#PANDEMONIUM LAUREN OLIVER FREE DOWNLOAD FULL#

#PANDEMONIUM LAUREN OLIVER FREE DOWNLOAD FULL#

I’m too terrified to sleep if I sleep, I’ll die.Ĭrawling, insides curled into dust, mouth full of the taste of smoke. At night, driving rain, fierce and cold: huddled between the roots of an enormous oak, while around me unseen animals scream and pant and rattle through the darkness. At one point, I reach a river: I am so weak, I am nearly taken under by its current. Step by step, fighting thorns, bees, mosquitoes snapping back thick, broad branches clouds of gnats, mists hovering in the air. My only thought is to move, keep going, deeper and deeper, away from the fences and the world of dogs and guns and. I have no idea where I am or where I’m going. I take off my shirt, rip off the hem, and tie the cleanest bit tightly around my chest so it presses against my wound and helps stanch the bleeding. An animal, coming to investigate, scurries quickly back into the tangle of growth. I cough up air and spit bile into the flat, shiny leaves on either side of me. There is nothing in my stomach, but I throw up anyway. The wound is shallow, but seeing all the blood, the missing skin, makes everything real: this new place, this monstrous, massive growth everywhere, what has happened, what I have left. A bullet has skimmed me on the side, just below my armpit, and my T-shirt is wet with blood. At least one regulator must have clipped me while I was climbing the fence. I’m not sure how far I’ve traveled into the Wilds, and how long I’ve been pushing deeper and deeper into the woods, when I realize I’ve been hit. I run, and when I can no longer run, I limp, and when I can’t do that, I crawl, inch by inch, digging my fingernails into the soil, like a worm sliding across the overgrown surface of this strange new wilderness. I force my way through a black, wet space of strange noises and smells. That’s how I am born again, in pain: I emerge from the suffocating heat and the darkness. I left her beyond a fence, behind a wall of smoke and flame.įire in my legs and lungs fire tearing through every nerve and cell in my body.

She’s one of those people who makes the cure seem redundant-it’s impossible to imagine that she would ever be capable of loving, even without the procedure. She’s old, and mean, and looks like a cross between a frog and a pit bull. The old Lena would have been terrified of a teacher like Mrs. Fierstein gives me a final stare-meant to intimidate me, I guess-and turns back to the board, returning to her lecture on the divine energy of electrons. I’m pushing aside the memory of my nightmare, pushing aside thoughts of Alex, pushing aside thoughts of Hana and my old school, push, push, push, like Raven taught me to do. “It won’t happen again,” I say, trying to look obedient and contrite. “This is your final warning, Miss Jones,” Mrs. People avoid me like I have a disease-like I have the disease. I’ve been enrolled at Edwards since just after winter break-only a little more than two months-and already I’ve been labeled the Number-One Weirdo. “No!” I burst out, louder than I intended to, provoking a new round of giggles from the other girls in my class. “Since you seem to find the Creation of the Natural Order so exhausting,” she says, “might I suggest a trip to the principal’s office to wake you up?” This is the third time I’ve fallen asleep in her class this week.

Fierstein, the twelfth-grade science teacher at Quincy Edwards High School for Girls in Brooklyn, Section 5, District 17, is glaring at me. I snap into awareness, to a muted chorus of giggles. “Alex,” I say, and then, a short scream: “Alex!” A hysterical feeling is building inside me, a shrieking voice saying wrong, wrong, wrong, and I sit up and place my hand on Alex’s chest, as cold as ice. “Look at me,” I say, but he doesn’t turn his head, doesn’t blink, doesn’t move at all. He is staring at the leaves without blinking. “I’m cold,” he parrots, from lips that barely move. I try to move into the space between his arm and his chest but his body is rigid, unyielding. “Give me your arm,” I say, but Alex doesn’t respond. My breath comes in clouds, and I press against him, trying to stay warm. And again I realize he’s right: It is snowing, thick flakes the color of ash swirling all around us. We are staring at the web of leaves above us, thick as a wall. There’s a basket at the foot of the blanket, filled with half-rotten fruit, swarmed by tiny black ants. “It probably wasn’t the best day for a picnic,” Alex says, and just then I realize that yes, of course, we haven’t eaten any of the food we brought. The leaves are almost black, knitted so tightly together they blot out the sky. The trees look larger and darker than usual. Alex and I are lying together on a blanket in the backyard of 37 Brooks.

Pandemonium lauren oliver free download