Sparks Rise Read Free Page A

heaven; bad kids need to be rehabilitated. Now I know that must be true; I know that someone, whether they’re up in paradise or down here in this little slice of hell, is trying to break me. I am being tested.
    The years between us have thinned out his round face, made good on the promise of inheriting his father’s chiseled features. Dark eyes sit below dark brows, thick dark hair. The rest of us are so drained of life after a sunless winter, we may as well blend into the snow, but he is lit from within. He is the best thing I have ever seen in my life. The worst thing.
    I can’t—I swallow the bile, try to shove away the last image my mind’s preserved of him. Ten years old, calling up the singsong password to get into our imaginary castle in Greenwood—that secret kingdom he invented in the thick cluster of trees behind our houses. His hair shines like a raven’s wing as he climbs up the rope to the tree platform his father had helped us build, takes his seat on the pillow we stole from one of their couches, and starts to read the story of the lost prince of Greenwood and a young knight—me—setting out to find him. He’d spent all day in school writing it; it made my chest tight to picture it, one arm wrapped around the notebook, protecting it from the cruel eyes of the boys sitting around us.
    If I could, I’d spend my days locked inside the fantasy of our stolen time there, but I’d never been able to disappear so completely into my imagination the way he could. It was stupid to be so hung up on it now. Even then, we should have been too old for play like that, or at least old and clever enough to name our magic land after something other than our neighborhood street. But it hadn’t mattered then, and it didn’t matter now, and what surprised me, more than almost anything, was how badly it hurt to realize by our own rules I would be denied access to Greenwood, anyway—the requirements were kindness and goodness in your heart, and I barely know what those words mean anymore. I think of them and I see him . So how did they do this—to the boy who’d struggled not to cry when we found the overturned nest of eggs in Greenwood? They didn’t even have a chance, he’d said.
    I want to cry, I want to cry so badly, but the helpless fury that’s been threatening to choke me for years has finally burnt through the last soft part of me. I want to give up.
    Even in another life—another world—where everything was good and sweetly normal, seven years would never have been enough time to forget the face that belonged to Lucas Orfeo.
    We won’t be fed again until dinner, but I couldn’t bring myself to eat a bite of the soggy mashed potatoes or the vegetable stew. We’ve been eating the same tasteless crap for weeks, so it wasn’t like I was missing much. I just didn’t trust my stomach not to send it sailing right back up as soon as I managed to swallow it down.
    Fear followed us into the Mess Hall, coating the silence, expanding until I thought it would eventually push the walls out of alignment. It multiplied faster than the weeds in the Garden. This is what makes it so hard—well, one of the many things that puts this place at the corner of bleak and misery. There’s never an explanation. Not for the way we’re supposed to behave, not for why they do the things they do. When they first began work on the Factory, Ruby said—
    No. That wasn’t right. Ruby wasn’t here when they began turning the dark dirt over, burrowing down into earth. She hadn’t been the one to wager the guess that the camp controllers were finally going to take care of the problem of us—permanently. Put us where no one would ever be able to find us.
    I braced my forehead against my hands, trying to rub away the throb of pain behind my temples. I blinked again, and the image of a little dark-haired girl was gone, replaced by a panicked kind of anger. It grated on my nerves. Sent my heart galloping for no reason at all.
    I was