybe I hear a rattle deep in his chest. “Here.”

He offers me another brochure of the caverns.


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“I have one,” I tell him.

“Take this one, too, in case you lose it.”

“I won’t lose it, Zombie.”

“I’m sending Poundcake with you,” he says.

“No, you’re not.”

“I’m in charge. So I am.”

“You need Poundcake here more than I need him out there.”

He nods. He knew I would say no, but he couldn’t resist one

last try. “Maybe we should abort,” he says. “I mean, it isn’t that

bad here. About a thousand bedbugs, a few hundred rats, and a

couple dozen dead bodies, but the view is fantastic . . .” Still jok-

ing, still trying to make me smile. He’s looking at the brochure in

his hand. Seventy-four degrees year ’round!

“Until we get snowed in or the temperature drops again. The

situation is unsustainable, Zombie. We’ve stayed too long already.”

I don’t get it. We’ve talked this to death and now he wants to

keep beating the corpse. I wonder about Zombie sometimes.

“We have to chance it, and you know we can’t go in blind,”

I go on. “The odds are there’re other survivors hiding in those

caves and they may not be ready to throw out the welcome mat,

especially if they’ve met any of Sullivan’s Silencers.”

“Or recruits like us,” he adds.

“So I’ll scope it out and be back in a couple of days.”

“I’m holding you to that promise.”

“It wasn’t a promise.”

There’s nothing left to say. There’re a million things left to say.

This might be the last time we see each other, and he’s thinking it,

too, because he says, “Thank you for saving my life.”

“I put a bullet in your side and now you might die.”

He shakes his head. His eyes sparkle with fever. His lips are


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gray. Why did they have to name him Zombie? It’s like an omen.

The first time I saw him, he was doing knuckle push-ups in the

exercise yard, face contorted with anger and pain, blood pooling

on the asphalt beneath his fists. Who is that guy? I asked. His

name is Zombie. He fought the plague and won, they told me,

and I didn’t believe them. Nobody beats the plague. The plague is

a death sentence. And Reznik the drill sergeant bending over him,

screaming at the top of his lungs, and Zombie in the baggy blue

jumpsuit, pushing himself past the point where one more push is

impossible. I don’t know why I was surprised when he ordered me

to shoot him so he could keep his unkeepable promise to Nugget.

When you look death in the eye and death blinks first, nothing

seems impossible.

Even mind reading. “I know what you’re thinking,” he says.

“No. You don’t.”

“You’re wondering if you should kiss me good-bye.”

“Why do you do that?” I ask. “Flirt with me.”

He shrugs. His grin is crooked, like his body leaning against

the counter.

“It’s normal. Don’t you miss normal?” he asks. Eyes digging

deep into mine, always looking for something, I’m never sure

what. “You know, drive-thrus and movies on a Saturday night

and ice cream sandwiches and checking your Twitter feed?”

I shake my head. “I didn’t Twitter.”

“Facebook?”

I’m getting a little pissed. Sometimes it’s hard for me to imagine

how Zombie made it this far. Pining for things we lost is the same

as hoping for things that can never be. Both roads dead-end in

despair. “It’s not important,” I say. “None of that matters.”

Zombie’s laugh comes from deep in his gut. It bubbles to the


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surface like the superheated air of a hot spring, and I’m not pissed

anymore. I know he’s putting on the charm, and somehow know-

ing what he’s doing does nothing to blunt the effect. Another rea-

son Zombie’s a little unnerving.

“It’s funny,” he says. “How much we thought all of it did. You

know what really matters?” He waits for my answer. I feel as if I’m

being set up for a joke, so I don’t say anything. “The tardy bell.”

Now he’s forced me into a corner. I know there’s manipulation

going on here, but I feel helpless to stop it. “Tardy bell?”

“Most ordinary sound in the world. And when all of this is

done, there’ll be tardy bells again.” He presses the point. Maybe

he’s worried I don’t get it. “Think about it! When a tardy bell rings

again, normal is back. Kids rushing to class, sitting around bored,

waiting for the final bell, and thinking about what they’ll do that

night, that weekend, that next fifty years. They’ll be learning like

we did about natural disasters and disease and world wars. You

know: ‘When the aliens came, seven billion people died,’ and then

the bell will ring and everybody will go to lunch and complain

about the soggy Tater Tots. Like, ‘Whoa, seven billion people,

that’s a lot. That’s sad. Are you going to eat all those Tots?’ That’s

normal. That’s what matters.”

So it wasn’t a joke. “Soggy Tater Tots?”

“Okay, fine. None of that makes sense. I’m a moron.”

He smiles. His teeth seem very white surrounded by the scruffy

beard, and now, because he suggested it, I think about kissing him

and if the stubble on his upper lip would tickle.

I push the thought away. Promises are priceless, and a kiss is a

kind of promise, too.


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2UNDIMMED, THE STARLIGHT sears through the black, coat-

ing the highway in pearly white. The dry grass shines; the bare

trees shimmer. Except for the wind cutting across the dead land,

the world is winter quiet.

I hunker beside a stalled SUV for one last look back at the

hotel. A nondescript two-story white rectangle among a cluster of

other nondescript white rectangles. Only four miles from the huge

hole that used to be Camp Haven, we nicknamed it the Walker

Hotel, in honor of the architect of that huge hole. Sullivan told

us the hotel was her and Evan’s prearranged rendezvous point.

I thought it was too close to the scene of the crime, too difficult

to defend, and anyway, Evan Walker was dead: It takes two to

rendezvous, I reminded Zombie. I was overruled. If Walker really

was one of them, he may have found a way to survive.

“How?” I asked.

“There were escape pods,” Sullivan said.

“So?”

Her eyebrows came together. She took a deep breath. “So . . .

he could have escaped in one.”

I looked at her. She looked back. Neither of us said anything.

Then Zombie said, “Well, we have to take shelter somewhere,

Ringer.” He hadn’t found the brochure for the caverns yet. “And

we should give him the benefit of the doubt.”

“The benefit of what doubt?” I asked.

“That he is who he says he is.” Zombie looked at Sullivan, who

was still glaring at me. “That he’ll keep his promise.”


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“He promised he’d find me,” she explained.

“I saw the cargo plane,” I said. “I didn’t see an escape pod.”

Beneath the freckles, Sullivan was blushing. “Just because you

didn’t see one . . .”

I turned to Zombie. “This doesn’t make sense. A being thou-

sands of years more advanced than us turns on its own kind—

for what?”

“I wasn’t filled in on the why part,” Zombie said, half smiling.

“His whole story is strange,” I said. “Pure consciousness occu-

pying a human body—if they don’t need bodies, they don’t need

a planet.”

“Maybe they need the planet for something else.” Zombie was

trying hard.

“Like what? Raising livestock? A vacation getaway?” Some-

thing else was bothering me, a nagging little voice that said, Some-

thing doesn’t add up. But I couldn’t pin down what that something

was. Every time I chased after it, it skittered away.

“There wasn’t time to go into all the details,” Sullivan snapped.

“I was sort of focused on rescuing my baby brother from a death

camp.”

I let it go. Her head looked like it was about to explode.

I can make out that same head now on my last look back,

silhouetted in the second-story window of the hotel, and that’s

bad, really bad: She’s an easy target for a sniper. The next Silencer

Sullivan encounters might not be as love struck as the first one.

I duck into the thin line of trees that borders the road. Stiff with

ice, the autumn ruins crunch beneath my boots. Leaves curled

up like fists, trash and human bones scattered by scavengers. The

cold wind carries the faint odor of smoke. The world will burn


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for a hundred years. Fire will consume the things we made from

wood and plastic and rubber and cloth, then water and wind and

time will chew the stone and steel into dust. How baffling it is

that we imagined cities incinerated by alien bombs and death rays

when all they needed was Mother Nature and time.

And human bodies, according to Sullivan, despite the fact that,

also according to Sullivan, they don’t need bodies.

A virtual existence doesn’t require a physical planet.

When I’d first said that, Sullivan wouldn’t listen and Zombie

acted like it didn’t matter. For whatever reason, he said, the bot-

tom line is they want all of us dead. Everything else is just noise.

Maybe. But I don’t think so.

Because of the rats.

I forgot to tell Zombie about the rats.

3BY SUNRISE, I reach the southern outskirts of Urbana. Halfway

there, right on schedule.

Clouds have rolled in from the north; the sun rises beneath

the canopy and paints its underbelly a glistening maroon. I’ll hole

up in the trees until nightfall, then hit the open fields to the west

of the city and pray the cloud cover hangs around for a while, at

least until I pick up the highway again on the other side. Going

around Urbana adds a few miles, but the only thing riskier than

navigating a town during the day is trying it at night.


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And it’s all about risk.

Mist rises from the frozen ground. The cold is intense. It

squeezes my cheeks, makes my chest ache with each breath. I feel

the ancient yearning for fire embedded deep in my genes. The

taming of fire was our first great leap: Fire protected us, kept us

warm, transformed our brains by changing our diets from nuts

and berries to protein-rich meat. Now fire is another weapon in

our enemy’s arsenal. As deep winter sets in, we’re crushed be-

tween two unacceptable risks: freezing to death or alerting the

enemy to our location.

Sitting with my back against a tree, I pull out the brochure.

Ohio’s Most Colorful Caverns! Zombie’s right. We won’t survive

till spring without shelter, and the caves are our best—maybe

only—bet. Maybe they’ve been taken or destroyed by the enemy.

Maybe they’re occupied by survivors who will shoot strangers on

sight. But every day we stay at that hotel, the risk grows tenfold.

We don’t have an alternative if the caves don’t pan out. No-

where to run, nowhere to hide, and the idea of fighting is ludi-

crous. The clock winds down.

When I pointed this out to him, Zombie told me I think too

much. He was smiling. Then he stopped smiling and said, “Don’t

let ’em get inside your head.” As if this were a football game and

I needed a halftime pep talk. Ignore the fifty-six to nothing score.

Play for pride! It’s moments like those that make me want to slap

him, not that slapping him would do any good, but it would make

me feel better.

The breeze dies. There’s an expectant hush in the air, the still-

ness before a storm. If it snows, we’ll be trapped. Me in these

woods. Zombie in the hotel. I’m still twenty or so miles from the


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caverns—should I risk the open fields by day or risk the snow

holding off at least till nightfall?

Back to the R word. It’s all about risk. Not just ours. Theirs,

too: embedding themselves in human bodies, establishing death

camps, training kids to finish the genocide, all of it crazy risky, stu-

pid risky. Like Evan Walker, discordant, illogical, and just damn

strange. The opening attacks were brutal in their efficiency, wip-

ing out 98 percent of us, and even the 4th Wave made some sense:

It’s hard to muster a meaningful resistance if you can’t trust one

another. But after that, their brilliant strategy starts to unravel.

Ten thousand years to plan the eradication of humans from Earth

and this is the best they can come up with? That’s the question

I can’t stop turning over and over in my head, and haven’t been

able to, since Teacup and the night of the rats.

Deeper in the woods, behind me and to my left, a soft moan

slices through the silence. I recognize the sound immediately;

I’ve heard it a thousand times since they came. In the early days,

it was nearly omnipresent, a constant background noise, like the

hum of traffic on a busy highway: the sound of a human being

in pain.

I pull the eyepiece from my rucksack and adjust the lens care-

fully over my left eye. Deliberately. Without panic. Panic shuts

down neurons. I stand up, check the bolt catch on the rifle, and

ease through the trees toward the sound, scanning the terrain for

the telltale green glow of an “infested.” Mist shrouds the trees;

the world is draped in white. My footsteps thunder on the frozen

ground. My breaths are sonic booms.

The delicate white curtain parts, and twenty yards away I see

a figure slumped against a tree, head back, hands pressed into its


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lap. The head doesn’t glow in my eyepiece, which means he’s no

civilian; he’s part of the 5th Wave.

I aim the rifle at his head. “Hands! Let me see your hands!”

His mouth hangs open. His vacant eyes regard the gray sky

through bare branches glistening with ice. I step closer. A rifle iden-

tical to mine lies on the ground beside him. He doesn’t reach for it.

“Where’s the rest of your squad?” I ask. He doesn’t answer.

I lower my weapon. I’m an idiot. In this weather, I would see

his breath and there is none. The moan I heard must have been

his last. I do a slow 360, holding my breath, but see nothing but

trees and mist, hear nothing but my own blood roaring in my ears.

Then I step over to the body, forcing myself not to rush, to notice

everything. No panic. Panic kills.

Same gun as mine. Same fatigues. And there’s his eyepiece on

the ground beside him. He’s a 5th Waver all right.

I study his face. He looks vaguely familiar. I’m guessing he’s

twelve or thirteen, around Dumbo’s age. I kneel beside him and

press my fingertips against his neck. No pulse. I open the jacket

and pull up his blood-soaked shirt to look for the wound. He was

hit in the gut by a single, high-caliber round.

A round I didn’t hear. Either he’s been lying here for a while or

the shooter is using a silencer.

Silencer.

According to Sullivan, Evan Walker took out an entire squad by

himself, at night, injured and outnumbered, sort of a warm-up to

his single-handed blowing up of an entire military installation.

At the time, I found Cassie’s story hard to believe. Now there’s a

dead soldier at my feet. His squad MIA. And me alone with the

silence of the woods and the milky white screen of fog.


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Doesn’t seem that far-fetched now.

Think fast. Don’t panic. Like chess. Weigh the odds. Measure

the risk.

I have two options. Stay put until something develops or night

falls. Or get out of these woods, fast. Whoever killed him could

be miles away or hunkered down behind a tree, waiting for a

clear shot.

The possibilities multiply. Where’s his squad? Dead? Hunting

down the person who shot him? What if the person who shot him

was a fellow recruit who went Dorothy? Forget his squad. What

happens when reinforcements arrive?

I pull out my knife. It’s been five minutes since I found him. I’d

be dead by now if someone knew I was here. I’ll wait till dark, but

I have to prepare for the probability that another breaker of the

5th Wave is rolling toward me.

I press against the back of his neck until I find the tiny bulge

beneath the scar. Stay calm. It’s like chess. Move and countermove.

I slice slowly along the scar and dig out the pellet with the tip

of the knife, where it sits suspended on a droplet of blood.

So we’ll always know where you are. So we can keep you safe.

Risk. The risk of lighting up in an eyepiece. The opposing risk

of the enemy frying my brain with the touch of a button.

The pellet in its bed of blood. The awful stillness of the trees

and the clinching cold and the fog that curls between branches

like fingers interlacing. And Zombie’s voice in my head: You think

too much.

I tuck the pellet between my cheek and gums. Stupid. I should

have wiped it off first. I can taste the kid’s blood.


A Novel

allycondie

dutton books

an imprint of penguin group (usa) llc

Atlantia_INT_2P.indd 3 7/15/14 12:33 PM

DUTTON BOOKSPublished by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) LLC375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

pUSA * Canada * UK * Ireland * Australia

New Zealand * India * South Africa * China

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A Penguin Random House Company

Copyright © 2014 by Allyson Braithwaite Condie

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers

and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

library of congress cataloging-in-publication dataCondie, Allyson Braithwaite.

Atlantia : a novel / by Ally Condie.pages cm

Summary: “Rio has always dreamed of leaving the underwater city of Atlantia for life in the Above; however, when her twin sister, Bay, makes an unexpected decision, Rio is left

stranded below where she must find a way to unlock the secrets of the siren voice she has long hidden and save Atlantia from destruction”— Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-0-525-42644-8 (hardback)[1. Fantasy. 2. Twins—Fiction. 3. Sisters—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.C7586At 2014[Fic]--dc23 2014020665

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for

author or third-party websites or their contents.


1

My twin sister, Bay, and I pass underneath the brown-and-turquoise banners hanging from the ceiling of the temple. Dignitaries perch on their chairs in the gallery, watching, and people crowd the pews in the nave. Statues of the gods adorn the walls and ceiling, and it seems as if they watch us, too. The temple’s largest and most beautiful window, the rose window, has been lit from behind to simulate the effect of sunlight through the panes. The glass shines like a blessing—amber, green, blue, pink, purple. The colors of flower petals Above, of coral formations Below.

The Minister stands at the altar, which is made of precious wood carved in an intricate pattern of straight lines and swirls, of waves that turn into trees. Two bowls rest on top of the al-tar—one filled with salt water from the ocean that envelops our city, one filled with dark dirt brought down from Above.

Bay and I wait in line with the other youth our age. I feel sorry for everyone else because they don’t have a brother or a sister to wait with them. Twins aren’t very common in Atlantia.

“Do you hear the city breathing?” Bay whispers. I know she wants me to say that I do, but I shake my head. What


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we hear isn’t breathing. It is the never-ending sound of air pumping through the walls and out into the city so that we can survive.

Bay knows that, but she’s always been a little crazy about Atlantia. She’s not the only one who loves our underwater city or refers to it as alive. And Atlantia does resemble a giant sea creature sprawled out in the ocean. The tentacles of our streets and thoroughfares web out from the larger round hubs of the neighborhoods and marketplaces. Everything is en-closed, of course. We live underwater, but we’re still human; we need walls and air to protect us.

The Minister raises his hand, and we all fall silent. Bay presses her lips together. She is usually calm and se-

rene, but today she seems tense. Is she afraid that I’ll go back on my word? I won’t. I promised her.

We stand side by side and hand in hand, our brown hair threaded with blue ribbons and braided in intricate plaits. We both have blue eyes. We are both tall and carry ourselves the same way. But we’re fraternal twins, not identical, and no one has ever had any trouble telling us apart.

Though Bay and I are not mirrors of each other, we’re still as near to the same person as two completely different peo-ple can be. We have always been close, and since my mother’s death, we have drawn even more tightly together.

“Today will be hard,” Bay says.I nod. Today will be hard, I think, because I won’t be doing

what I always wanted to do. But I know that’s not what Bay means.

“Because it used to be her,” I say.Bay nods.Before my mother died six months ago, she was the Minister


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of the temple and she presided over this ceremony, one of several held to mark the anniversary of the Divide. Bay and I watched each year as our mother gave the opening speech and blessed the youth of the year with water or dirt, depending on what each person chose.

“Do you think Maire is here?” Bay asks.“No,” I say. Bay is referring to our aunt, our only living rela-

tive. I keep my voice flat but use the most cutting words I can. “She doesn’t belong here.” The temple is our mother’s place, and she and her sister, Maire, were estranged for as long as I can remember. Although, when my mother died—

Don’t think about it. The Minister begins the ritual, and I close my eyes and pic-

ture my mother conducting this service instead. In my mind, she stands straight and small behind the altar. She wears her brown-and-blue robes and the Minister’s insignia, the silver necklace that mimics the carving on the pulpit. She opens her arms wide, and it makes her look like one of the rays that swim through the sea gardens sometimes.

“What are the gifts given to we who live Below?” the new Minister asks.

“Long life, health, strength, and happiness.” I chant the words with everyone else, but, for my family, at least, the first part has not been true. Both of my parents died young—my father of a disease called water-lung back when Bay and I were babies, and my mother more recently. Of course, they still lived longer than they would have Above, but their lives were far shorter than most of the people who live in Atlantia.

Then again, our family has never been like most families in Atlantia. It used to be that we were different in ways that


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made people turn green with jealousy, but lately Bay and I are different in ways that make people pity us. Their envy has been washed away by our misfortunes. Bay and I used to walk the halls of the temple school and everyone respected us, because we were the daughters of Oceana, the Minister. Now we are objects of pity, the orphaned children of parents who died too soon.

“What is the curse of those who live Above?” the Minister asks.

“Short life, illness, weakness, and misery.” Bay squeezes my hand, comforting me. She knows that

I’m going to keep my promise, and that in doing so I’ll have to make a choice opposite to the one I’d always planned.

“Is this fair?”“It is fair. It is as the gods decreed at the time of the Divide.

Some have to stay Above so that humanity might survive Below.” “Then give thanks.”“Thanks to the gods for the sea where we live, for the air we

breathe, for our lives in the Below.” “And have mercy on us.”“And on those who live Above.”“This,” the Minister says, “is the way the gods have decreed

it must be since the Divide took place. The air was polluted, and people could no longer survive for long Above. To save hu-manity, they built Atlantia. Many chose to stay Above so that their loved ones could live Below.

“Those of us underwater in the Below have long, beautiful lives. We work hard, but not nearly as hard as those on land. We have time for leisure. We don’t have to breathe ruined air or have cancer eat our lungs.

“Those Above work all their lives to support us Below. Their lungs decay, and their bodies feel tremendous pain. But


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they will be rewarded later, in the life after this one. “The choice to save our world in this way was made by the

gods and by our ancestors. We accept their choice every day of our lives, except for today, when we make our own. Though we believe the gods have sent us Below for a reason, we also have the chance to go Above if we wish, to dedicate our lives to sacrifice.”

The Minister has finished the speech. I open my eyes. The new Minister is a tall man named Nevio. I still haven’t

gotten used to seeing the Minister’s insignia hanging around his neck. I still think of it as belonging to my mother.

Why would anyone choose to go Above if you die so young and have to work so hard? the children of the Below used to ask each other when we were smaller. And I never answered, but I kept a long list at home of all the reasons I could think of to go Above. You could see the stars. You could feel the sun on your face. You could touch a tree that had roots in the ground. You could walk for miles and never come across the edge of your world.

“Come forward,” Nevio says to the first person.“I accept my fate Below,” the girl says. A murmur of

approval goes up from the crowd. For all the grand speeches about the virtue of sacrifice, the people of Atlantia like it when the youth validate their own choice to stay Below. Nevio the Minister nods and dips his fingers into the bowl of seawater and sprinkles it over the girl, speckling her face with drops too small to be tears. I wonder if it stings.

The first person to choose the Above is surrounded by the peacekeepers and swept away to a secure location. There is no opportunity to say good-bye to friends and family. Once the ceremony concludes, the peacekeepers load everyone who has chosen the Above onto a transport and send them up to the


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surface. The finality of the decision always appealed to me—no loose ends, only leaving. I knew it would be hard to see my mother’s face when I made my choice, but she would have Bay. They wouldn’t be alone, and I would—at last—be Above.

But when my mother died, everything changed.Another boy goes up for his turn. I know him by sight—Fen

Cardiff, handsome and charismatic, with blond hair and dan-gerous, laughing eyes. There’s an irreverent, ironic note in his voice even as he speaks the sacred words. “I choose sacrifice in the Above.”

I think I hear a woman cry out. She sounds surprised and wounded. His mother? Didn’t he tell her what he was going to choose? He doesn’t glance up into the stands—instead, he turns around to look back at the rest of us in line, as if searching for something or someone.

In the moment before the peacekeepers take him away, I find myself staring right into his eyes, eyes that will soon see the Above. I am so jealous of him I can hardly breathe. But I promised Bay I wouldn’t do it, that I’d stay here with her. My palms feel sweaty. I promised Bay.

She is the only person I’ve ever told that I want to go Above. That I dream about it every night, that when I see the immense glass jar of dirt on the altar in the temple I can pic-ture exactly how it would feel to touch it and smell it, to have it under my feet and all around. And in the years before my mother died, Bay promised that, when the time came, she’d let me go. She herself couldn’t bear to leave Atlantia—she loved the city and my mother too much—but Bay assured me that she would keep my wish a secret so that no one could try to stop me. Once I declared it in front of the crowd at the temple, my mother would have no choice but to let me leave.


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Even the Minister and the Council cannot override the deci-sion of each individual person regarding the Above and the Below.

I love my mother and my sister but, for as long as I can re-member, I’ve always known that I need to see the Above.

But I can’t go. On the day my mother died, Bay cried so much that the

water from her tears streamed down into her hair, and I had the fleeting thought that my sister might turn into a mermaid, with seaweed hair and salt always on her face. “Promise me,” she said when she could finally speak, “that you won’t leave me alone.”

I knew Bay was right. I couldn’t leave her, now that my mother was gone. “I promise,” I whispered to Bay.

The only way for Bay and me to stay together is to remain Below. While we can both choose to stay, both of us cannot choose to go because we are the only two children in our fam-ily. One person from each gene line must always remain in Atlantia.

A few more people, and it’s my turn. Nevio the Minister knows me, of course, but his expression

when I come to the front remains impassive, the way it has for everyone else. My mother would have been the same way—she was always different in her Minister robes, more removed and regal. But would she have kept her composure if I’d said I wanted to go Above?

I will never know.The salt water is in a blue bowl; the dirt in a brown one. I

close my eyes and will myself to speak in the right voice—the flat, false one my mother always insisted that I use, the one that hides the curse and gift that is my real voice.


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“I accept my fate Below,” I say.The Minister flecks salt water onto my face, blessing me,

and it is done. I turn back to watch Bay come past the altar. She is mo-

ments younger than I am, or she would have gone first. Watch-ing my sister is a bit like watching myself make the choice. The processed air of the temple moves over us as if Atlantia truly breathes.

Bay has a soft voice, but I have no trouble hearing her. “I choose sacrifice in the Above,” she says.No. Bay. She said the wrong line. She was nervous and made

a mistake.I move to help her. There must be a way—“Wait,” I say. “Bay.” I look at Nevio the Minister to see if he

can stop this, but he stares at Bay, an expression of surprise flickering across his face. It’s only a moment that I glance at him, but it’s too long. Peacekeepers surround Bay, as they have the others who chose the Above.

“Wait.” No one hears me or pays attention. That’s the pur-pose of the voice I use.

“Bay,” I say again, and this time there’s a tiny hint of my real voice in my tone, and so she turns to look at me, almost as if in spite of herself.

I am stunned at the sadness in her eyes, but not as much as I am at the purpose I see there.

She meant to do this.In the seconds that it takes to wrap my mind around the

impossible—This is no mistake, Bay wants to leave—they pull my sister out of reach.

I push through the crowd quickly and quietly, trying not to cause a scene because a scene will be stopped. The priests all


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know me, and they know that Bay and I are inseparable. Al-ready some of them move in my direction to block my path, sympathetic expressions on their faces.

Why would Bay do this?Justus, one of the kinder priests, comes closer and reaches

out to me.“No,” I say, my real voice, my real pain and anger cutting

and coming out, and Justus drops his arm down to his side. I look up and see his face—shocked, stunned, slapped with the sound of me speaking.

I’ve done what I always promised I wouldn’t. I’ve used my true voice in public. And it is as my mother always warned me it would be—there’s no way to take it back. I can’t bear to look at the horror on Justus’s face. Justus, who has known me all my life. I don’t dare glance back at the crowd to see who else has heard.

Though my feet are firmly on the ground of Atlantia, I’m dissolving.

My sister’s gone. She decided to go Above.She would never do this.She did.Bay asked me if I heard the city breathing. I hear my own breathing now, in and out and in and out. I

live here. I will die here. I am never going to leave.


Down in the deepmarket, the sellers call out, nudging their carts into people’s backs and bodies to get attention.

“Pure air!” someone shouts. “All flavors and scents. Cinna-mon, cayenne, rose! Cedar, lilac, saffron!”

“Something new to wear!” another cries. There are shops up closer to the surface, near the temple, but down here the wares are much more varied—a jumbled flotsam and jetsam of junk and treasures. The goods are tumbled out in carts and stalls instead of arranged precisely behind glass windows. The selling stalls are dilapidated but utilitarian, pieced together out of old metal pilings and plastic slats.

Bay and I used to go everywhere together, and, after the temple, the deepmarket was the place we came most often af-ter our mother died. I haven’t found any clues in the temple as to why Bay left, so I’ve come here to look for something. Any-thing. A message. A note. Any sign from her at all.

After the peacekeepers released me on the day Bay left, I went back to the room the two of us shared and tore it apart.

I had to find something that could explain what she’d done. Maybe, I thought, there would be a letter, labeled in her neat

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handwriting, explaining everything, bringing her motives to light.

I turned out the pockets of all of her clothes. I pulled off the bedspread, blankets, and sheets from her bed, heaved the mat-tress from the springs and looked underneath. I went through all of my own belongings, just in case. I even steeled myself and opened the box in the closet where we kept the last of my mother’s things, but everything was exactly as it had been when we packed it away. No note.

Nothing. To go so suddenly, without any explanation, was cruel, and

Bay was never cruel. She could be annoyed and sharp when she was tired or under stress. But those qualities in her were never as strong as they were in me—she was the gentler sister, quicker to laugh, certainly better suited to follow in my moth-er’s footsteps. I never resented it when people said that, be-cause I knew it was true.

In the days since Bay left, I’ve done everything I can think of to get to her. I fought through the crowd at the temple un-til the peacekeepers pulled me back and put me in a holding area with other family members who’d shown signs of causing a scene. After they released us, I went to see the transport go to the surface, but of course it had already left. I stood there, trying to think of a way to follow, but the Council keeps a close watch on the transports and the locks that take them up. That is the only safe way for the living to go Above. Most of the transports are not pressurized for human survival. They’re meant for the transfer of goods and food between the Above and the Below.

And even in my most desperate imaginings, I know the Council won’t let me join my sister Above. They’ll


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never permit me to go and I can’t think of a viable way to escape.

As I walk past a stall in the deepmarket, I see brocades em-broidered by someone well-skilled, and I almost reach out to touch the fabric, to linger looking over the designs. But I keep moving, pacing the length of the market way, leaving behind the crawl of stalls and coming out into the area at the edge of the deepmarket where the races take place.

In spite of the crush of people, it gets very cold in the deepmarket. The market’s hours are limited. Closing time coincides with the dimming time in order to conserve the energy it takes to heat this part of the city and keep the air go-ing. We are deep down here. I shiver, though the walls of At-lantia have never been breached or broken in any significant way.

When the people prepared for the Divide long ago, they asked for inspiration in designing Atlantia. The story is that the Minister at the time had a dream, in which the gods told him that our city should be patterned after the grand cities of old. The Minister saw Atlantia clearly in his dream—a beauti-ful place of temples and churches set on plazas. He saw color-ful buildings with shops on the ground floor and apartments rising above them, and boulevards and streets connecting ev-erything together.

But, of course, it all had to be underwater. And so Atlantia was conceived as a series of enormous en-

closed bubbles, some higher than others, some lower, con-nected by canals and walkways. The engineers discovered that it was better to make smaller habitats and join them together than to create one large bubble for everything. The center-most sphere is the most desirable part of Atlantia. It holds


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the temple, the Council buildings, the upmarket, and several living areas. Other, smaller enclosures encompass the lesser churches, markets, and neighborhoods. Some of the deepest bubbles of all are the areas that encompass the machineries of Atlantia, the bays where the mining drones come in for repair and storage, and the deepmarket.

The engineers spent years designing all of this. Some of the original blueprints are on display in a special glass case in one of the antechambers of the temple. There are rusty stains and splatters on the diagrams. The rumor is that, as the engineers were dying, they sometimes coughed blood onto the papers. They couldn’t stop in their task or humankind would have perished, so they kept on at their sacred, consecrated work. When I mentioned the rumor about the spots on the paper be-ing blood to my mother, she did not debunk it or say the stains were something else. “So many sacrificed for us to live,” she said, and her eyes were very sad.

The destruction Above meant that there were few natural materials left for use Below. Our city’s underpinnings are made mostly of manufactured goods, with some precious overlays of old materials like the wooden pulpit in the temple and the stones covering a few of the best streets. But Atlantia is still beautiful. One of the things we Atlantians are most proud of is our trees—made of steel trunks and individual, shimmering metallic leaves, they are as lovely as anything that ever existed Above.

So people say. The engineers used the transportation from one of those

old cities—a romantic system of canals and boats called gon-dolas—as a model for our public transit down here. Of course, our gondolas are modernized—they have engines and run on


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tracks through dry concrete canals. The people of Atlantia love the gondolas although they require constant mainte-nance. Even though workers repair the gondolas each night after curfew, it’s not uncommon to see a boat beached off its track during the day, machinists swarming around like mer-maids gathering about the hulls of shipwrecks in pre-Divide illustrations.

My mother found the architecture of Atlantia fascinating, and she loved the trees and the gondolas almost as much as she loved the temple. “Flourishes in the face of death,” she told Bay and me once as we looked at the diagrams. “The en-gineers left their signature in every working of Atlantia. They made the city useful and beautiful.”

“It’s a second kind of immortality,” Bay said. “They live on in heaven, and in Atlantia herself.”

My mother looked over at Bay, and their love of the city was so palpable that I felt left out. I loved Atlantia, but not the way they did.

These lower areas have less embellishment and look more utilitarian than some of the other parts of Atlantia. Here, the rivets are clearly visible on the walls, and the sky is lower. Up at the temple, the soaring rises inside the building echo the high arches of the false sky outside.

I pass by one of the stalls that sells masks. They aren’t the air masks we carry strapped over our backs—the ones we’re told to keep with us at all times in case of a breach in Atlan-tia’s walls. The masks sold in the deepmarket are designed to be worn for fun, so you can pretend to be someone else. I feign interest in them, touching the faces of fantastic creatures that used to live in the Above—lions, tigers, horses—all of them known to me only from pictures in books. There are also more


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fanciful masks—a variety of sea witches, some with green faces, some blue.

Children delight in telling one another stories about the sea witches. We talked about them at school and when we played together in the plazas. Once, when my mother wanted me to come with her to the temple for a late service and I didn’t want to go, I tried to use what I’d heard as an excuse. “If I go out near the dimming time a sea witch might get me,” I told my mother. “Or a siren.”

“Sea witches are an old superstition,” my mother said. She didn’t deny the existence of sirens—people, usually women, who can use their voices to convince others to do their bid-ding—because everyone knows sirens exist. They were the first miracle that came about after the Divide. They were born to the younger generation of those who came Below, and they have been serving Atlantia ever since.

I am a siren.It is a secret my mother decided to keep because sirens’

lives are consecrated to the service of Atlantia, and siren chil-dren are given to the Council to raise. My mother didn’t want to give me up.

“Sea witches are real,” I told my mother. “They have names.” Maybe, I thought, people know when they’re sea witches, but they keep it a secret, the way I keep my secret about being a siren. The thought thrilled me.

“And what are the witches’ names?” my mother asked in the amused voice I loved, the one that meant she was willing to go along with my game.

“Maire,” I said, thinking of a story I’d heard the day before at school. “One of them is named Maire.”

“What did you say?” My mother sounded shocked.


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“Maire,” I said. “She’s a sea witch and a siren. She has magic, more than just her voice. She gets what she wants from you and then she turns you into sea foam before your family even has a chance to bring your body to the floodgates.” One of the girls at school told me that Maire drank the foam, but I decided to spare my mother this gory detail since her hands had gone to her mouth and her eyes were wide. Too wide. She wasn’t pretending to be horrified. She was horrified, and my mother was not easily shocked.

“Don’t tell that story anymore,” she said. Her voice trem-bled and I felt sorry. Perhaps I’d used too much of my voice in telling the story. I hadn’t meant to frighten her.

“I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”Some people said that sirens didn’t have souls, and so I

asked my mother if that were true of Maire. “No,” my mother said. “Every living thing has a soul. Maire has a soul.” And of course, my mother knew what I was really asking. “You have a soul, Rio,” she told me. “Never doubt that.”

It wasn’t until later that our mother told us the truth—that the siren Maire was her sister. Our aunt. “But we no longer speak to each other,” my mother said, a great sorrow in her voice, and Bay and I looked at each other, terrified. How could sisters grow so far apart?

“Don’t worry,” my mother said, seeing our expressions. “It won’t happen to you. They came and took Maire away when they found out she was a siren, and we weren’t raised together. We grew apart. You see? It’s one of the reasons we have to keep Rio’s secret. We don’t want her to be separated from us. We don’t want to lose her.”

Bay and I nodded. We understood perfectly. And this was an enormous secret for my mother to keep

from the Council, especially later when she became Minister.


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She was supposed to report to the other Council members and work with them closely. She was not supposed to have secrets from them.

But she did have secrets. At least one, and maybe more.It was on Maire’s doorstep that they found my mother the

night she died. She went to see her sister, but I don’t know why.

R

I’ve made it to the edge of the deepmarket, where they keep the swimming lanes—several heavy cement canals once used for the gondolas. Years ago, some enterprising group hauled the lanes down here and set them up for racing. It must have been difficult to move something so heavy.

Aldo, the man who organizes the races, nods to me as I approach. “I heard your sister went Above,” he calls out. “I’m sorry to hear that.” Aldo is a few years older than Bay and me. Even though his blue eyes and dark curly hair and smooth fea-tures should make him handsome, they don’t.

“Thank you.” Those two words are all I can manage to say without emotion when people offer me their condolences.

Aldo’s moment of civility has already ended. “I’m going to have to redo all the race brackets for this weekend now that she won’t be swimming.”

“Did she leave anything here for me?” I ask.“What would she leave?” “A note,” I say. “Or something else. I’m not sure.”“No,” Aldo says. “She always took her gear with her.

We don’t have room to store much down here. You know that.”


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I do. The racing lanes themselves use most of the available space, and the spectator stands take up what’s left. There is a small bank of rent-by-the-hour lockers pushed up near the wall where Aldo posts the brackets; we can keep our things there while we race.

“Could there be anything in the lockers?” I ask.“No,” Aldo says. “I went through them last night. They were

all empty.”He says it in a disinterested tone, and I believe that he tells

the truth. My heart sinks.So. She didn’t leave anything here, either. Aldo turns and

walks away.The water slaps against the walls of the cement canals.

Steely thin bleachers rise up on either side, calling to mind the seats in the temple. The priests knew Bay began racing here after my mother’s death, and they turned a blind eye to it. We needed the money. The temple takes care of all of its students’ room and board, of course, but all our work there is considered consecrated and we receive no coin in return. Almost everyone else had two parents to watch over them, to give them pocket money and pay for books and buy new clothes. But the Minis-ter also takes no money for her work, only room and board and clothing. Our mother looked out for us by selling her personal possessions when we needed something new. However, she’d gone through most of those items by the time she died.

So Bay set out to earn money. It was surprising, how clearly she knew exactly what to do. After I promised to stay, she still grieved deeply, but she was back to her old self in other ways—calm and collected, thinking things through.

“They have races in the deepmarket,” she told me. “Swim-ming ones. People bet on them.”


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I knew about the races, even though up until then Bay and I rarely watched them. The priests discouraged it. “But those people have been swimming for years,” I said.

“We can learn fast,” she said. “It’s in our genes.”Bay and I both take after my father physically—we are tall

and strong, while my mother was small and delicate. When we were twelve, we passed her in height and kept on growing; she laughed that she had to look up to the two of us.

My father was a racer, back when it was an approved sport and they had fancy sleek swimming lanes erected in the plazas on weekends. That’s how my mother met him. She was attending one of the races, and he came out of the water after finishing and looked up and saw her. In a crowd of people stir-ring and shouting there was one spot of stillness: my mother. She stood up because that’s what everyone else was doing, but she kept on reading the book she’d brought with her. That in-trigued him. What was so interesting that she couldn’t even be bothered to watch the race? So he climbed up in the stands and found her and asked her to go to one of the cafés with him. She agreed. That was the beginning.

“But racing is what might have given him water-lung,” I protested.

“They’ve never proven the link,” Bay said. She sold one of my mother’s few remaining personal pos-

sessions—a tiger god statue—and used the coin to buy each of us a training suit and practice time in the lanes.

“I feel naked,” I told Bay the day we first tried on the suits.“You shouldn’t,” she said. “These things are almost as mod-

est as our temple robes. We’re covered from stem to stern.”That made me laugh, which I hadn’t done often since

my mother died, and Bay smiled. We went out to the lanes


20

ally condie

together, and the teacher shook his head. “Aldo didn’t tell me you were so old,” he said. “It’s no use for me to teach you.”

“We’re only fifteen,” Bay said.“Still too old,” the man said. “You have to start younger

than this.”“We paid you to teach us,” Bay said. “It’s no concern to you

how fast we are as long as you have your coin.”Of course, when we both picked up swimming fairly

quickly, he acted as though he’d predicted it all along. “It’s in your genes, of course,” he said. “You’ll never be as good as you could have been, if you’d started younger. But I suppose your mother wanted to keep you up at the temple. I can’t say I blame her.”

“It doesn’t matter if I’m not in the faster brackets,” Bay said to me quietly. “I only have to be good enough to enter and win some of the races.”

“Wait,” I said. She’d said I, not we. “What about me?”“No,” Bay said. “It’s too dangerous.”Because of my voice. I knew that was the reason. It always

was, for everything. But this time, I didn’t see why. “It’s like everything else,” Bay said. “Anything you do in

public runs the risk of exposure. It’s better if you watch. You can tell me if anyone tries to cheat. You can keep an eye on the clock and see if Aldo tries to rig the results.”

I fumed. “If I’m not going to race, why did I bother learning to swim?”

“It’s part of who we are,” she said. “Our father knew how. And doesn’t it seem stupid that most of us don’t know how to swim? When we live underwater?”

“Not really,” I said. “If there’s ever a breach, we’ll all die anyway.”


21

atlantia

“Don’t think like that,” Bay said. So we kept training to-gether, day after day, but I never raced.

Aldo comes back out with more papers to post on the wall. The rustling of the pages brings me back to the present.

“I could swim in her bracket,” I say. Racing would be a con-nection to Bay. A way to burn off some of the restlessness eat-ing me up inside.

Aldo raises his eyebrows. I can tell that he likes this idea, because he is both sharp and lazy and this will save him some work. “When the two of you trained side by side, you always kept up with her.”

“Yes,” I say. “I did.”“I don’t have a problem with it,” he says. “But the other rac-

ers will have to agree with the substitution. And I’ll need to let the bettors know.”

I nod.“Come again tomorrow and I’ll tell you what they say,” Aldo

says. He heads back in the direction of the stall where he takes the bets.

I stand there for a moment more, watching the smooth tur-quoise water wash against the sides of the racing lane. Aldo colors the water artificially so that it looks more enticing. For the first time since Bay left I feel a tiny bit better. If I make my body tired, maybe my mind can rest, even if only for the mo-ments when I swim and stare down at the line on the bottom of the lane and think about nothing but pushing through my own fatigue.

“Rio,” a voice says behind me. And in one heartbeat my thoughts go from blue to black.I know that voice, though I haven’t heard it in a long time,

not since my mother’s funeral.


22

ally condie

She’s here. Maire.My mother’s sister.The siren woman some people call a witch.The one I think might have killed my mother.How else to explain her crumpled figure on Maire’s door-

step? Or why Maire never said anything, never offered a single word of explanation as to why my mother might have come to her?

“Maire wouldn’t have killed her,” Bay said, when I told her about my suspicions. “A sister couldn’t do that.”

I turn around and look back at the throngs in the deepmar-ket, but I can’t find Maire among the moving cloaks and ban-ners and faces. Still, I feel her watching me, even if I can’t see exactly where she is. Does she expect me to answer her?

Maire doesn’t know about my voice. My mother took great care to keep that part of me hidden from everyone, even her own sister.

“But if Maire has a voice like mine, won’t people expect me to have one, too?” I asked once, when I was small.

“No,” my mother said. “There have never been two sirens in the same family line. We’ve always believed that the siren voices are a gift from the gods, not simple genetics.”

“Then why don’t you treat it like a gift?” Her eyes softened. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wish we could.

But it is a gift, just not one you can use right now.”“When?” I asked.She had no answer for me, but I had one for myself. After I

went Above. My mother was always so pleased with my self- control. She didn’t know that the reason I could manage it was because I never planned to do it forever. I thought I would go Above and speak at last.


23

atlantia

“Maire is your greatest protection,” my mother said. “Be-cause she has a siren voice, people aren’t looking for any of us to have one as well.”

Rio. I hear my name again now, a single, clear word meant for me.

I start walking, fast, away from the rows of sellers and stalls and back up toward the lower reaches of Atlantia’s neighborhoods.

I think I feel Maire following me, and I think I hear her, too. It’s almost as though she’s whispering to me, sentences I can’t quite make out, hiding an undercurrent of words in the sound of the air channeling through the walls of the city. And I can’t help myself. I wonder, Could I do that, too?

If I use my voice, I’ll be like Maire. I’ll be marked as a siren and people will fear me.

Every time I see Justus, the priest, he won’t meet my gaze. Even though he heard me speak only a single word in my real voice, it was enough to make him keep his distance. That’s the safest response for me, and I should be glad. But I’m sad about it. He was my mother’s best friend, the gentlest priest, the one Bay and I hoped the others would choose as Minister after she died.

But they didn’t. They chose Nevio.A group of teenagers push past, laughing and talking

together. They glance over at me and then look away. For a minute I’m tempted to call to them in my real voice. I could play upon the boys; I could make the girls feel jealous, wish they’d never ignored me.

“Hello,” a voice says, persuasive, delicious, and for a mo-ment I think I’ve done it, I’ve spoken. But I haven’t.

Maire stands in front of me in her black robes, with her disheveled hair. Her face is at once too sharp to be anything


24

ally condie

like my mother’s and yet too intelligent to be dissimilar. I have never seen her so close before.

“I need to speak to you,” Maire says. “About your mother. And your sister.”

You do not, I almost say, in my true voice, but I have been so long silent that it seems a pity to speak now. To ruin anything for an aunt who cares nothing for me.

I walk past her. She follows. I hear her boots on the street behind me. I feel the dark of my losses in those words mother and sister, in the way she said them so they would echo in my mind, cold as a cathedral with no candles.

I have always known that if I stayed Below I would be made small, and I feel it happening.

“Rio?” Maire says. “I was there at the temple the day Bay left. And I heard you speak.”

I stop.It wasn’t only Justus who heard me. “I always wondered if you were a siren, too,” Maire says, a

ring of happiness in her voice, and I flinch in spite of myself. “If,” Maire says, “there is ever anything you want, or need,

I can help you. I helped your mother, you know. Even Oceana the Minister needed me.”

That’s a lie. And my mother would be proud of how my voice comes out even and flat, although I want to scream. “My mother didn’t need you,” I say. “She had us. Her daughters.”

“There are some things you only tell a sister,” Maire says. “And some things you only ask of a sister.” Now her voice sounds soft and sad, faraway, even though she stands close to me. It’s unnerving. “You think that I am the evil sister, and that your mother was good,” she says. “But Oceana did need me. And Bay needed me, too.”


25

atlantia

Bay didn’t need Maire. Bay had me.“She left something for you,” Maire says. “Come along and

I’ll give it to you.”I’m caught between two things I know to be true.Bay wouldn’t have gone Above without leaving me some

kind of message or explanation.She also would never have left that message or explanation

with Maire.Would she?Maire’s voice is tangling things, confusing me.A gondola comes behind us, slipping along in its cement ca-

nal. I want to get away from Maire and back to the temple. I break into a run.

“We need to talk, you and I.” Maire’s voice follows me. “I can help you get what you want, your deepest desire.”

Does she even know my deepest desire? To go Above? I have the terrible feeling that she might. That she might

know my whole heart and mind.“I can help you get Above,” Maire says, her voice fading,

haunting. “But it has to be soon. We are running out of time. Can’t you hear the way the city is breathing?”


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Design by Marikka Tamura.Text set in Palatino Linotype.



Four hundred have died here. I pray that yours are faring

better. The city has canceled celebrations of the Spring

Moons on quarantine orders, and the typical masquerades have

become as scarce as the meat and eggs.

Most of the children in our ward are emerging from their

illness with rather peculiar side effects. One young girl’s hair

turned from gold to black overnight. A six-year-old boy has scars

running down his face without ever having been touched. The

other doctors are quite terrified. Please let me know if you see a

similar trend, sir. I sense something unusual shifting in the wind,

and am most anxious to study this effect.

Letter from Dtt. Siriano Baglio to Dtt. Marino Di Segna

31 Abrie, 1348

Southeastern districts of Dalia, Kenettra



13 JUNO, 1361

City of DaliaSouthern Kenettra

The Sealands



1

Some hate us, think us outlaws to hang at the gallows.

Some fear us, think us demons to burn at the stake.

Some worship us, think us children of the gods.

But all know us.

—Unknown source on the Young Elites

Adelina Amouteru

I’m going to die tomorrow morning.That’s what the Inquisitors tell me, anyway, when they

visit my cell. I’ve been in here for weeks—I know this only be-cause I’ve been counting the number of times my meals come.

One day. Two days.Four days. A week.Two weeks.Three.I stopped counting after that. The hours run together, an

endless train of nothingness, filled with different slants of light and the shiver of cold, wet stone, the pieces of my san-ity, the disjointed whispers of my thoughts.

But tomorrow, my time ends. They’re going to burn me at the stake in the central market square, for all to see. The In-quisitors tell me a crowd has already begun to gather outside.



2

I sit straight, the way I was always taught. My shoulders don’t touch the wall. It takes me a while to realize that I’m rocking back and forth, perhaps to stay sane, perhaps just to keep warm. I hum an old lullaby too, one my mother used to sing to me when I was very little. I do my best to imitate her voice, a sweet and delicate sound, but my notes come out cracked and hoarse, nothing like what I remember. I stop trying.

It’s so damp down here. Water trickles from above my door and has painted a groove into the stone wall, discolored green and black with grime. My hair is matted, and my nails are caked with blood and dirt. I want to scrub them clean. Is it strange that all I can think about on my last day is how filthy I am? If my little sister were here, she’d murmur some-thing reassuring and soak my hands in warm water.

I can’t stop wondering if she’s okay. She hasn’t come to see me.

I lower my head into my hands. How did I end up like this?

But I know how, of course. It’s because I’m a murderer.

<>

It happened several weeks earlier, on a stormy night at my father’s villa. I couldn’t sleep. Rain fell and lightning re flected off the window of my bedchamber. But even the storm couldn’t drown out the conversation from downstairs. My father and his guest were talking about me, of course. My father’s late-night conversations were always about me.



3

I was the talk of my family’s eastern Dalia district. Adelina Amouteru? they all said. Oh, she’s one of those who survived the fever a decade ago. Poor thing. Her father will have a hard time marrying her off.

No one meant because I wasn’t beautiful. I’m not being arrogant, only honest. My nursemaid once told me that any man who’d ever laid eyes on my late mother was now wait-ing curiously to see how her two daughters would blossom into women. My younger sister, Violetta, was only fourteen and already the budding image of perfection. Unlike me, Violetta had inherited our mother’s rosy temperament and innocent charm. She’d kiss my cheeks and laugh and twirl and dream. When we were very small, we’d sit together in the garden and she would braid periwinkles into my hair. I would sing to her. She would make up games.

We loved each other, once.My father would bring Violetta jewels and watch her clap

her hands in delight as he strung them around her neck. He would buy her exquisite dresses that arrived in port from the farthest ends of the world. He would tell her stories and kiss her good night. He would remind her how beautiful she was, how far she would raise our family’s standing with a good marriage, how she could attract princes and kings if she desired. Violetta already had a line of suitors eager to secure her hand, and my father would tell each of them to be patient, that they could not marry her until she turned seventeen. What a caring father, everyone thought.

Of course, Violetta didn’t escape all of my father’s cruelty.



4

He purposely bought her dresses that were tight and pain-ful. He enjoyed seeing her feet bleed from the hard, jeweled shoes he encouraged her to wear.

Still. He loved her, in his own way. It’s different, you see, because she was his investment.

I was another story. Unlike my sister, blessed with shin-ing black hair to complement her dark eyes and rich olive skin, I am flawed. And by flawed, I mean this: When I was four years old, the blood fever reached its peak and every-one in Kenettra barred their homes in a state of panic. No use. My mother, sister, and I all came down with the fever. You could always tell who was infected—strange, mottled patterns showed up on our skin, our hair and lashes flitted from one color to another, and pink, blood-tinged tears ran from our eyes. I still remember the smell of sickness in our house, the burn of brandy on my lips. My left eye became so swollen that a doctor had to remove it. He did it with a red-hot knife and a pair of burning tongs.

So, yes. You could say I am flawed.Marked. A malfetto.While my sister emerged from the fever unscathed, I now

have only a scar where my left eye used to be. While my sister’s hair remained a glossy black, the strands of my hair and lashes turned a strange, ever-shifting silver, so that in the sunlight they look close to white, like a winter moon, and in the dark they change to a deep gray, shimmering silk spun from metal.

At least I fared better than Mother did. Mother, like every



5

infected adult, died. I remember crying in her empty bed-chamber each night, wishing the fever had taken Father instead.

My father and his mysterious guest were still talking downstairs. My curiosity got the best of me and I swung my legs over the side of my bed, crept toward my chamber door on light feet, and opened it a crack. Dim candlelight illumi-nated the hall outside. Below, my father sat across from a tall, broad-shouldered man with graying hair at his temples, his hair tied back at the nape of his neck in a short, custom-ary tail, the velvet of his coat shining black and orange in the light. My father’s coat was velvet too, but the material was worn thin. Before the blood fever crippled our country, his clothes would have been as luxurious as his guest’s. But now? It’s hard to keep good trade relations when you have a malfetto daughter tainting your family’s name.

Both men drank wine. Father must be in a negotiating mood tonight, I thought, to have tapped one of our last good casks.

I opened the door a little wider, crept out into the hall, and sat, knees to my chin, along the stairs. My favorite spot. Some-times I’d pretend I was a queen, and that I stood here on a palace balcony looking down at my groveling subjects. Now I took up my usual crouch and listened closely to the conversa-tion downstairs. As always, I made sure my hair covered my scar. My hand rested awkwardly on the staircase. My father had broken my fourth finger, and it never healed straight. Even now, I could not curl it properly around the railing.



6

“I don’t mean to insult you, Master Amouteru,” the man said to my father. “You were a merchant of good reputation. But that was a long time ago. I don’t want to be seen doing business with a malfetto family—bad luck, you know. There’s little you can offer me.”

My father kept a smile on his face. The forced smile of a business transaction. “There are still lenders in town who work with me. I can pay you back as soon as the port traffic picks up. Tamouran silks and spices are in high demand this year—”

The man looked unimpressed. “The king’s dumb as a dog,” he replied. “And dogs are no good at running coun-tries. The ports will be slow for years to come, I’m afraid, and with the new tax laws, your debts will only grow. How can you possibly repay me?”

My father leaned back in his chair, sipped his wine, and sighed. “There must be something I can offer you.”

The man studied his glass of wine thoughtfully. The harsh lines of his face made me shiver. “Tell me about Adelina. How many offers have you received?”

My father blushed. As if the wine hadn’t left him red enough already. “Offers for Adelina’s hand have been slow to come.”

The man smiled. “None for your little abomination, then.”My father’s lips tightened. “Not as many as I’d like,” he

admitted.“What do the others say about her?”“The other suitors?” My father rubbed a hand across his



7

face. Admitting all my flaws embarrassed him. “They say the same thing. It always comes back to her . . . markings. What can I tell you, sir? No one wants a malfetto bearing his children.”

The man listened, making sympathetic sounds.“Haven’t you heard the latest news from Estenzia? Two

noblemen walking home from the opera were found burned to a crisp.” My father had quickly changed tack, hoping now that the stranger would take pity on him. “Scorch marks on the wall, their bodies melted from the inside out. Everyone is frightened of malfettos, sir. Even you are reluctant to do busi-ness with me. Please. I’m helpless.”

I knew what my father spoke of. He was referring to very specific malfettos—a rare handful of children who came out of the blood fever with scars far darker than mine, frighten-ing abilities that don’t belong in this world. Everyone talked about these malfettos in hushed whispers; most feared them and called them demons. But I secretly held them in awe. People said they could conjure fire out of thin air. Could call the wind. Could control beasts. Could disappear. Could kill in the blink of an eye.

If you searched the black market, you’d find flat wooden engravings for sale, elaborately carved with their names, for-bidden collectibles that supposedly meant they would pro-tect you—or, at the least, that they would not hurt you. No matter the opinion, everyone knew their names. The Reaper. Magiano. The Windwalker. The Alchemist.

The Young Elites.



8

The man shook his head. “I’ve heard that even the suitors who refuse Adelina still gape at her, sick with desire.” He paused. “True, her markings are . . . unfortunate. But a beau-tiful girl is a beautiful girl.” Something strange glinted in his eyes. My stomach twisted at the sight, and I tucked my chin tighter against my knees, as if for protection.

My father looked confused. He sat up taller in his chair and pointed his wineglass at the man. “Are you making me an offer for Adelina’s hand?”

The man reached into his coat to produce a small brown pouch, then tossed it onto the table. It landed with a heavy clink. As a merchant’s daughter, one becomes well ac-quainted with money—and I could tell from the sound and from the size of the coins that the purse was filled to the brim with gold talents. I stifled a gasp.

As my father gaped at the contents, the man leaned back and thoughtfully sipped his wine. “I know of the estate taxes you haven’t yet paid to the crown. I know of your new debts. And I will cover all of them in exchange for your daughter Adelina.”

My father frowned. “But you have a wife.”“I do, yes.” The man paused, then added, “I never said I

wanted to marry her. I am merely proposing to take her off your hands.”

I felt the blood drain from my face. “You . . . want her as your mistress, then?” Father asked.

The man shrugged. “No nobleman in his right mind would make a wife of such a marked girl—she could not



9

possibly attend public affairs on my arm. I have a reputation to uphold, Master Amouteru. But I think we can work this out. She will have a home, and you will have your gold.” He raised a hand. “One condition. I want her now, not in a year. I’ve no patience to wait until she turns seventeen.”

A strange buzzing filled my ears. No boy or girl was allowed to give themselves to another until they turned seventeen. This man was asking my father to break the law. To defy the gods.

My father raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t argue. “A mis-tress,” he finally said. “Sir, you must know what this will do to my reputation. I might as well sell her to a brothel.”

“And how is your reputation faring now? How much damage has she already done to your professional name?” He leaned forward. “Surely you’re not insinuating my home is nothing more than a common brothel. At least your Ade-lina would belong to a noble household.”

As I watched my father sip his wine, my hands began to tremble. “A mistress,” he repeated.

“Think quickly, Master Amouteru. I won’t offer this again.”

“Give me a moment,” my father anxiously reassured him.I don’t know how long the silence lasted, but when he

finally spoke again, I jumped at the sound. “Adelina could be a good match for you. You’re wise to see it. She is lovely, even with her markings, and . . . spirited.”

The man swirled his wine. “And I will tame her. Do we have a deal?”



10

TEXT

SH

ORT

I closed my eye. My world swam in darkness—I imag-ined the man’s face against my own, his hand on my waist, his sickening smile. Not even a wife. A mistress. The thought made me shrink from the stairs. Through a haze of numb-ness, I watched my father shake hands and clink wineglasses with the man. “A deal, then,” he said to the man. He looked relieved of a great burden. “Tomorrow, she’s yours. Just . . . keep this private. I don’t want Inquisitors knocking on my door and fining me for giving her away too young.”

“She’s a malfetto,” the man replied. “No one will care.” He tightened his gloves and rose from his chair in one elegant move. My father bowed his head. “I’ll send a carriage for her in the morning.”

As my father escorted him to our door, I stole away into my bedchamber and stood there in the darkness, shaking. Why did my father’s words still stab me in the heart? I should be used to it by now. What had he once told me? My poor Adelina, he’d said, caressing my cheek with a thumb. It’s a shame. Look at you. Who will ever want a malfetto like you?

It will be all right, I tried telling myself. At least you can leave your father behind. It won’t be so bad. But even as I thought this, I felt a weight settle in my chest. I knew the truth. Malfettos were unwanted. Bad luck. And, now more than ever, feared. I would be tossed aside the instant the man tired of me.

My gaze wandered around my bedchamber, settling fi-nally on my window. My heartbeat stilled for a moment. Rain drew angry lines down the glass, but through it I could



11

TEXT

SH

ORT

still see the deep blue cityscape of Dalia, the rows of domed brick towers and cobblestone alleys, the marble temples, the docks where the edge of the city sloped gently into the sea, where on clear nights gondolas with golden lanterns would glide across the water, where the waterfalls that bordered southern Kenettra thundered. Tonight, the ocean churned in fury, and white foam crashed against the city’s horizon, flooding the canals.

I continued staring out the rain-slashed window for a long while.

Tonight. Tonight was the night.I hurried to my bed, bent down, and dragged out a sack

I’d made with a bedsheet. Inside it were fine silverware, forks and knives, candelabras, engraved plates, anything I could sell for food and shelter. That’s another thing to love about me. I steal. I’d been stealing from around our house for months, stashing things under my bed in preparation for the day when I couldn’t stand to live with my father any longer. It wasn’t much, but I calculated that if I sold all of it to the right dealers, I might end up with a few gold talents. Enough to get by, at least, for several months.

Then I rushed to my chest of clothes, pulled out an armful of silks, and hurried about my chamber to collect any jewelry I could find. My silver bracelets. A pearl necklace inherited from my mother that my sister did not want. A pair of sapphire earrings. I grabbed two long strips of silk cloth that make up a Tamouran headwrap. I would need to cover up my silver hair



12

while on the run. I worked in feverish concentration. I added the jewelry and clothes carefully into the sack, hid it behind my bed, and pulled on my soft leather riding boots.

I settled down to wait.An hour later, when my father retired to bed and the

house stilled, I grabbed the sack. I hurried to my window and pressed my hand against it. Gingerly, I pushed the left pane aside and propped it open. The storm had calmed some, but rain still came down steadily enough to mute the sound of my footsteps. I looked over my shoulder one last time at my bedchamber door, as if I expected my father to walk in. Where are you going, Adelina? he’d say. There’s nothing out there for a girl like you.

I shook his voice from my head. Let him find me gone in the morning, his best chance at settling his debts. I took a deep breath, then began to climb through the open window. Cold rain lashed at my arms, prickling my skin.

“Adelina?”I whirled around at the voice. Behind me, the silhouette of

a girl stood in my doorway—my sister, Violetta, still rubbing sleep from her eyes. She stared at the open window and the sack on my shoulders, and for a terrifying moment, I thought she might raise her voice and shout for Father.

But Violetta watched me quietly. I felt a pang of guilt, even as the sight of her sent a flash of resentment through my heart. Fool. Why should I have felt sorry for someone who had watched me suffer so many times before? I love you, Adelina, she used to say, when we were small. Papa loves you



13

too. He just doesn’t know how to show it. Why did I pity the sister who was valued?

Still, I found myself rushing to her on silent feet, taking one of her hands in mine, and putting a slender finger up to her lips. She gave me a worried look. “You should go back to bed,” she whispered. In the dim glow of night, I could see the gloss of her dark, marble eyes, the thinness of her delicate skin. Her beauty was so pure. “You’ll get in trouble if Father finds you.”

I squeezed her hand tighter, then let our foreheads touch. We stayed still for a long moment, and it seemed as if we were children again, each leaning against the other. Usually Violetta would pull away from me, knowing that Father did not like to see us close. This time, though, she clung to me. As if she knew that tonight was something different. “Violetta,” I whispered, “do you remember the time you lied to Father about who broke one of his best vases?”

My sister nodded against my shoulder.“I need you to do that for me again.” I pulled far away

enough to tuck her hair behind her ear. “Don’t say a word.”She didn’t reply; instead, she swallowed and looked down

the hall toward our father’s chambers. She did not hate him in the same way that I did, and the thought of going against his teaching—that she was too good for me, that to love me was a foolish thing—filled her eyes with guilt. Finally, she nodded. I felt as if a mantle had been lifted from my shoul-ders, like she was letting go of me. “Be careful out there. Stay safe. Good luck.”



14

We exchanged a final look. You could come with me, I thought. But I know you won’t. You’re too scared. Go back to smil-ing at the dresses that Father buys for you. Still, my heart soft-ened for a moment. Violetta was always the good girl. She didn’t choose any of this. I do wish you a happy life. I hope you fall in love and marry well. Good-bye, sister. I didn’t dare wait for her to say anything else. Instead I turned away, walked to the window, and stepped onto the second-floor ledge.

I nearly slipped. The rain had turned everything slick, and my riding boots fought for grip against the narrow ledge. Some silverware fell out of my sack, clattering on the ground below. Don’t look down. I made my way along the ledge until I reached a balcony, and there I slid down until I dangled with nothing but my trembling hands holding me in place. I closed my eye and let go.

My legs crumpled beneath me when I landed. The impact knocked the breath from my chest, and for a moment I could only lie there in front of our house, drenched in rain, muscles aching, fighting for air. Strands of my hair clung to my face. I wiped them out of my way and crawled onto my hands and knees. The rain added a reflective sheen to everything around me, as if this were all some nightmare I couldn’t wake from. My focus narrowed. I needed to get out of here before my father discovered me gone. Finally, I scrambled to my feet and ran, dazed, toward our stables. The horses paced uneasily when I walked in, but I untied my favorite stallion, whispered some soothing words to him, and saddled him.

We raced into the storm.



15

I pushed him hard until we had left my father’s villa behind and entered the edge of Dalia’s marketplace. The market was completely abandoned and flooded with puddles—I’d never been out in the town at an hour like this, and the emptiness of a place usually swarming with people unnerved me. My stallion snorted uneasily at the downpour and took several steps backward. His hooves sank into the mud. I swung down from the saddle, ran my hands along his neck in an attempt to calm him, and tried to pull him forward.

Then I heard it. The sound of galloping hooves behind me.I froze in my tracks. At first it seemed distant—almost

entirely muted by the storm—but then, an instant later, it turned deafening. I trembled where I stood. Father. I knew he was coming; it had to be him. My hands stopped caress-ing the stallion’s neck and instead gripped his soaked mane for dear life. Had Violetta told my father after all? Perhaps he’d heard the sound of the silverware falling from the roof.

And before I could think anything else, I saw him, a sight that sent terror rushing through my blood—my father, his eyes flashing, materializing through the fog of a wet mid-night. In all my years, I’d never before seen such anger on his face.

I rushed to jump back on my stallion, but I wasn’t fast enough. One moment my father’s horse was bearing down on us, and the next, he was here, his boots splashing into a puddle and his coat whipping out behind him. His hand closed around my arm like an iron shackle.



16

“What are you doing, Adelina?” he asked, his voice eerily calm.

I tried in vain to escape his grasp, but his hand only gripped tighter until I gasped from the pain. My father pulled hard—I stumbled, lost my balance, and fell against him. Mud splashed my face. All I could hear was the roar of rain, the darkness of his voice.

“Get up, you ungrateful little thief,” he hissed in my ear, yanking me forcefully up. Then his voice turned soothing. “Come now, my love. You’re making a mess of yourself. Let me take you home.”

I glared at him and pulled my arm away with all my strength. His grip slipped against the slick of rain—my skin twisted painfully against his, and for an instant, I was free.

But then I felt his hand close around a fistful of my hair. I shrieked, my hands grasping at the empty air. “So ill-tempered. Why can’t you be more like your sister?” he murmured, shaking his head and hauling me off toward his horse. My arm hit the sack I’d tied to my horse’s sad-dle, and the silverware rained down around us with a thunderous clatter, glinting in the night. “Where were you planning on going? Who else would want you? You’ll never get a better offer than this. Do you realize how much hu-miliation I’ve suffered, dealing with the marriage refusals that come your way? Do you know how hard it is for me, apologizing for you?”

I screamed. I screamed with everything I had, hoping that my cries would wake the people sleeping in the buildings all



17

around me, that they would witness this scene unfolding. Would they care? My father tightened his grip on my hair and pulled harder.

“Come home with me now,” he said, pausing for a mo-ment to stare at me. Rain ran down his cheeks. “Good girl. Your father knows best.”

I gritted my teeth and stared back. “I hate you,” I whispered.

My father struck me viciously across the face. Light flashed across my vision. I stumbled, then collapsed in the mud. My father still clung to my hair. He pulled so hard that I felt strands being torn from my scalp. I’ve gone too far, I suddenly thought through a haze of terror. I’ve pushed him too much. The world swam in an ocean of blood and rain. “You’re a disgrace,” he whispered in my ear, filling it with his smooth, icy rage. “You’re going in the morning, and so help me, I’ll kill you before you can ruin this deal.”

Something snapped inside me. My lips curled into a snarl.A rush of energy, a gathering of blinding light and darkest

wind. Suddenly I could see everything—my father motion-less before me, his snarling face a hairsbreadth away from my own, our surroundings illuminated by moonlight so bril-liant that it washed the world of color, turning everything black and white. Water droplets hung in the air. A million glistening threads connected everything to everything else.

Something deep within me told me to pull on the threads. The world around us froze, and then, as if my mind had crept out of my body and into the ground, an illusion of



18

towering black shapes surged up from the earth, their bodies crooked and jolting, their eyes bloody and fixed straight on my father, their fanged mouths so wide that they stretched all across their silhouetted faces, splitting their heads in two. My father’s eyes widened, then darted in bewilderment at the phantoms staggering toward him. He released me. I fell to the ground and crawled away from him as fast as I could. The black, ghostly shapes continued to lurch forward. I cow-ered in the midst of them, both helpless and powerful, look-ing on as they passed me by.

I am Adelina Amouteru, the phantoms whispered to my father, speaking my most frightening thoughts in a chorus of voices, dripping with hatred. My hatred. I belong to no one. On this night, I swear to you that I will rise above everything you’ve ever taught me. I will become a force that this world has never known. I will come into such power that none will dare hurt me again.

They gathered closer to him. Wait, I wanted to cry out, even as a strange exhilaration flowed through me. Wait, stop. But the phantoms ignored me. My father screamed, swatting desperately at their bony, outstretched fingers, and then he turned around and ran. Blindly. He smashed into his horse and fell backward into the mud. The horse shrieked, the whites of its eyes rolling. It reared on its mighty legs, pawing for an instant at the air—

And then down came its hooves. Onto my father’s chest.My father’s screams cut off abruptly. His body convulsed.The phantoms vanished instantly, as if they were never



19

there in the first place. The rain suddenly grew heavy again, lightning streaked across the sky, and thunder shook my bones. The horse untangled itself from my father’s broken body, trampling the corpse further. Then it tossed its head and galloped into the rain. Heat and ice coursed through my veins; my muscles throbbed. I lay there in the mud, trem-bling, disbelieving, my gaze fixed in horror on the sight of the body lying a few feet away. My breaths came in ragged sobs, and my scalp burned in agony. Blood trickled down my face. The smell of iron filled my nose—I couldn’t tell whether it came from my own wounds or my father’s. I waited, brac-ing myself for the shapes to reappear and turn their wrath on me, but it never happened.

“I didn’t mean it,” I whispered, unsure whom I was talking to. My gaze darted up to the windows, terrified that people would be watching from every building, but no one was there. The storm drowned me out. I dragged myself away from my father’s body. This is all wrong.

But that was a lie. I knew it, even then. Do you see how I take after my father? I had enjoyed every moment. “I didn’t mean it!” I shrieked again, trying to drown out my inner voice. But my words only came out in a thin, reedy jumble. “I just wanted to escape—I just wanted—to get away—I didn’t—I don’t—”

I have no idea how long I stayed there. All I know is that, eventually, I staggered to my feet. I picked up the scattered silverware with trembling fingers, retied the sack, and pulled myself onto my stallion’s saddle. Then I rode away, leaving



20

behind the carnage I’d created. I ran from the father I’d mur-dered. I escaped so quickly that I never stopped to wonder again whether or not someone had been watching me from a window.

I rode for days. Along the road, I bartered my stolen sil-verware to a kind innkeeper, a sympathetic farmer, a soft-hearted baker, until I’d collected a small pouch of talents that would keep me in bread until I reached the next city. My goal: Estenzia, the northern port capital, the crowning jewel of Kenettra, the city of ten thousand ships. A city large enough to be teeming with malfettos. I’d be safer there. I’d be so far away from all of this that no one would ever find me.

But on the fifth day, my exhaustion finally caught up to me—I was no soldier, and I’d never ridden like this before. I crumpled in a broken, delirious heap before the gates of a farmhouse.

A woman found me. She was dressed in clean brown robes, and I remember being so taken by her motherly beauty that my heart immediately warmed to her in trust. I reached a shaking hand up to her, as if to touch her skin.

“Please,” I whispered through cracked lips. “I need a place to rest.”

The woman took pity on me. She cupped my face between her smooth, cool hands, studied my markings for a long mo-ment, and nodded. “Come with me, child,” she said. She led me to the loft of their barn, showing me where I could sleep, and after a meal of bread and hard cheese, I immediately fell unconscious, safe in the knowledge of my shelter.



21

In the morning, I woke to rough hands dragging me from the hay.

I startled, trembling, and looked up to see the faces of two Inquisition soldiers staring down at me, their white armor and robes lined with gold, their expressions hard as stone. The king’s peacekeepers. In desperation, I tried to summon the same power I’d felt before my father died, but this time the energy did not course through me, and the world did not turn black and white, and no phantoms rose from the ground.

There was a girl standing beside the Inquisitors. I stared at her for a long moment before I finally believed the sight. Violetta. My younger sister. She looked as if she’d been cry-ing, and dark circles under her eyes marred her perfection. There was a bruise on her cheek, turning blue and black.

“Is this your sister?” one of the Inquisitors asked her.Violetta looked silently at them, refusing to acknowledge

the question—but Violetta had never been able to lie well, and the recognition was obvious in her eyes.

The Inquisitors shoved her aside and focused on me. “Adelina Amouteru,” the other Inquisitor said as they hauled me to my feet and bound my hands tightly behind my back. “By order of the king, you are under arrest—”

“It was an accident”—I gasped in protest—“the rain, the horse—”

The Inquisitor ignored me. “For the murder of your father, Sir Martino Amouteru.”

“You said if I spoke for her, you would let her go,” Vio-letta snapped at them. “I spoke for her! She’s innocent!”



22

They paused for a moment as my sister clung to my arm. She looked at me, her eyes full of tears. “I’m so sorry, mi Adelinetta,” she whispered in anguish. “I’m so sorry. They were on your trail—I never meant to help them—”

But you did. I turned away from her, but I still caught my-self gripping her arm in return until the Inquisitors wrenched us apart. I wanted to say to her, Save me. You have to find a way. But I couldn’t find my voice. Me, me, me. Perhaps I was as selfish as my father.

<>

That was weeks ago.Now you know how I ended up here, shackled to the wall

of a wet dungeon cell with no windows and no light, without a trial, without a soul in the world. This is how I first came to know of my abilities, how I turned to face the end of my life with the blood of my father staining my hands. His ghost keeps me company. Every time I wake up from a feverish dream, I see him standing in the corner of my cell, laughing at me. You tried to escape from me, he says, but I found you. You have lost and I have won. I tell him that I’m glad he’s dead. I tell him to go away. But he stays.

It doesn’t matter, anyway. I’m going to die tomorrow morning.


S A L L Y G R E E N

VIKINGAn Imprint of Penguin Group (USA)

9780670016785_HalfBad_INT_FinalREV2.indd 3 12/17/13 12:27 PM

VIKINGPublished by the Penguin Group


New York, New York 10014

USA * Canada * UK * Ireland * Australia * New Zealand * India * South Africa * China


First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), 2014. Published simultaneously in the UK by Penguin Books Ltd

Copyright © 2014 by Half Bad Books Limited

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying

with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

libr a ry of congr ess c ata loging-in-pu blic ation dataGreen, Sally.

Half bad / Sally Green.pages cm. — (The half bad trilogy ; 1)

Summary: In modern-day England, where witches live alongside humans, Nathan, son of a White witch and the most powerful Black witch, must escape captivity before

his seventeenth birthday and receive the gifts that will determine his future.ISBN 978-0-670-01678-5 (hardback)

[1. Witches—Fiction. 2. Good and evil—Fiction. 3. Family life—Fiction. 4. Toleration—Fiction. 5. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 6. Prisoners—Fiction. 7. England—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.G826323Hal 2014 [Fic—dc23 2013041190

Printed in U.S.A.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Designed by Nancy Brennan Set in Fournier MT


g

“There is nothing either good or bad,

but thinking makes it so.”

Hamlet, William Shakespeare


ONE

THE TRICK


The Trick

There’s these two kids, boys, sitting close together, squished in by the big arms of an old chair. You’re the one on the left.

The other boy’s warm to lean close to, and he moves his gaze from the telly to you sort of in slow motion.

“You enjoying it?” he asks.You nod. He puts his arm round you and turns back to

the screen.Afterward you both want to try the thing in the film.

You sneak the big box of matches from the kitchen drawer and run with them to the woods.

You go first. You light the match and hold it between your thumb and forefinger, letting it burn right down until it goes out. Your fingers are burnt, but they hold the black-ened match.

The trick works.The other boy tries it too. Only he doesn’t do it. He

drops the match.

Then you wake up and remember where you are.


The Cage

The trick is to not mind. Not mind about it hurting, not mind about anything.

The trick of not minding is key; it’s the only trick in town. Only this is not a town; it’s a cage beside a cottage, surrounded by a load of hills and trees and sky.

It’s a one-trick cage.


Push-ups

The routine is okay.Waking up to sky and air is okay. Waking up to the

cage and the shackles is what it is. You can’t let the cage get to you. The shackles rub but healing is quick and easy, so what’s to mind?

The cage is loads better now that the sheepskins are in. Even when they’re damp they’re warm. The tarpaulin over the north end was a big improvement too. There’s shelter from the worst of the wind and rain. And a bit of shade if it’s hot and sunny. Joke! You’ve got to keep your sense of humor.

So the routine is to wake up as the sky lightens before dawn. You don’t have to move a muscle, don’t even have to open your eyes to know it’s getting light; you can just lie there and take it all in.

The best bit of the day.There aren’t many birds around, a few, not many. It

would be good to know all their names, but you know their different calls. There are no seagulls, which is something to think about, and there are no vapor trails either. The wind is usually quiet in the predawn calm, and somehow the air feels warmer already as it begins to get light.


6 h Sa l ly Green

You can open your eyes now and there are a few minutes to savor the sunrise, which today is a thin pink line stretch-ing along the top of a narrow ribbon of cloud draped over the smudged green hills. And you’ve still got a minute, maybe even two, to get your head together before she appears.

You’ve got to have a plan, though, and the best idea is to have it all worked out the night before so you can slip straight into it without a thought. Mostly the plan is to do what you’re told, but not every day, and not today.

You wait until she appears and throws you the keys. You catch the keys, unlock your ankles, rub them to emphasize the pain she is inflicting, unlock your left manacle, unlock your right, stand, unlock the cage door, toss the keys back to her, open the cage door, step out—keeping your head down, never look her in the eyes (unless that’s part of some other plan)—rub your back and maybe groan a bit, walk to the vegetable bed, piss.

Sometimes she tries to mess with your head, of course, by changing the routine. Sometimes she wants chores be-fore exercises but most days it’s push-ups first. You’ll know which while still zipping up.

“Fifty.”She says it quietly. She knows you’re listening.You take your time as usual. That’s always part of the

plan.Make her wait.Rub your right arm. The metal wristband cuts into it

when the shackle is on. You heal it and get a faint buzz.


HALF BAD g 7

You roll your head, your shoulders, your head again and then stand there, just stand there for another second or two, pushing her to her limit, before you drop to the ground.

one Not mindingtwo is the trick.three The onlyfour trick.five But there aresix loads ofseven tactics.eight Loads.nine On the look-outten all the time.eleven All the time.twelve And it’sthirteen easy.fourteen ’Cause there ain’tfifteen nothing elsesixteen to do.seventeen Look out for what?eighteen Something.nineteen Anything.twenty Ntwenty-one Etwenty-two thing.twenty-three A mistake.twenty-four A chance.


8 h Sa l ly Green

twenty-five An oversight.twenty-six Thetwenty-seven tiniesttwenty-eight errortwenty-nine by thethirty Whitethirty-one Witchthirty-two fromthirty-three Hell.thirty-four ’Cause she makesthirty-five mistakes.thirty-six Oh yes.thirty-seven And if that mistakethirty-eight comes tothirty-nine nothingforty you waitforty-one for the next oneforty-two and the next oneforty-three and the next one.forty-four Untilforty-five youforty-six succeed.forty-seven Untilforty-eight you’reforty-nine free.

You get up. She will have been counting, but never let-ting up is another tactic.


HALF BAD g 9

She doesn’t say anything but steps toward you and back-hands you across the face.

fifty “Fifty.”

After push-ups it’s just standing and waiting. Best look at the ground. You’re by the cage on the path. The path’s muddy, but you won’t be sweeping it, not today, not with this plan. It’s rained a lot in the last few days. Autumn’s coming on fast. Still, today it’s not raining; already it’s go-ing well.

“Do the outer circuit.” Again she’s quiet. No need to raise her voice.

And off you jog . . . but not yet. You’ve got to keep her thinking you’re being your usual difficult-yet-basically- compliant self and so you knock mud off your boots, left boot-heel on right toe followed by right boot-heel on left toe. You raise a hand and look up and around as if you’re assessing the wind direction, spit on the potato plants, look left and right like you’re waiting for a gap in the traffic and . . . let the bus go past . . . and then you’re off.

You take the drystone wall with a leap to the top and over, then across the moorland, heading to the trees.

Freedom.As if!But you’ve got the plan, and you’ve learned a lot in four

months. The fastest that you’ve done the outer circuit for her is forty-five minutes. You can do it in less than that,


10 h Sa l ly Green

forty maybe, ’cause you stop by the stream at the far end and rest and drink and listen and look, and one time you managed to get to the ridge and see over to more hills, more trees and a loch (it might be a lake but something about the heather and the length of summer days says you’re in Scotland).

Today the plan is to speed up when you’re out of sight. That’s easy. Easy. The diet you’re on is great. You have to give her some credit, ’cause you are super healthy, super fit. Meat, veg, more meat, more veg, and don’t forget plenty of fresh air. Oh this is the life.

You’re doing okay. Keeping up a good pace. Your top pace.

And you’re buzzing, self-healing from her little slap; it’s giving you a little buzz, buzz, buzz.

You’re already at the far end, where you could cut back to do the inner circuit which is really half the outer circuit. But she didn’t want the inner circuit and you were going to do the outer whatever she said.

That’s got to be the fastest yet.Then up to the ridge.And let gravity take you down in long strides to the

stream that leads to the loch.Now it gets tricky. Now you are just outside the area of

the circuit and soon you will be well outside it. She won’t know that you’ve gone until you’re late. That gives you twenty-five minutes from leaving the circuit—maybe thir-


HALF BAD g 11

ty, maybe thirty-five, but call it twenty-five before she’s after you.

But she’s not the problem; the wristband is the prob-lem. It will break open when you go too far. How it works, witchcraft or science or both, you don’t know, but it will break open. She told you that on Day One and she told you the wristband contains a liquid, an acid. The liquid will be released if you stray too far and this liquid will burn right through your wrist.

“It’ll take your hand off,” was how she put it.Going downhill now. There’s a click . . . and the burn-

ing starts.But you’ve got the plan.You stop and submerge your wrist in the stream. The

stream hisses. The water helps, although it’s a strange sort of gloopy, sticky potion and won’t wash away easily. And more will come out. And you have to keep going.

You pad the band out with wet moss and peat. Dunk it under again. Stuff more padding in. It’s taking too long. Get going.

Downhill.Follow the stream.The trick is not to mind about your wrist. Your legs feel

fine. Covering lots of ground.And anyway losing a hand isn’t that bad. You can re-

place it with something good . . . a hook . . . or a three-pronged claw like the guy in Enter the Dragon . . . or maybe


12 h Sa l ly Green

something with blades that can be retracted, but, when you fight, out they come, ker-ching . . . or flames even . . . no way are you going to have a fake hand, that’s for sure . . . no way.

Your head’s dizzy. Buzzing too, though. Your body is trying to heal your wrist. You never know, you might get out of this with two hands. Still, the trick is not to mind. Either way, you’re out.

Got to stop. Douse it in the stream again, put some new peat in and get going.

Nearly at the loch.Nearly.Oh yes. Bloody cold.You’re too slow. Wading is slow but it’s good to keep

your arm in the water.Just keep going.Keep going.It’s a bloody big loch. But that’s okay. The bigger the

better. Means your hand will be in water longer.Feeling sick . . . ughhh . . .Shit, that hand looks a mess. But the acid has stopped

coming out of the wristband. You’re going to get out. You’ve beaten her. You can find Mercury. You will get three gifts.

But you’ve got to keep going.You’ll be at the end of the loch in a minute.Doing well. Doing well.Not far now.Soon be able to see over into the valley, and—


Ironing

“You nearly lost your hand.”It’s lying on the kitchen table still attached to your arm

by bone, muscle, and sinew that are visible in the open, raw groove round your wrist. The skin that used to be there has formed lava-like rivulets, running down to your fingers as if it has melted and set again. Your whole hand is puffing up nicely and hurts like . . . well, like an acid burn. Your fingers twitch, but your thumb is not working.

“It might heal so that you can use your fingers again. Or it might not.”

She took the band off your wrist at the loch and sprayed the wound with a lotion that dulled the pain.

She was prepared. She’s always prepared.And how did she get there so quickly? Did she run? Fly

on a bloody broomstick?However she got to the loch, you still had to walk back

with her. That was a tough walk.“Why don’t you speak to me?”She’s right in your face.“I’m here to teach you, Nathan. But you must stop try-

ing to escape.”


14 h Sa l ly Green

She’s so ugly that you’ve got to turn away.There’s an ironing board set up on the other side of the

kitchen table.She was ironing? Ironing her combat trousers?“Nathan. Look at me.”You keep your eyes on the iron.“I want to help you, Nathan.”You hawk up a huge gob, turn, and spit. She’s quick,

though, and snatches back so it lands on her shirt not on her face.

She doesn’t hit you. Which is new.“You need to eat. I’ll heat up some stew.”That’s new too. Usually you have to cook and clean and

sweep.But you’ve never had to iron.She goes to the pantry. There’s no fridge. No electric-

ity. There’s a wood-burning range. Setting the fire up and cleaning it out are also your chores.

While she’s in the pantry you go to look at the iron. Your legs are weak, unsteady, but your head’s clear. Clear enough. A sip of water might help but you want to look at the iron. It’s just a piece of metal, iron-shaped, with a metal handle, old. It’s heavy and cold. It must be heated up on the range to do its job. Must take ages. She’s miles from anywhere and anything, and she irons her trousers and shirts!

When she comes back a few seconds later you’re round


HALF BAD g 15

by the pantry door and you bring the iron down hard, pointed side against her head.

But she’s so bloody tall and so bloody fast. The iron catches the side of her scalp and sinks into her shoulder.

You’re on the floor clutching your ears, looking at her boots before you pass out.


The Trick Doesn’t Work

She’s talking but you can’t make sense of it.You’re back sitting at the kitchen table, sweating and

shuddering a bit, and blood from your left ear is running down your neck. That ear won’t heal. You can’t hear at all on that side. And your nose is a mess. You must have landed on it when you fell. It’s broken, blocked up, and bloodied, and it won’t heal either.

Your hand is resting on the table and it’s so swollen now that the fingers can’t move at all.

She’s sitting on the chair next to you and is spraying your wrist with the lotion again. It’s cooling. Numbing.

And it would be so good to be numb like that all over, numb to it all. But that won’t happen. What will happen is that she’ll lock you back up in the cage, chain you up, and it’ll go on and on and on . . .

And so the trick doesn’t work. It doesn’t work, and you do mind; you mind about it all. You don’t want to be back in that cage, and you don’t want the trick anymore. You don’t want any of it anymore.

The cut on her scalp is healed, but there’s the wide ridge of a black-red scab underneath her blonde hair and there’s


HALF BAD g 17

blood on her shoulder. She’s still talking about something, her fat slobbering lips working away.

You look around the room. The kitchen sink, the win-dow that overlooks the vegetable garden and the cage, the range, the ironing board, the door to the pantry, and back to the ugly woman with nicely pressed trousers. And clean boots. And in her boot is her little knife. She sometimes keeps it there. You saw it when you were on the floor.

You’re dizzy so it’s easy to swoon, sinking to your knees. She grabs you by your armpits but your left hand isn’t injured and it finds the handle and slides the knife out of her boot while she grapples with your dead weight, and as you let your body sink farther you bring the blade to your jugular. Fast and hard.

But she’s so bloody quick, and you kick and fight and fight and kick but she gets the knife off you and you’ve no kick and no fight left at all.

Back in the cage. Shackled. Kept waking up last night . . . sweating . . . ear still doesn’t work . . . you’re breathing through your mouth ’cause your nose is blocked. She’s even chained your bad wrist, and your whole arm is so swollen that the shackle is tight.

It’s late morning, but she still hasn’t come for you. She’s doing something in the cottage. Tapping. Smoke’s coming out of the chimney.

It’s warm today, a breeze from the southwest, clouds


18 h Sa l ly Green

moving silently across the sky so the sun is managing a se-ries of appearances, touching your cheek and casting shad-ows from the bars across your legs. But you’ve seen it all before, so you close your eyes and remember stuff. It’s okay to do that sometimes.


geeky con sampler

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infinite sea of brown

infinite sea rick yancey

n c e yg

copyright laws

undulating sea

t e s e athe

copyright fuels creativity