First published in Great Britain 2015
by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited
The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN
Published with arrangement with HarperTeen,
a division of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1350 Avenue of the Americas,
New York, New York 10019, USA
Text copyright © 2015 Michael Grant
Illustrations copyright © Joe McLaren
First e-book edition 2015
ISBN 978 1 4052 6518 8
Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1260 6
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Parts of this book are inspired by Aitzaz Hassan Bangash, who died saving his school from a suicide bomber. I’ve changed names, locations, and details to serve my story.
For Katherine, Jake, and Julia.
Contents
From childhood I suffered from occasional nightmares featuring the most vivid monsters and the most intense of emotions. A constant theme was helplessness. I was often paralyzed in my dreams. Or, if I could move, it was in slow motion while everything and everyone around me moved at normal speed. I would often wake myself by screaming. Deliberately, you see. In the throes of the horror I would tell myself to scream, to scream until I was awake.
When my father died, my dreams changed and became bittersweet. I had one terrible dream in which I saw him dead. After that he was never dead, just far away. I never saw him in his casket, nor did my unconscious mind conjure the moment when an enemy’s bullet took his life. He was always alive and his eyes shone not with fear but with regret and love. I would savor those dreams and seek to prolong them. And when at last, reluctant, I woke, I would find my pillow wet.
I think maybe dreams provide a type of balance. When life is good, dreams remind you that fear still lives out there in the world. When life is bad, dreams offer hope.
I am Mara. I am sixteen years old. And my dreams now are most often of my home, my school, my friends, past pets, objects I hold dear, and my mother and my ever-absent, ever-present father. They are dreams of loss and alienation, but not nightmares.
Life is my nightmare now, and paradoxically, my dreams have become escapes.
So, in the seconds before my eyes fluttered open, I was at my friend Suzee’s pool party for her thirteenth birthday. The sun was shining, but not hot—it seldom gets really hot in Marin County, California. The pool in the dream was overflowing, lapping around the legs of my chaise longue. My flip-flops were floating away. But in compensation the water was carrying a bag of blue corn tortilla chips toward me and in the dream I thought, Well, that’s a fair trade. I waited patiently