Chapters (53)
- Front Cover
- Letter from the Author
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- • One •
- • Two •
- • Three •
- • Four •
- • Five •
- • Six •
- • Seven •
- • Eight •
- • Nine •
- • Ten •
- • Eleven •
- • Twelve •
- • Thirteen •
- • Fourteen •
- • Fifteen •
- • Sixteen •
- • Seventeen •
- • Eighteen •
- • Nineteen •
- • Twenty •
- • Twenty-One •
- • Twenty-Two •
- • Twenty-Three •
- • Twenty-Four •
- • Twenty-Five •
- • Twenty-Six •
- • Twenty-Seven •
- • Twenty-Eight •
- • Twenty-Nine •
- • Thirty •
- • Thirty-One •
- • Thirty-Two •
- • Thirty-Three •
- • Thirty-Four •
- • Thirty-Five •
- • Thirty-Six •
- • Thirty-Seven •
- • Thirty-Eight •
- • ∞ •
- • Thirty-Nine •
- • Forty •
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- Excerpt from Be Dazzled
- One
- Two
- About the Author
- Back Cover
Something in Kane bristled. Something under his thoughts, not a memory, but the shell of it, like the brittle husk left behind by a cicada. He tiptoed down the stairs. Whatever the memory was, he held it in his head with a gentle grasp as though it were his only precious thing. To his surprise, it guided him through the basement tunnels, to the boiler room doors, without making one wrong turn.
The doors were ajar. The hot sigh of machinery breathed out, smelling of grease and dust, and he remembered all the legends about the monsters living in the dark guts of Amity Regional High. Flesh eating. Freshman hazing. Could they be real?
There wasn’t time to wonder. He wanted his photo back.
It was easy to sneak into the noisy, dark room. Through the whirring he made out a voice, then two voices, and soon he was able to make out a whole conversation from where he hid among the pipes.
Except it wasn’t a conversation. It was a debate.
“How can you be sure?” asked Elliot.
“Because I just am, okay?”
Kane clapped his hands over his mouth. That was Ursula!
“That photo is proof he’s still in there,” she said.
“The only thing this photo proves is that we didn’t do a good job purging his room.”
Kane’s whole body went cold, then numb. They were talking about him. They were talking about his room. They had been inside his house.
“If anything,” Elliot was saying, “it shows he’s trying to figure things out himself using hints, which somebody is clearly leaving for him, Ursula. What did you tell him on the path? You wanted him to find those photos, didn’t you?”
“Is that an accusation?” The level of drama in her voice told Kane, and probably Elliot, that she was definitely guilty.
“Chill out, you two,” said a new voice. An icy soprano Kane didn’t know. “Even if we missed a few photos by mistake—right, Urs?—Kane has no real idea who we are or what we do. I spent all of bio watching him write in that journal, and he didn’t even look at me until the end. He’s not going to remember anything on his own. He can’t.”
“She’s right,” said Elliot. “Adeline knows better than anyone about this sort of thing. We’ll have to go on without him.”