“But you lied about the rest. You said saving him would save the world, and clearly that didn’t happen.” I gesture to the crumbling city I used to call home. “We lost everything.”
Aerithin glances away. In that moment, I’m sure I’ll never get the answers I need, something that will keep me going. For the first time, I notice all the battle scars on his silver skin, as if he’s been fighting this war for a thousand years.
It feels like forever passes before he finally speaks.
“I did not lie when we met,” Aerithin says. “You saved your brother. And now, Gabe will save your world.”
Gabe takes a step backward, his eyes wide. “What?” he gasps. “How?”
“You will destroy the Xua.”
In one horrifying rush, I know exactly what we’re up against. I know why every Xua has been after him, and I know it isn’t going to stop. We’re on their territory now. There’s nowhere left for us to hide. Nowhere left for us to run.
And now two people from my crew are after us, too. People who know all my secrets and weaknesses. Justin and Billy.
I take my brother’s hand. “I’m going to help him.”
“So will I,” Natalie says behind me.
I jump, startled by her voice, and glance behind us and realize that everyone has moved closer.
“Me too,” Noah says.
We all know what we’re facing now.
One by one, each person on my team and Noah’s team takes a vow. I don’t know how Gabe is supposed to destroy an entire alien race, but I’ll stand at my brother’s side for the rest of my life, no matter how long it takes.
And when I find Justin—I know I will; our paths are destined to cross again and again—I’ll find a way to save him, too.
No matter what happens next, I’m not going to be afraid.
This time we’re going to win.
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Acknowledgments
Valiant was a book of my heart. It took me four months to write this story about a time-traveling girl who has to save the world. It then took years to edit and find it a proper home. I never gave up on this book, however. I always loved the idea of an average girl being given the task of saving everyone she knows—but most specifically, her younger brother.
For me, the essence of the story is this: Who would you be willing to save the world for?
Sara’s younger brother, Gabriel, is a geeky, science-fiction-loving, comic-book-reading fourteen-year-old boy who’s enchanted by the one thing that will end the world—the launch of the Valiant rocket ship. In many ways, Gabe is modeled after my son, Jesse. So, I can definitely understand why Sara would be willing to try so hard to save him. I would, too.
I never lost faith in this book, even though I injured my hands from typing it so quickly and, even though, as a result six years later, I still can’t use my thumbs when I type. I never lost faith even though it took a long time for this story to make its way into print. One reason I didn’t give up was because so many people helped and encouraged me along the way. First, I want to thank my agent, Natalie Lakosil, because she loved this book way back in the beginning, when it was still an untamed wild creature. Next, I want to thank my editor, Heather Howland, because she loved, nurtured, and polished it until it became a lovely, dark apocalyptic tale with a hint of romance. I also want to thank my beta readers, Kristian Kim, Teddi Deppner, Jane Wells, Carol Collett, Becca Johnson, Mac Wheeler, Cheri Williams, Eddie Clark, and Melanie Noelle Bernard, who patiently read this story and then gave me their input.
As always, I’m indebted to my writers’ group for supporting me throughout Valiant’s publishing journey. Rachel Marks, Rebecca Luella Miller, Paul Regnier, and Mike Duran—you’ll always be my heroes!
A very special thank-you to my husband, Tom. Thank you for loving and supporting me when I work crazy hours staring at a computer screen, when I get emotionally attached to imaginary people, when I cry if I kill off one of my characters, and when I occasionally allow a bad guy to survive at the end of a story because there might be a sequel.
And, of course, I must say thank you to my son, Jesse, for giving me a reason to write this book. You are beautiful, intelligent, creative, and talented, and you have an incredibly gentle spirit. I will always love you. You are definitely the person I would save the world for—over and over again.
About the Author
Born in the Midwest, magazine editor Merrie Destefano currently lives in Southern California with her husband, two German shepherds, a Siamese cat, and the occasional wandering possum. Her favorite hobbies are reading speculative fiction and watching old Star Trek episodes, and her incurable addiction is writing. She loves to camp in the mountains, walk on the beach, watch old movies, and listen to alternative music—although rarely all at the same time.
www.merriedestefano.com
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Lost Girls...
Yesterday, Rachel went to sleep listening to Taylor Swift, curled up in her grammy’s quilt, worrying about geometry. Today, she woke up in a ditch, bloodied, bruised, and missing a year of her life.
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Black to cover the blood.
And she can fight.
Tell no one.
She’s not the only girl to go missing within the last year…but she’s the only girl to come back. She desperately wants to unravel what happened to her, to try and recover the rest of the Lost Girls.
But the more she discovers, the more her memories return. A
nd as much as her new life scares her, it calls to her. Seductively. The good girl gone bad: sex, drugs, and raves, and something darker…something she still craves. The rush of the fight, the thrill of the win—something she can’t resist, that might still get her killed…
Excerpt from Lost Girls
by Merrie Destefano
I didn’t recognize myself.
When I went to sleep last night, my hair had been dark brown and shoulder-length. Now it was cropped short and dyed platinum blond. My face looked longer and thinner, my cheekbones more pronounced. I looked away from the mirrored wall on my left and focused on the man sitting across from me instead.
FBI agent Ryan Bennet.
Any other time I would have thought it was cool to be alone with a guy like this. About ten years older than me, he looked like a stunt double for Channing Tatum. Cool green eyes studied me, a pensive expression on his face. He glanced down at his notes, tapping his pen on the table between us.
“You don’t remember anything about where you were for the past two weeks?”
He’d asked this before. I’d already answered it.
I sighed. I wanted to go home.
“There was a smell. Like a forest, maybe. Pine and cedar. That’s all.”
“Could that smell have been a man’s cologne?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
“The last thing you remember is…”
“Going to bed and listening to music.”
“And your current class schedule is...” He began naming all my sophomore classes, reading a list I had written down a few minutes ago.
I nodded.
“You don’t remember taking chemistry or Algebra II?”
“Are you kidding?” There’s no way I was in Algebra II. I hadn’t even mastered geometry yet. I was still worried Miss Wallace was going to flunk me.
He shifted in his chair, then shot a quick glance at the mirror, maybe wishing he could talk to whoever was on the other side. “There’s one other thing we haven’t discussed yet.”
An unwelcome shudder raced over me. I already knew that I hadn’t been raped. I’d spent hours with a doctor while she gently poked and prodded me, asking me questions. When she was drawing my blood, both of us had been puzzled by the marks on my inner arms.
Needle marks.
Either I was a druggie, which just couldn’t be true, or someone had been injecting something into me. The tricky thing was, some of those track marks looked a lot older than two weeks. Now I had a possible threat of withdrawal hanging over my head, with symptoms that could range from headaches to night terrors to tremors.
Across from me, Agent Bennet opened a large manila envelope, one that had been sitting conspicuously beside him throughout our interview. He slid out several photographs, all eight-by-ten glossies—each one catching his attention for a moment and causing his brow to lower—and then he slapped them down on the table, lining them up in a row so they faced me. They were all shots of girls about my age, each one with different hair and eye and skin color, each one smiling into the camera, like they were expecting something wonderful to happen. These had to be yearbook photos, because every hair was perfect, every girl was staring right at me.
All of them waiting for something.
I glanced up at Agent Bennet, wondering what he wanted.
“Do you know any of these girls?” he asked.
I ran a gaze over them again, imagining them stretching on the barre, wearing one-piece black leotards, or running down the hall at Lincoln High, wearing jeans and T-shirts, backpacks slung over their shoulders. Six girls looked up at me, wanting me to know their names, but I was lucky to remember my own name right now.
I shook my head. “Who are they?”
He started listing them off as if they were his younger sisters; every time he touched a photo he would say the girl’s name and his jaw would shift, just a fraction, as if the muscle was working too hard. As I expected, he said six names I didn’t recognize—Emily, Hannah, Madison, Nicole, Haley, and Brooke—then he spoke again, still staring down at their faces.
“All these girls have gone missing within the past three months. Two of them disappeared after school, like you did. Three left home for sporting events but never came back. One girl told her mother she was spending the weekend with a friend, but the friend waited and waited. The girl never showed up.”
He paused, then looked directly into my eyes, watching me so closely that a trickle of sweat began to run down my neck. “You’re the only girl who has come back,” he said, leaning forward. “How did you get away?”
How was I supposed to know? My skin started to heat up, a feeling of being trapped started to overwhelm me, and my breathing turned ragged and raw. I needed to get out of here.
I shook my head, my stomach roiling. “I don’t remember.”
“There were pine needles stuck to your clothes, Rachel, and seedpods that can only be found in the San Gabriel Mountains. Could someone have been holding you captive in the mountains?”
That smell of cedar and pine came back, as if he had conjured it. It wafted around me, oozing out of the floorboards and the seams where the walls met. It curled like smoke away from the mirror until foggy clouds covered the floor. I fought a gag reflex, holding my right hand over my mouth. Without realizing it, I pushed my chair backward, accidentally knocking it to the floor with a loud crash. I struggled to my feet.
At the same time, the door behind me clicked and swung open. A woman dressed in a navy blue suit looked in at us, a stern expression on her face as she glanced from me to Agent Bennet. “That’s enough for today, Bennet. In fact, it’s enough, period. Miss Evans can go home now. Her parents have been waiting for more than an hour.”
One hand still over my mouth and nose, trying to block out the stench of pine and cedar, I stumbled past her, heading down the hallway. But no matter how fast I walked, I could still hear the two of them arguing.
“You will not follow this line of questioning any further, do you understand, Bennet?” the woman was saying. “This girl has been traumatized enough.”
“But there’s something here that connects these cases. I’m sure of it. Something we’re overlooking—”
“Half of these girls are probably runaways. There’s not enough evidence to prove they fall into the category of Violent Crimes Against Children, or that these cases are related—”
The farther I walked away from them, the more their voices faded, which was what I wanted. I could see Mom and Dad and Kyle through a large glass window up ahead, all of them waving at me, big smiles on their faces like we were going to Disneyland.
The two agents behind me probably hadn’t realized that I could still hear them. It was like I was invisible. I tried to ignore them and forget about what might have happened during that two-week period when I was lost.
Except now, after talking to that FBI agent, I knew that I wasn’t the only one. There were other girls out there who had gone missing, too.
And they were still lost.
Valiant Page 24