d0b213-b449-57be-b6d9-7f566ee44daa">
First published in USA 2019 by HarperCollins Children’s Books
First published in Great Britain 2019
by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited
The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN
Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, New York, USA
Text copyright © 2019 Tahereh Mafi
First e-book edition 2019
ISBN 978 1 4052 9179 8
Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1854 7
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Stay safe online. Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont is not responsible for content hosted by third parties. Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet.
Egmont takes its responsibility to the planet and its inhabitants very seriously. We aim to use papers from well-managed forests run by responsible suppliers
CONTENTS
KENJI
WARNER
KENJI
JULIETTE
KENJI
WARNER
KENJI
JULIETTE ELLA
KENJI
WARNER
JULIETTE ELLA
WARNER
JULIETTE ELLA
WARNER
JULIETTE ELLA
WARNER
JULIETTE ELLA
WARNER
JULIETTE ELLA
WARNER
JULIETTE ELLA
WARNER
JULIETTE ELLA
WARNER
JULIETTE ELLA
She’s screaming.
She’s just screaming words, I think. They’re just words. But she’s screaming, screaming at the top of her lungs, with an agony that seems almost an exaggeration, and it’s causing devastation I never knew possible. It’s like she just—imploded.
It doesn’t seem real.
I mean, I knew Juliette was strong—and I knew we hadn’t discovered the depth of her powers—but I never imagined she’d be capable of this.
Of this:
The ceiling is splitting open. Seismic currents are thundering up the walls, across the floors, chattering my teeth. The ground is rumbling under my feet. People are frozen in place even as they shake, the room vibrating around them. The chandeliers swing too fast and the lights flicker ominously. And then, with one last vibration, three of the massive chandeliers rip free from the ceiling and shatter as they hit the floor.
Crystal flies everywhere. The room loses half its light, bathing the cavernous space in a freakish glow, and it’s suddenly hard to see what’s happening. I look at Juliette and see her staring, slack-jawed, frozen at the sight of the devastation, and I realize she must’ve stopped screaming a minute ago. She can’t stop this. She already put the energy into the world and now—
It has to go somewhere.
The shudders ripple with renewed fervor across the floorboards, ripping through walls and seats and people.
I don’t actually believe it until I see the blood. It seems fake, for a second, all the limp bodies in seats with their chests butterflied open. It seems staged—like a bad joke, like a bad theater production. But when I see the blood, thick and heavy, seeping through clothes and upholstery, dripping down frozen hands, I know we’ll never recover from this.
Juliette just
