Burning Kingdoms. Lauren DeStefano
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Copyright
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015
Copyright © Lauren DeStefano 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photographs © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images (falling girl); Shutterstock.com (ferris wheel, landscape).
Lauren DeStefano asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of 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.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007541232
Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780007541249
Version: 2014-12-29
Dedication
For
Mina
Baptista.
Here’s to
the next
twenty-seven
birthdays.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
Carl Sagan
Contents
1
When the world was formed, the people soon followed. It has been a balancing act of life and death from that day on. It is not the place of any man to question it.
—The Text of All Things, Chapter 1
Snow. That’s the word the people of the ground have for this wonder.
“Goddamn snow,” our driver mumbles for the second time, as mechanical arms sweep the dusting from the window.
It’s like a stab to the heart hearing a god referred to so unkindly. I wonder which god he means. I’d think the god of the ground would be less forgiving than the one in the sky. Vengeful. It would make sense, the god of the ground having interned us to the sky for being too selfish.
But I don’t ask. I haven’t spoken a word since I told Pen that it would be all right.
All the whiteness is blinding, and despite the blustery cold, the inside of this vehicle is so hot that beads of sweat are forming at the back of my neck. There’s a metallic taste to this air.
I have a thought that my parents will be worried, before I remember that they’re gone. Not at home. They’re colors in the tributary now, a place that can’t be seen by the living.
I