Burn

by Monica Hesse

Genres: YA Dystopian; YA Mysteries & Thrillers

Synopsis

Perfect for fans of Black Mirror and Warcross, this gripping sequel to Stray finds Lona delving into her past so she can face her future Lona Sixteen Always is about to become Lona Seventeen Always, but she isn't feeling older or wiser. Though she escaped from the Path, the virtual reality experiment in which she was raised, she's learned that real life is full of challenges. Plagued by strange memories and dreams, and feeling pressured by her friends to just be normal, Lona begins to question her own sanity. She suspects that the only way to feel whole is to solve the mystery of her dreams-it almost feels like someone's trying to send her a message, but where are the clues pointing? In the bid to find out who she really is, Lona will fall headlong into a trap far more dangerous and cunning than she could ever have imagined. Edgar-award winning master of suspense Monica Hesse brings us a richly imagined speculative world where sought-after answers could cost the asker everything. This ebook includes bonus excerpts from Monica Hesse's historical fiction novels Girl in the Blue Coat and The War Outside.

Release date: June 12, 2018

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 320

Sample

“Are you going to make a wish, Lona?” Gamb poked her in the rib cage. “I’ve already made, like, forty-seven of them and it’s not even my birthday.”

The cake was shiny. The smooth buttercream reminded Lona of an ice-skating rink. It was almost too immaculate to eat, except that her stomach growled when she looked at it. It smelled like hot sugar and butter and the vanilla extract that had been whipped into the frosting. She could almost taste it on her tongue, the sweet grainy sheen.

“Wait until it is your birthday, Gamb,” Ilyf said. “The birthday fairy is going to be all, ‘Oh, sorry, your wish allotment has been filled. You used them up six months ago when you stole someone else’s.’”

Gamb was careless with his wishes. Lona didn’t want to be. This was, after all, the only one she’d ever made. It was her first birthday. Her seventeenth year, but her first birthday. Pink and green streamers hung around the kitchen, and also an iridescent banner with “Happy Birthday” spelled out in bubbly gold and silver. It was the decor of a little kid’s party, but she liked it. She liked the giant bouquet of sunflowers Ilyf had arranged on the table, and the paper cone hats Gamb ceremoniously put on everyone’s heads, affixed with stretchy elastic.

Today she would turn seventeen, and she would get a new name. Lona Sixteen Always would become Lona Seventeen Always. If she wanted. Now that she wasn’t on Path anymore, there was no reason to obey Path naming traditions—but there was no reason not to either. It’s not like she had any alternate options.

“She doesn’t have to make any wishes if she doesn’t want to.” Under the table, Fenn’s hand stroked the soft underside of her wrist. He leaned in closer and his breath tickled her ear. “Or you can make a million. Or a million and one.” His fingers traveled higher, skimming over the crease of her elbow. It was a gesture of comfort, a remnant from the way Pathers used to be stroked by Coping Technicians, but it still felt sharp and shivery on her skin.

Fenn reached into his pocket and produced a lighter for the candles—eighteen in total: seventeen for every year of her life, and a symbolic one to grow on. Gamb turned off the light so that the room flickered, and Lona’s face felt warm from the heat. As many wishes as she wanted. Gamb sighed at her indecision. “Give her some time,” Ilyf ordered him.

“I don’t need anything,” she protested.

“You suck at birthdays,” Gamb said. “You’re not supposed to wish for something you need. It’s supposed to be about something you want.”

“Before they melt,” Ilyf encouraged. A spot of pink wax had already dribbled onto the frosting. “It’s just a birthday tradition. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.”

A birthday tradition. Lona closed her eyes. She should make a wish, for the full, traditional birthday experience. But her deepest wishes had already come true. She was alive. Fenn was alive. Fenn was here, at this moment, his hand still skimming her arm. She was here, with Fenn and Gamb and Ilyf, the first living graduates of the Julian Path. They were so much luckier than they could have been. What more was there to wish for?

I wish I could know my real name.

The thought appeared in her mind unbidden, an unexpected guest at the door. That’s what she wished for. Her name. Not Lona, which was the arbitrary conglomeration of letters assigned by the Julian Path when she was an infant. But her real name. The one her mother intended for her in the hours before she relinquished custody of her newborn daughter to a government program. The one that signified someone had cared about her. That name.

Lona watched as one of the candles listed slowly to the right, a snowbank of white frosting piling up against its side.

I wish I could know my real mother, too.

There. That’s the wish she wanted more than anything. The wish that was too extravagant to say out loud. It could only be conceived of in secret, on birthdays.

Before she could take it back, she drew in a breath and blew. Seventeen candles went out, leaving puffs of smoke and the smell of wax and sulfur. The eighteenth flickered, but eventually it died, too, and the kitchen was bathed in gray.

Gamb immediately smeared a glob of frosting on Lona’s face. She licked it off the side of her mouth, feeling the sugar particles roll around on her tongue.

“We forgot to sing ‘Happy Birthday’!” Ilyf cried. “We were supposed to do it with the candles.” They were all still amateurs at the patterns of birthday parties. They’d only had three to practice on—Fenn’s, Gamb’s, and Ilyf’s when they’d all turned nineteen the previous year.

“I don’t think there’s an official rulebook, Ilyf,” Gamb said. “I think Lona still gets to turn seventeen whether we sing the song or not.”

“But we have to,” Ilyf insisted. “Tradition.”

They started in three different keys—Ilyf, determined and slightly flat; Gamb in a ridiculous falsetto; Fenn, softly and just to Lona. She clapped when they were done, and Ilyf sliced around the candles to give Lona the biggest piece, with the sugar rose.

“Are you going to tell us what you wished for?” Gamb asked, but he lost focus before Lona could think of a pretend wish she could use instead of her vulnerable real one. “Hey—listen. When I do this, I can play a song.” He took his paper hat off and strummed the elastic, stretching it to longer and shorter lengths. “Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clement—ow.” He sucked at the finger he’d snapped.

Ilyf rolled her eyes. “The package did say ‘not suitable for children under four.’”

“The package wasn’t considering the musical possibilities of these hats.”

“Anyway. All the candles went out on the cake, Gamb. So Lona doesn’t have to tell us her wish. We’ll see it when it comes true.”

“The important ones already have,” Lona insisted.

“Please don’t tell me you wasted a wish on, like, world peace or ending poverty,” Gamb said.

“I wished that I could play a musical instrument.”

“You—wait, what?”

“The elastic chin strap, Gamb. I wished I could play the elastic chin strap.”

She darted her hand out before he could back away, and—

“Ow!” He rubbed his face where she’d snapped at it. “Let the party record show, the birthday girl is going to be punished, as soon as it’s not her birthday.”

She wrapped her arms around her knees, watching her breath come out in white clouds and disappear. December 15, but no first snowfall yet. The forecaster said maybe next week.

“There you are.” The screen door squeaked behind Fenn as he stepped out onto the porch.

“Just watching for snow.”

“Do you want a blanket? I can go get one.”

“No. I like feeling how cold it can get.” When Fenn and Lona had been in the Julian Path, their sensory perceptions had been dulled. For their own comfort, things were cold, but never freezing. Off Path, Lona liked feeling the thousand tiny pinpricks of a windy night, the way the frigid air found the gaps in her clothing and gave her goose bumps.

Fenn sat beside her on the porch swing. His skin was still inside-warm against her shoulder, and his eyes were still summer-green against the bleak winter landscape. Today his shirt was flannel and brown, the color of the wet earth and a few shades lighter than his hair.

He used the heel of his foot to rock the swing back and forth, and she leaned into his body. “What does this cold taste like?” he asked.

She smiled and breathed in. “This cold? Peppermint. Or wintergreen, maybe. Something spicy. What do you think?”

She felt his ribs expand as he inhaled. “Cloves? If it were snowing, I’d definitely say peppermint. But the brown—the fact that everything is muddy and damp and thick—it makes me think of the cloves in the ham Julian’s grandma used to make. How if you put them in your mouth, they tasted spicy and hot and cold at the same time.”

“You win.” She loved that about him, the attention to detail he gave things like sights and sounds. The night was exactly clove-flavored. “What musical instrument does it sound like?”

“Not a flute.” He cocked his head away from hers to listen, exposing his neck. “Maybe a clarinet? Or maybe—” She tilted up and brushed her lips against his bare skin, watching it ripple with goose bumps. He groaned. “No fair. Now I can’t hear anything but my heart pounding.”

“Are you saying the night sounds like drums?”

He laughed, then reached into the zippered pouch on his shirt, producing a small package and two slender envelopes. “I didn’t know if you’d want to open these in front of everyone.”

“More birthday?”

“The first card is from Talia.”

“I’ll see her in a couple days for Tuesday dinner.”

“She wanted you to have something to open on your actual birthday.”

She slid her thumb under the envelope flap, pulling out a blue card from the Monitor who’d helped Lona and Fenn shut down the Julian Path six months ago. And who, though it still seemed strange, was technically Lona’s legal guardian. “Gabriel signed his own name.” Lona showed Fenn the card with Talia’s block print and the shaky scrawl of a four-and-a-half-year-old, belonging to Talia’s other ward. “I think, at least. I think that’s supposed to be a G.”

She guessed who the second card was from even before opening it. The cover said “Happy Birthday” and nothing more, and the inside was blank except for a J. Julian. This card was the first time she’d heard from him in months. The postmark was foreign, though, which meant he’d remembered her birthday in advance, in time for the card to cross an ocean. That was something. Even if he never called.

“Who’s this from?” She picked up the final package. It was small and square but heavy for its size, wrapped in green tissue paper that whispered against her fingers.

“Me.”

“The party was supposed to be my present!”

“This is your other present.” She tore off the wrapping. Inside was a book, plain and brown, no title on the cover or the spine. “Open it.”

The first page was creamy and textured. “For all of your birthdays,” Fenn had written in careful cursive. There was no text on the next page. Just two pictures of infants, each propped up against a beige background—one bald and wailing, the other dark-haired and solemn. As Lona turned the pages, the infant in one set of pictures grew a pointy nose, sandy hair, gray eyes. The other grew curly hair, and his nebulously colored eyes became a bottle-glass green. By the fourth page, he was as she remembered him the first day they met, standing by a calisthenics machine.

“Fenn—it’s us. It’s all pictures of us. How did you—”

“Do you like it?”

She turned another page, sixteen in total. Mirrors hadn’t been illegal in the Julian Path, but they hadn’t been prevalent either. There was no point in providing anything that would have encouraged individuality—not when the goal of the Julian Path was to teach them all to be like Julian. Lona had never seen these before.

“I had Talia dig them out of our files before they shut down the system,” Fenn explained. “Our yearly progress photos—the ones they took for records.” He looked worried suddenly. “I hope you like it. Ilyf said I was supposed to get you jewelry for your birthday.”

“Fenn, I love it.” Jewelry. As if there was a bracelet that could be half as beautiful as this album. “I wouldn’t have thought to ask for it, but it’s exactly what I needed.”

“It is?”

“You have no idea.”

Only Fenn would think to give her something so grounding, so affirming of her own past. Because he had shared her Path. He was her first and only friend there.

“Can I—” He still did that sometimes, asked permission before he kissed her. It was a residual habit, a leftover taboo from when they lived in Path and excessive touching was frowned upon. This time, he didn’t complete the sentence before his mouth found hers and she inhaled the earthy scent of his skin. She didn’t know whether Fenn actually smelled like grass or whether she just associated it with him because he taught her to appreciate the scent. Either way, when he was close she smelled prairies and meadows, and heard the dry rustle of wheat or corn. His lips were soft; his fingers wound through her hair and tightened when she leaned in closer to him.

“Thank you,” he breathed, when their lips parted. He still did that sometimes, too. He was grateful for the simplest experiences, in ways one could only be if one knew what it was like to live without them.

“Are you going to bed soon?” he asked.

She nodded. They had their own rooms, but sometimes when Lona had a bad dream, Fenn would slip in and crouch low beside her bed. She would wake to his hand stroking the small of her back, or his voice whispering in her ear. She did the same for him. Nightmares were a symptom of withdrawal from the Path, but they nursed each other through the worst of them. She had gone from fearing physical touch to feeling as though her life depended on it.

Her nightmares were mostly gone. There was only one recurring bad dream left, and it was always the same: She was kneeling on the floor in a sterile white room, hunching over the lifeless body of a beautiful girl as blood seeped onto Lona’s pants, spreading until her clothes were soaked. Genevieve, the girl who loved Fenn and who ultimately died proving it. That dream replayed in her sleep almost as it had happened in real life, except that in real life Lona couldn’t will herself to wake up. It was sad and strange to live in Genevieve’s house, left to them after her death, but Lona didn’t want to move. Grief, like cold, could be a reminder of being alive.

“Have you had the dream lately?” Fenn could read her quietness sometimes, know what thoughts sent her into herself. He knew how Genevieve’s death haunted Lona’s sleep.

“Not for almost a week.”

Now is when she should tell him about the other dream, the one that woke her last night in the dim, quiet hours of her seventeenth birthday. She could still feel the thumbtack scratches on her hands, still remember the clinical beep made by the sound of the security system. She could still feel the man’s panic as he searched through the ravaged office.

What was he trying to find and why was it so important he found it before they did?

She should tell Fenn about that, but she couldn’t. She didn’t want to mar such a beautiful day, and she didn’t want to remember the dream. She just wanted it to go away.

“Are you sure?” Fenn asked.

“I’m sure,” she said, technically answering his question honestly. “I haven’t had the dream about Genevieve.”

That night, in her bed, she dreamed of cake. She dreamed of doughy sweetness, shortening, and sugar, and running her tongue over her lips, tasting happiness.

“Slide it through the metal detector.”

Lona looked down at the plastic-wrapped paper plate in her hands. “It’s just cake.”

“Slide the cake through the metal detector.”

She sighed, but set the plate on the conveyer belt next to her shoulder bag. The regular security guard wouldn’t have made her do this. Veronica knew her—she would have gazed up from her knitting project just long enough to smile and wave Lona through.

When this new guy handed back her plate, the frosting had a thumbprint in the middle, the clingy plastic wrap dipped down into the hole like a moon crater. “We just have to check,” he said defensively. “People could hide keys or knives in there.”

She made her way back to the residential wing. It was craft hour; some patients were painting watercolors in the common area. Mrs. O’Hare’s Monet was beautiful. She was a retired art teacher. It must be sad for her husband, who Lona saw visiting sometimes. Mrs. O’Hare remembered everything about how to hold a paintbrush, but had no idea who he was.

Before Lona could open the door to the intensive care wing, it flew open and a bosom-heavy nurse smashed into her, trilling a theatrical scream.

“Christ, Lona.” Rowena was her favorite nurse on the ward. A retired opera singer who still behaved like she was onstage. “Oooh, what’s that? Someone having a birthday?”

“I did,” she admitted. “Yesterday.”

“Happy birthday! Party?”

“A little one.”

“Am I going to be disappointed when I ask if that cake is for me?”

“I’m sorry. I should have brought more.” She’d planned to. But when she got up this morning Gamb was eating it with a fork, digging out the frosting flowers without even having the decency to look guilty. Lona salvaged the only intact piece she could.

“Oh, my butt doesn’t need it anyway.” Rowena absentmindedly ran a hand over the thick padding of her hips. “He’ll be excited to have the cake. And the company. Nobody else ever comes to visit him.” She checked her watch. “You all should stop by the common room later. After crafts we’re showing a movie.”

Lona nodded, but she doubted she would come to the common room. The idea of lingering nauseated her. She made these visits in secret. Fenn wouldn’t understand why she came here; she could barely understand. She hated herself every time she walked through the door.

His hair had gone white, the fast-forward aging that happens sometimes with trauma victims. Not salt and pepper but salt and nutmeg, with flecks of his original warm brown. Today he wore a fleece tracksuit that zipped up the front—he was allowed to have zippers but not buttons, which could be removed and swallowed—and a pair of white Velcro shoes on his feet. He was not allowed to have lace-up shoes.

“Hi, Warren.”

He looked up from the picture book on his lap. She knew the title without having to see the front; it was a favorite. Dilbert Ducky’s Big Adventure. Sometimes he pressed the book into Lona’s hands, asking her to read it to him, but not today. Today his eyes lit up when he saw the cake in Lona’s hands.

“Cookie!”

“Close. It’s cake. It’s birthday cake, Warren. Yesterday was my birthday.” She crumpled the plastic wrap into a waste can and searched for a plastic spoon in the drawer where he sometimes collected them. He wasn’t allowed forks. “Do you want to feed yourself?”

He opened his mouth like a baby bird. She spooned a small bite in, using the hard edge of the utensil to scrape a smear from the corner of his lip.

Why was she here?

Six months ago, she couldn’t have imagined this. Six months ago, Warren was just the Architect, the man who designed the Julian Path as a monument to his dead son. He was also Genevieve’s father. The Architect responded to the trauma of her death by erasing all of his memories with an electrical remmersing prod.

The first time Lona visited him, she wanted to see him miserable. She wanted to hate him. But then Rowena led her to his room, rapping brusquely on the door and shoving Lona inside. He was still in his crank-up bed then—he hadn’t yet learned how to walk—stroking a plush pony.

“You have a visitor, Warren,” Rowena had said, pushing Lona down into one of the chairs next to the bed. “First one. I’ll stop back in twenty minutes to see how you’re doing.”

The Architect looked at her and his blue eyes were wide and benign. “Hi—hi!” he said. “Hi!”

She wanted to hate him. But when she opened her mouth, what came out was, “Hi, Warren. My name is Lona. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Story?” he asked hopefully when the cake was gone.

“There’s a movie outside. I think it’s Bambi. Do you want to watch it? The beginning is scary but you’d like when the baby deer and the skunk become friends.”

He shrank back against the armchair. “No. No out. Story.”

“Fine. A story. Not Dilbert, though. I can’t read that again.”

He held out the duck story hopefully.

“No, not Dilbert. Something else.” She picked through the selection on the shelf. “How about this one?” She pulled out an unfamiliar hardback that had a pig and a porcupine on the cover. One of the nurses must have brought it from the library. She settled on the arm of Warren’s chair, making sure to hold the book so he could see the illustrations.

“One day, Oink decided to conduct a science experiment,” she began. “He asked his friend Spike to help set up his laboratory.”

“Nehhh,” he interrupted. “Nehhh!”

“Right, Warren. It’s an exciting story.”

“Nehhh!”

She’d thought, once, that the exclamation was his daughter’s name—that he was trying to say “Neve,” the nickname Genevieve preferred. Doctors told her this wasn’t possible—his brain scans on memory tests were flat. He didn’t remember Neve. “Nehhh” was just an exclamation.

The book was funny, a Sorcerer’s Apprentice–like tale that involved Oink and Spike surfing waves of expanding soap bubbles as they tried to stop their Magical Multiplying Solution. When Lona reached the end, she turned back to the beginning, without prompt, to read it again. Warren always liked to hear stories twice in a row, sometimes three or four times. When she finished the second time, she made a big show of closing the cover and putting it back on the shelf so he would know he wasn’t going to get a third reading.

“Okay, Warren. It’s time for me to go now.”

He shook his head furiously and squirmed; he’d tucked something behind his back. She looked down to the floor. Her bag was missing. “Warren. We’ve been over this before. I’m still going to leave, even if you hide my things. It just makes me waste time looking for them, which makes me late, which makes me not want to come back.” Warren tucked his head in shame, slowly pulling the bag from behind him.

“Thank you. I’ll come back soon. Maybe next week.”

“Soon.”

“Soon.”

He didn’t have any concept of time. Lona could leave to get a soda from the vending machine down the hall, and when she returned he was just as happy to see her as if she’d been away for months. He didn’t have any concept of anything. Warren had gotten what he always wanted for the children of the Julian Path. A clean slate.

Clean slate didn’t mean purified slate, though. His had been wiped down, but it was impossible to remove the grime that had already burrowed below the surface. He was still responsible for his daughter’s death. He just didn’t have to spend every day remembering it.

Rowena appeared at the door, now wearing a pipe-cleaner necklace that someone must have made her in crafts. “We’re doing root beer floats with the movie,” she cajoled. “Are you sure you don’t want to join us?”

Lona slung her bag over her shoulder. “Thanks, but I have stuff to do.”

“Stay!” Warren pleaded. He’d grabbed the edge of her coat; his fingers were stubby and sticky and brown with cake, and looking at them suddenly filled her with revulsion.

Why did she keep coming here? It made her uneasy that she couldn’t articulate it. She didn’t enjoy spending afternoons with a 170-pound toddler, reading the same books over and over again. The visits didn’t feel like virtuous acts; they were filled with irritation, not compassion. But she was still choosing them, again and again, even though Warren didn’t deserve them. Even though it meant lying to Fenn. Even though it would devastate him to find out.

“Lona?” From the tone of Rowena’s voice, she could tell it wasn’t the first time the nurse had called her name. “I asked if you wanted a root beer float for the road.”

Lona shook her head and moved toward the door.

“Bring a friend next time,” Rowena suggested cheerfully. “It would be nice to see more young people here.”

“I don’t have any friends who know I come here.”

“Tell them you can get community service credits for volunteering,” Rowena offered. “We’ve partnered with schools before.”

“No,” Lona said, because she’d phrased it wrong. What she should have said was, If my friends knew I came here, they would no longer be my friends.

A car was in the driveway at home, a blue station wagon Lona didn’t recognize. She hung her coat by the front door and sniffed the sleeve of her sweater. The hospital had its own odor, like lemons and stale bread. She wanted it off her.

“Hey, are you back?” Fenn called from somewhere in the house, but she couldn’t answer him smelling like hospital. It felt like reveling in her dishonesty. She ducked into the hallway bathroom, stripping off her sweater down to the short sleeves she’d worn underneath, scrubbing her face and arms until they were red.

In the kitchen, Fenn poured coffee for a small, wiry woman with a long ponytail.

“Talia!”

It was funny—Lona used to think the ex-Monitor had a hard face, one that reminded her of a weather-worried stone. Six months later, the fine lines around her mouth looked like laugh lines, not frown. The clothing helped. As a Monitor for the Julian Path, Talia had worn regulation black; today she was dressed in a green pullover and jeans.

“Where did you end up?” Fenn eyed her, briefly, before pouring her a cup of coffee. “I thought you’d be back an hour ago.”

“You probably just missed us.” Talia slid the sugar to Lona. “Gabe and I were out doing errands all afternoon, but we were in the neighborhood so we decided to stop by and show you guys the new car.”

Just missed them? Oh. Right. Her stomach fluttered as her memory returned. That was the fake destination Lona had given Fenn: going to drop some papers off at Talia’s.

“I should have called first,” she stammered. “When you weren’t home I went to the mall instead. Just wandered around,. . .