Prologue

Day 1, afternoon.

Falling…

What would you do if you were pulled down four hundred feet by the full force of gravity?

All that goes up must come down. My physics teacher, Mr. Hoffmann, had rambled on about Newton’s laws earlier today.

Forget the sci-fi movies, kids; nothing ever floats except balloons, bubbles, and other stuff… It’s a simple natural law. Superman is just a farce, deal with it. The Earth’s core is a pretty nasty magnet.

Mr. Hoffmann, with his white hair and eccentric attitude, had got that right. That was where it all started: gravity. No, my fate had been sealed much earlier, before school started.

The ground shot up towards me like an angry giant’s mouth growling for my flesh. A horrifying fall from the fifteen-story building at the west end of Golden Birch—was how I was going to die.

The building had been abandoned for two reasons: first, a giant sinkhole had collapsed the front wall. Second, it used to be a hospital, but the rumor was that it was just a cover. Something terrible and much worse had happened there. Just my luck that I chose this building to hide in.

I was hurtling toward said sinkhole at breakneck speed, like a pile of trash emptying into a trashy trash can. Of course, it had been an accident, I told myself, when I tried to escape from Jack, Kyle, and Liam. The floor was slippery and slanted from the collapse. None of the boys would have pushed me off that really high building—at least, not intentionally. They only wanted to scare me and had me cornered at the very edge when it happened. Right? That was what I told myself over and over again, like a broken recording.

I freefell like a crashing aircraft that had lost its vital controls. With the wind rushing in my ears, the sting in my eyes, and the panicking, I could already envisage the sharp pain that would follow almost immediately: the crunching of bones, the ugly splattering of blood over the sidewalk, and the gruesome dismembering of my body which would be scattered like torn bits of paper. Maybe I’d end up as a bloody pancake. And there was absolutely nothing I could do about it now—absolutely nothing.

The thought of my foster parents, the Jacobs, flashed into my mind. They had been so kind to take me in. I tried to cling to the other happy memories of my fourteen years. Well, there weren’t that many—almost impossible to find since half of my life had been scattered throughout orphanages and living on the streets and off scraps.

With its huge dark mouth, the ground shot up like a struck baseball toward my face.

Here comes the pain.

Then, the strangest thing happened. The fall slowed, and so did time itself. Maybe that explained why so many thoughts crossed my mind in such a short time.

Which was a good thing, as an abrupt stop would be like slamming into a brick wall. Like a car going at a hundred miles an hour and then coming to a halt. My organs, which already felt like mushy dough, were like the driver not wearing a seatbelt slowly crashing through the windshield.

An object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction were Mr. Hoffmann’s words. The Law of Inertia. Great.

The ground was still approaching too fast. My arms flailed in an attempt to shield my face; my stomach climbed into my throat. No way would I survive this fall.

Suddenly, time, which had been slowing down, came to an abrupt stop. The ticking hands on my watch stopped, and my breath caught in my throat. The wind rushing at me turned into a breeze, and the hairs on my arms froze.

Maybe this was what death felt like. Not that many people came back from the dead to tell about it. And those who did talked about tunneling light vision in the last few seconds of their lives.

No one had ever said anything about a pair of red, reptilian eyes staring back at them.

For a moment, I was suspended mid-air like a floating balloon, just levitating there as if some sort of invisible string was pulling me up like a puppet. All I could do was stare at the twin points of red lights. Pretty sure I wasn’t bungee jumping from that abandoned building.

This is it, was my final thought. I must be dead.