Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1: Proof of Life

Chapter 2: Losing the Finder

Chapter 3: Prison

Chapter 4: The Plan

Chapter 5: Chi Boy’s Coming-to Story

Chapter 6: Catalog and Crucify

Chapter 7: Miles to Go

Chapter 8: A Girl and A Gun

Chapter 9: Bedridden

Chapter 10: Mitch’s Going-Away Story

Chapter 11: A Slim Light in a Dark World

Chapter 12: The Death Tree

Chapter 13: Programming

Chapter 14: News

Chapter 15: Tree and Zheegwon’s Coming-to Story

Chapter 16: A House in the Woods

Chapter 17: Phase Two

Chapter 18: Vampires in the Woods

Chapter 19: Moccassin Telegraph

Chapter 20: Moving On

Chapter 21: A Little Bird Brings Death

Chapter 22: A Cage Opens

Chapter 23: The Lights Come On

Chapter 24: Rules of the Game

Chapter 25: The Final Test

Chapter 26: Reunion

Chapter 27: Reunion, Part Two

Chapter 28: A Road, A School, and an Ambush

Chapter 29: In The Pines

Chapter 30: The Way Home

Chapter 31: Traveling Song

Chapter 32: Mothers, Dearest

Chapter 33: Welcome to the Leisure Dome

Chapter 34: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Chapter 35: Bloom

Chapter 36: What’s Yours

Chapter 37: Herd

Chapter 38: How Rose Arrived–a Different Coming-to Story

Chapter 39: Subtract and Add

Chapter 40: Begin Again

Epilogue/Prologue: The Girl Who Would be Loud

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

CHAPTER 1:

PROOF OF LIFE

French

I DREAMED ABOUT MY BROTHER.

In the dream, we were still kids—the same age we were the last time I saw him, gangly and uncoordinated. We were sitting on the wooden floor of a tree house, the walls buckled and thin, the same tree house he was stolen from all those years ago. I tried to speak, to warn him that the Recruiters would be coming and he was going to be taken and I would be left in a tree like a forgotten ornament. But I couldn’t make a sound, just empty speech bubbles like an unfinished comic that popped around my head. Mitch was laughing as if I was telling the best jokes.

“Frenchie, you’re hilarious,” he said, his words swooshing through the air, shaped like paper planes folded out of weekly flyers.

Set between us on the floor was a small green figure of a plastic army man, one knee bent, a crooked rifle held at shoulder height. The swoop of the word hilarious tumbled to the ground and knocked the man over. That small violence of plastic on plank sounded like lightening bursting an oak to wood chips.

Outside, the world was sped up, the sun and the moon exchanging seats like a game of musical chairs set to fiddles. I saw us in the tree house, and then the tree house in a field, and then the field in the middle of a forest, and then the towns and highways beyond, haphazard like a snapped string of beads over green fabric. Water slid down mountains clotted with pines, and soil rushing after like black vomit. Hail the size of dinner plates bounced over cracked pavement and smashed into buildings. People blipped onto the land like faults in film and then disappeared just as fast, leaving shadows and holes. Lakes, poisoned useless, glinted like coins in the sunlight, then moonlight, then sunlight again. Icebergs melted, and everything warped as if the ice had been the solid frame of it all. Trash in the oceans was beached in tall waves, leaving deserts of water bottles and decorating the trees with the confetti of faded wrappers and pull tabs. Disgorged grocery bags spun down wrecked roads like the crinkly ghosts of tumbleweeds. This was the world now. And that wasn’t even the worst part.