Uncanny Read online

  Table of Contents

  Start Reading

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE FOR SARAH FINE

  “As a modern-day ‘Orpheus and Eurydice,’ Sanctum will be a hit with urban fantasy readers, who will love its top-notch world-building, page-turning action, and slow-developing romance.”

  —School Library Journal

  “In this well-developed concept of the afterlife, details are well-executed and the setting is described flawlessly. Without a doubt, readers will look forward to the next installment of the Guards of the Shadowlands series.”

  —Library Media Connection on Sanctum

  “This is one of my favorite books of this year! Smart and sexy.”

  —Reading Teen blog on Sanctum

  “Theology be damned, though: Lela and Malachi are both likable protagonists, and readers will be happy . . . this trilogy opener has a lot going for it.”

  —Kirkus Reviews on Sanctum

  “Fans of Rae Carson’s books and Victoria Aveyard’s Red Queen will find much to love in Fine’s engrossing novel.”

  —VOYA on The Impostor Queen

  “Sarah Fine presents a fresh and fascinating magical world with its own rules and rituals, riveting action and relationships (and a sequel-worthy ending), featuring a protagonist who grows in wisdom, compassion, and self-awareness.”

  —School Library Journal on The Impostor Queen

  ALSO BY SARAH FINE

  Young Adult Fiction

  Guards of the Shadowlands Series

  Sanctum

  Fractured

  Chaos

  Captive: A Guard’s Tale from Malachi’s Perspective

  Vigilante: A Guard’s Tale from Ana’s Perspective

  Stories from the Shadowlands

  Of Metal and Wishes Series

  Of Metal and Wishes

  Of Dreams and Rust

  Of Shadows and Obsession: A Short Story Prequel to Of Metal and Wishes

  The Impostor Queen Series

  The Impostor Queen

  The Cursed Queen

  Other Series

  Scan (with Walter Jury)

  Burn (with Walter Jury)

  Beneath the Shine

  Adult Fiction

  The Reliquary Series

  Reliquary

  Splinter

  Mosaic

  Mayhem and Magic (Graphic Novel)

  Servants of Fate Series

  Marked

  Claimed

  Fated

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Sarah Fine

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Skyscape, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Skyscape are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542046466

  ISBN-10: 1542046467

  Cover design by Damonza

  For Lam, in celebration of our tenth book together. This has been a marvelous journey, and I for one hope we’re nowhere near the end of it.

  CONTENTS

  Start Reading

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  I did not anticipate the wind. On the sidewalk, it makes jackets flap and leaves rustle. Seven stories up, it threatens to throw me right over the edge.

  Is that what I want?

  I’m not good at knowing what I want—that’s what she said to me, and it turns out she was right. This will be my last decision, and it could be my worst or my best, but I don’t know if it will be something I want.

  But wanting isn’t relevant now.

  My shoes scrape over cement as I stand on the roof’s ledge. I am battered. Faltering. My arms are out, my fingers splayed. I turn around and face the school’s security cannies, who have formed a semicircle around me on the roof and are slowly approaching. Outdated, outmoded, plastic skin, expressionless. They are here to stop me or at least detain me until emergency services reach us, but like me, they are not immune to gravity. If I go over, they can’t save me.

  They’re programmed to save me. They won’t feel a thing if they fail, though. They can’t. That’s the difference between us.

  Looking at their blank eyes fills me with a sense of the inevitable.

  I can’t remember not existing, whatever happened before I became me. I don’t think it hurt, not like this. Perhaps I’m wrong, though. Maybe I’ve been here before.

  I crane my neck to see past the machinemen, searching for the one face I need, one I know I’ve already seen for the last time. She isn’t here. Of course she isn’t. She can’t be.

  I want to see her one last time. After everything I did, she wouldn’t look at me with anything other than sorrow or maybe hate or pity. But still, I want to see her.

  There. That’s one thing I know I want.

  Even if it were relevant, it still wouldn’t matter.

  I inch back a little. It would be easier for the wind to take me. I’d prefer that to doing this myself. But the cannies keep getting closer, and now the wind is still. Unhelpful.

  “This is my choice,” I say loudly. “I’m doing this of my own free will.”

  Is this what she wanted? I think this might be what she wanted.

&n
bsp; It’s all tangled up in her, and she’s not here. I’ll never see her again. I’ll never see her again, and it’s because of the choices I made.

  Free will.

  Want.

  I close my eyes. It’s time.

  Chapter One

  I wish I were small. Just one of those girls with bird bones who can ball up, knees under chin, heels to butt, tiny-tiny.

  But I am huge. I seem to have my own gravitational pull. I am a black hole, expanding by the minute, and no gaze can escape me. My head might as well be brushing the white ceiling, leaving a little grease stain there. I’m contained between the armrests of this chair, but I could swear my elbows are brushing the walls on either side. My belly is swelling, and soon it’ll overflow onto Principal Selridge’s desk and ooze toward where she stands on the other side, clutching her biceps as if she’s afraid they’re going to peel away from her bones.

  I turn my head and look out the window. We’re two stories up. If I had jumped, my body would have sailed past that auto-cleaning windowpane in a fraction of a second, a blink of an eye. Easy to miss. But now I have everyone’s eyes. They can’t look around me or past me. Black. Hole.

  Selridge steps in front of the window, blocking my view of the park across the street. She motions one of the cannies over to take her place and guard the spot. He’s got a wide, blank face, fair skin, black hair—impossible to mistake for human. He’s the one who unlocked the doors as the others lugged me off the roof, down the stairs, up the hall, past the banner welcoming the incoming freshmen, the Clinton Academy Class of 2073. First day of school, halfway through homeroom discussion period, and I gave everyone something to talk about.

  Lara and Mei were cutting class, laying flowers in front of Hannah’s locker as I was carried past. They watched me go by with stone faces. I’m guessing Finn told them about the message he sent me this morning. I hope he doesn’t blame himself. I didn’t really think about that, up on the roof. I should have.

  The rest of my classmates gathered in the doorways of their homerooms and stared. They were probably using their Cerepins to stream what they were seeing to their channels. A hundred simultaneous vids of Cora Dietrich on the Mainstream, screaming, screaming, screaming.

  If you were to listen to all of them at once, it wouldn’t come close to the noise inside my head.

  “You’re going to be okay, Cora,” Selridge says, now back behind her desk. “Your parents will be here soon. If you turn your Cerepin back on, you could talk to them—they made sure to tell me they’re eager to hear from you.”

  She taps her own Cerepin, a small black nodule on her right temple. Hers is an older model, and unlike the newer ones, it signals when it’s capturing. The red light is blinking. She’s probably streaming a feed of me straight to Mom and Gary. They can see what she sees, thanks to her implanted lenses. They might even be talking to her now through the sensor in her ear, words I can’t hear and don’t want to. My mother might even have been the one who told Selridge to guard the window.

  Mom was definitely the one who alerted the school. I don’t know if it was because Finn carried through on his threat to send her the vid he sent me this morning or because she got scared when I turned my Cerepin off.

  Considering what happened last time, I don’t blame her at all.

  My hands cover my eyes and my shoulders jerk up around my head. I can’t think about it, not now, please not now, but my brain is already feeding me memories of a sharp, sickly sweet scent and my cold, wet feet sliding along a marble floor. I bend at the waist and start to rock. I know the keening sound is awful, at once hoarse and high and grating, but I can’t stop it. I can’t stop.

  “Cora . . .”

  That’s all Selridge can think of to say.

  Firm hands grasp my shoulders. I try to wrench away, but the canny is too strong. He holds me still. He doesn’t understand that I need this. How could he?

  He lets me go when my keening escalates into a full-fledged scream. I keep my fists pressed into my eyes. Outside, I hear the shuffle of feet, the sound of voices. Homeroom discussion is over. I should be going to my individual learning session with Aristotle. Neda will wonder where I am.

  Wait. She’ll know. Everyone knows.

  My hands fall to my lap like birds hit by skycars. Dead on impact. My vision blurs as I stare across the room, making Selridge one with the wall behind her. She shudders when she sees the look on my face.

  My breakfast comes up in a single sudden heave. All over Selridge’s desk screen, stomach acid and bits of protein bar, sour and burning on my tongue. I spit on the floor as my principal gags. “Sorry,” I whisper.

  I cover my mouth and breathe, but the smell is a hand around my throat, once again dragging me back to the night it happened. It is fingernails clawing at a closed door, trying to rip through. Everything in me locks up.

  Wet feet sliding on a marble floor.

  This time, it’s just acid and spit, splashing onto the hardwood and the synthetic leather of my boots.

  My heartbeat swishes in my ears. The canny offers me a cloth to wipe my mouth, and when I don’t take it, he does it for me. Selridge’s lips move. What is she saying?

  “Cora!” It’s Mom. She squats next to me, right in the puke at our feet. When she wraps her arms around me, I feel her shaking. “It’s going to be all right. We’re taking you home.”

  Okay, this is good. I was afraid they were going to take me straight back to the hospital.

  “We should take her back to the hospital,” says Gary from behind me. “We talked about this.”

  “She really should be evaluated,” Selridge says. “If she can’t promise she won’t try something—”

  “I know, but we can monitor her,” Mom says, turning to my adoptive father. “I won’t leave her side if that’s what it takes.”

  “You shouldn’t take more time off,” Gary mutters.

  “I really can’t allow her to return to school until she’s been cleared by a doctor,” says Selridge, her voice louder now. “The suicide attempt was made on academy grounds. This is very serious.”

  “That’s fair, Maeve,” Gary says to my mom.

  “No,” I whisper. I’m not a black hole anymore. Now I’m invisible.

  “We’ll decide in the car,” Gary says a moment later. Mom probably just gave him the death glare, and he doesn’t want to get into it in front of Selridge. “CC, can you walk?”

  I’ve asked him a million times not to call me that, but it’s a habit he can’t seem to break. He doesn’t realize that every time he says it, he makes things harder for me, and I’m scared to explain—scared to hurt him more than I already have. His hands on my shoulders are softer than the canny’s. Gentle, like he’s asking permission. I don’t fight him as he pulls me up and guides me away from the stinking mess I made. I turn and press my face into his sweater, trying to escape the smell, and he lets me. Puts his hand over the back of my head and stiffly holds me there, shushing me as I tremble.

  “Please send me a quick message to let me know how she’s doing,” Selridge says. “We’re all very concerned.”

  As Gary lets me go, Selridge ducks her head a little, trying to make eye contact with me, but I’m not letting it happen. If we lock gazes, I’ll see just how bad it is, and I don’t want to know.

  I had planned to never know.

  “Cora, it really will be okay,” Selridge says. “We all miss Hannah, but nobody blames you for what happened.”

  I wish the wind had blown just a little harder up there on the roof. Just one good gust.

  Mom puts her arm around my waist, maneuvering me between her and Gary as they lead me out of Selridge’s office. “I thought we agreed,” Gary says under his breath.

  “She’ll be better at home,” Mom says. “Besides, if she went to the hospital again, she’d just come back to the same house. The same us. The same memories.”

  He nods. “You’re probably right. Besides—the investigation isn’t complete. The
y’ll need to talk to Cora at some point.”

  Mom’s grip on my waist tightens. “Not now, Gary!”

  We walk past empty classrooms and occupied learning auditoriums with closed doors. Inside one of those auditoriums, Neda is facing off with Aristotle in the way only she can, probably mad as hell at me, maybe scared I’ll tell someone about her part in all of this. When I turn my Cerepin back on, there’ll probably be fifty messages from her.

  When I turn on my Cerepin . . . if I do. I’m scared to see Finn’s message again, to find out how many times I was tagged in vids by people who believe the worst of me. Not wanting to risk more stares, I examine the floor as we walk down the hall, past the mute cannies standing dormant, waiting for another student to rescue or protect. They have no feelings, but if they did, disgust would be at the top, I’m sure. Some of them nearly fell as they pulled me from the ledge.

  Do they fear death?

  Do I?

  We make it outside. The wind gusts an hour too late, ruffling my short hair, blowing dust into my eyes. A company car is waiting. Gary must have been on his way to the Parnassus complex when he probably got a frantic call from Mom, and here they are. I’m making him look bad.

  Hurting him again, after everything he’s done for us. God. I don’t know why they’re being nice. I wish they had just let me go.

  Leika’s door slides open as we reach the curb. I dive into her, grateful to be hidden, and Mom and Gary climb in after me. “Where to, sir?” Leika asks, all sleek metal and compliance. I wish I had her voice, her calm.

  I glance over at Mom and Gary. They’re looking at each other. A long look full of shared hours, a shared heart. Mom blinks. Gary’s eyes shift to meet mine. “You’re in a lot of trouble,” he says.

  “I know,” I mumble.

  “We’ve always been patient with you, CC, but this—”

  “Gary,” Mom murmurs.

  He sighs. Closes his eyes. His nostrils flare. “All right. Let’s get real here.”

  This is his CEO voice. I imagine it echoing in a boardroom. Hannah had this kind of presence, too. You had no choice but to listen to her.

  Had.

  Oh, god. I clench my teeth as my stomach turns.

  “Cora,” Mom says. “Gary has a point. What you did this morning—that was . . .”