Authors: Oliver Lauren

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Dystopian, #Love & Romance, #Social Issues, #Emotions & Feelings

Pandemonium (41 page)

BOOK: Pandemonium

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“Lena?” Julian’s voice pipes up quietly, behind me. I turn. He’s standing near the van, arms hanging heavily at his sides, as though he’s afraid to move in this new world. “Are you okay?”

Seeing him there—with the trees spread out darkly on all sides of us, and the clouds retreating—joy wells up in me again. Suddenly I am closing the space between us, not thinking, and barreling into his arms with so much force he almost topples backward. “Yes,” I say. “I’m okay. We’re okay.” I laugh. “Everything’s going to be fine now.”

“You saved me,” he whispers. I can feel his mouth moving against my forehead. The touch of his lips makes heat dance through me. “I couldn’t believe—I never thought you would come.”

“I had to.” I pull away so that I can look up at him, keeping my arms looped around his waist. He rests his hands on my back. Even though I have spent a long time in the Wilds, it strikes me again that it is a miracle to stand this way with someone. No one can tell us no. No one can make us stop. We have picked each other, and the rest of the world can go to hell.

Julian reaches up and brushes a piece of hair out of my eyes. “What happens now?” he asks.

“Anything we want,” I say. The joy is a surge: I could soar away on it, ride it all the way to the sky.

“Anything?” Julian’s smile spreads slowly from his lips to his eyes.

“Anything and everything,” I say, and Julian and I move at the same time, and find each other’s lips. At first, it’s clumsy: His nose bumps my lips, and then my chin bumps his chin. But he’s smiling, and we take our time, and find each other’s rhythm. I run my lips lightly over his, explore his tongue, softly, with mine. He puts his fingers in my hair. I inhale the smell of his skin, fresh and also woodsy, like soap and evergreen trees, mixed. We kiss slowly, gently, because now we have all the time in the world—nothing but time, and the space to get to know each other freely, and to kiss as much as we want. My life is beginning again.

Julian pulls away to look at me. He traces my jaw with one finger. “I think—I think you’ve given it to me,” he says, slightly out of breath. “The
deliria
.”

“Love,” I say, and squeeze his waist. “Say it.”

He hesitates for just a second. “Love,” he says, testing the word. Then he smiles. “I think I like it.”

“You’ll grow to love it. Trust me.” I raise myself on my tip-toes and Julian kisses my nose, then skims his lips over my cheekbones, brushing against my ear, planting tiny kisses across the crown of my head.

“Promise me we’ll stay together, okay?” His eyes are once again the clear blue of a perfectly transparent pool. They are eyes to swim in, to float in, forever. “You and me.”

“I promise,” I say.

Behind us the door creaks open, and I turn around, expecting Raven, just as a voice cuts through the air: “Don’t believe her.”

The whole world closes around me, like an eyelid: For a moment, everything goes dark.

I am falling. My ears are full of rushing; I have been sucked into a tunnel, a place of pressure and chaos. My head is about to explode.

He looks different. He is much thinner, and a scar runs from his eyebrow all the way down to his jaw. On his neck, just behind his left ear, a small tattooed number curves around the three-pronged scar that fooled me, for so long, into believing he was cured. His eyes—once a sweet, melted brown, like syrup—have hardened. Now they are stony, impenetrable.

Only his hair is the same: that auburn crown, like leaves in autumn.

Impossible. I close my eyes and reopen them: the boy from a dream, from a different lifetime. A boy brought back from the dead.

Alex.

About the Author

LAUREN OLIVER captivated readers with her first novel, the
New York Times
bestseller
BEFORE I FALL
, a
Publishers Weekly
Best Book of the Year. She followed that up with
DELIRIUM
, the first book in her bestselling, heart-stopping trilogy. Oliver is also the author of a luminous novel for younger readers,
LIESL
&
PO
. A graduate of the University of Chicago and NYU’s MFA program, she lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can visit her online at www.laurenoliverbooks.com.

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Other Works

BEFORE I FALL

DELIRIUM

LIESL & PO

Credits

Cover design by Erin Fitzsimmons

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Pandemonium

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Oliver, Lauren.

Pandemonium / Lauren Oliver.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Sequel to: Delirium.

Summary: After falling in love, Lena and Alex flee their oppressive society where love is outlawed and everyone must receive “the cure”—an operation that makes them immune to the delirium of love—but Lena alone manages to find her way to a community of resistance fighters. Although she is bereft without the boy she loves, her struggles seem to be leading her toward a new love.