HarperVoyager
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A Paperback Original 2016
Copyright © Lauren DeStefano 2016
Cover design Alexandra Allden © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover photographs © Mark Owen/Arcangel Images (girl in scene); Shutterstock.com (birds).
Lauren DeStefano asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007541287
Ebook Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 9780007541270
Version: 2016-02-19
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
—T. S. Eliot
Contents
“The city is falling out of the sky,” Professor Leander said. They were his last words. The medicine of the ground was not enough to cure an old man of the sun disease. He refused most of the efforts anyway. He told me that he’d already accomplished what no one else had been able to do. He’d gotten us to the ground. He was quite curious, he said, to know if his spirit would be taken to the tributary, or if he’d go to whatever afterlife the ground believed in, or if there was nothing at all.
Amy was with him when he died, and she called it a peaceful death. A fitting death.
Down a labyrinthine set of hallways in the same hospital, Gertrude Piper opened her eyes after a month of sleep. It was as though the two gods had made an even trade—the life of a man from the sky in exchange for the life of a girl on the ground.
Before that, we all thought that Birdie Piper would die. After I landed in Havalais at the dawn of winter, she was the most vibrant thing in her strange world. She offered her friendship to Pen and me without question; she snuck us through our bedroom window and showed us the wonders of Havalais. The mermaids in the sea. The glittering lights cast upon the water at night. The spinning metal rides in her family’s amusement