Cover

She could hear Pharaoh being lowered, his basket not coming down quite so lightly as her own, for it seemed to smack the walls. She looked toward the shaft, but the feet of Pharaoh did not appear. A great slab was being lowered on ropes. Renifer's torchlight showed it to be no beautiful painted object. Just rock.

Annie could make no sense of it.

When the huge stone had settled onto the bottom, the person above let go of the ropes. They fell into a coil of their own. Were she and Renifer meant to do something with those ropes?

A second stone was lowered onto the ropes from the first stone. Together, the two stones sealed the shaft. There was no longer an opening. Nobody else could come down.

Nobody could go back up, either.

A terrible racket began. It took Annie several moments to realize that rocks were being dropped down the shaft. Rocks that hit and ricocheted and echoed. Filling the shaft. Filling it for eternity.

Annie and Renifer were being buried alive.

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LUCY THE GIANT, Sherri L. Smith

THE RAG AND BONE SHOP, Robert Cormier

WHEN ZACHARY BEAVER CAME TO TOWN Kimberly Willis Holt

FREEDOM BEYOND THE SEA, Waldtraut Lewin

LORD OF THE DEEP, Graham Salisbury

LORD OF THE NUTCRACKER MEN, Iain Lawrence

THE GADGET, Paul Zindel

SHATTERED MIRROR, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

SHADES OF SIMON GRAY, Joyce McDonald

Title Page

Dedication

For my granddaughter
Elizabeth Anne

I

Time to Fight

ANNIE: 1999

When her parents finally got married again and left for their honeymoon, nobody was happier than Annie Lockwood.

She now had four days—precisely ninety-six hours— in which she would be unsupervised. Annie had convinced her parents that while they were gone, she would be responsible, trustworthy and dependable.

None of this was true. Every single promise to her mother and father she had no intention of keeping.

She was alone at last. The wedding guests were gone and her parents en route to Florida. Her brother was on a bus with his team, headed to basketball camp. The house was utterly quiet. Annie stood in the center of her bedroom, unaware of the clutter around her, and gathered her courage.

Opening her top desk drawer, Annie removed a small envelope and shook it until a scrap of newspaper fell out. It landed between a mug of pencils and a stack of CDs.

EGYPTIAN ART IN THE AGE OF THE PYRAMIDS

September 16, 1999—January 9, 2000

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, New York

Annie despised museums. Whenever there was a class trip to a museum, she tried to be sick and stay home for the day. If this failed, she slouched in the teacher's wake, wishing she could get pushed around in a wheelchair, because nothing was more tiring than standing in front of a painting.