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First published in Great Britain in 2017
by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited
The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN
Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, New York, USA
Text copyright © 2017 Michael Grant
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
First e-book edition 2017
ISBN 978 1 4052 8483 7
Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1766 3
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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For all the GONE fans,
the best fans in the world
CONTENTS
Shade Darby, Four Years Earlier
ASO-4
7: AN UNHAPPY GUINEA PIG
8: DADDY ISSUES
9: ON THE RUN
10: TURNING WHITE TO RED
ASO-5
Meanwhile, in Scotland
11: A REALLY BAD COMMUTE
12: BEING USED
13: ALL DONE BEING USED
PART TWO: HERO, VILLAIN, MONSTER
Interstice
14: A CAREER SETBACK
15: A NICE TALK
16: SHADE VS KNIGHTMARE
17: BATTLE OF THE LIGHTHOUSE
Aboard the Okeanos Explorer
18: GOING HOME
19: MEET THE PSYCHOPATH
PART THREE: ROUGH BEASTS
20: FIRST ON THE SCENE
21: COOKING DRAKE
22: FIRE, WATER AND SHADE DARBY
23: LATE TO THE PARTY
24: THERE’S ALWAYS SOMETHING WORSE
25: SOMETHING WORSE
26: INNOCENT BYSTANDER
27: HEROES, VILLAINS, MONSTERS
28: CONSEQUENCES
29: AFTERMATH
About the Author
| PART ONE | | | ORIGIN STORIES |
Shade Darby, Four Years Earlier
“IT’S THE MONSTER!” Shade Darby cried out, speaking to no one in particular.
The monster was a girl who appeared to be in her teens, but was in reality mere days old. She was known the world over from her first recorded appearance during which she had torn off a man’s arm and eaten it. While the man watched in shock and agony.
The girl, the creature, the monster, now covered from head to toe in blood, stood in the middle of the highway.
There was no traffic on the highway. There hadn’t been in a year. That was how long the dome had sat astride the 101 at Perdido Beach, creating the world’s longest detour.
One day the dome had simply appeared, a perfect sphere twenty miles in diameter which extended down beneath the ground as far as it rose into the sky. That dome was centered on a nuclear power plant, but encompassed vast tracts of forest, hills, farmland, ocean, and almost all of the town of Perdido Beach, California, which lay at the extreme southern end.
The instant the dome appeared (impenetrable, opaque, and utterly impervious to drills, lasers, and shaped explosive charges), every single person fifteen years of age and older had been ejected.