- Published: 4 May 2021
- ISBN: 9780143775423
- Imprint: Penguin
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 272
- RRP: $22.00
Violet Black
Extract
ONE:
VIOLET
My head is an over-ripe watermelon, about to burst. My eyes are stinging, and my skin burns.
My limbs are heavy, as though someone poured molten lead into my veins. I can't turn my head, can't speak, can't see beyond this white-white-white.
I'm dead, just like all the other kids this epidemic has taken away.
Hell is a bright light searing your retinae. Heaven is a myth. I close my eyes. Wait for the reckoning.
TWO:
VIOLET
Violet. The name is a bubble inside my brain, perfectly rounded, but ready to burst as soon as I try to touch it. I've been here before, many times over recent hours-days-weeks. Stupid me, I can't stop reaching for that bubble, though.
Clinging onto life is a reflex, even when all else seems futile. My lungs are inflating, deflating. My heart beats a foreign rhythm.
Violet. Blink once if you can hear me.
How can I blink when I can barely open my eyes? But I do, so slowly I can almost hear my eyelids creaking. My virus-addled brain tries to make sense of the images before me. A pointy nose, black-framed glasses, a receding hairline. Who does this Picasso face belong to, and what is that beeping, and who is moaning? Not the Picasso face, not me . . . I don't think.
'Violet,' the voice repeats, and it's as if someone has raised a pair of binoculars to my eyes.
The world rushes in. It's almost too much. But I reach for that bubble, step back into the light.
Blink. Once, just once. The doctor smiles.
'Welcome back, Violet Black.'
He thought I was going to die too.
I know that for a fact.
THREE:
ETHAN
Fact: Measles is a highly contagious disease that is easily spread by salivary or mucous droplets when coughing, sneezing or talking.
Fact: Measles can cause serious complications, from ear infections and pnuemonia to the most life-threatening, encephalitis.
Fact: Encephalitis is swelling of the brain. It can kill you. Trust me, I know.
Fact: There is a highly effective vaccine for measles.
Fact: In the late 2010s, a fall in vaccination rates led to a measles epidemic. Many years later, a new, deadlier strain of measles began to circulate – M-fever.
Fact: There is no effective vaccine for M-fever. Yet.
Fact: Ten percent of all those infected with M-fever will develop encephalitis. Ninety-five percent of those with encephalitis will die.
Fact: Against the odds, I have survived. Don't ask me how, or why. I guess I was lucky.
I am running through the desert, the red earth firm and unyielding beneath my trainers.
Today is the first of September, the first day of spring, and it's been sixty four days since I last saw Sophie Abercrombie.
A prime number is divisible only by itself and by one. If I were a prime number, I’d want to be a five.
Chapter 1: Rebecca *Please note* that this extract contains adult themes and is suitable for readers aged 16+.
If you take photographs through a prism, you can turn people into ghosts.
Jake lay on top of his board, feeling the swells move beneath him, like the air moving in and out of his lungs, like the blood surging through the four chambers of his stubbornly beating heart.
They see the fish on their first day, laid bare on the tideline. The seagulls have nearly picked the bones clean already.
There was no peace, even in the loo. Rory’s pager and phone were going simultaneously.
I never asked for visions, I was one. In my future, I see myself regal and glorious, luminescent with the glow of my god.
Fliss sat next to Minnie and the little one, letting the soft yet clear notes of song fall into her ears.
They were still 400 yards from the strip of white beach and the crammed jungle behind it when the fighter planes came.
‘Max?’