Read an Extract from Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan

Rae was speechless, with no idea what happened in that scene.

In this hospital, doors had metal loops set in the white doors. You could grab onto the loops if you were feeling unsteady, and ease the door open. The door swung behind Alice with a force that made the squat water glass beside Rae’s narrow bed shake.

Her sister leaving was no surprise. Rae had already driven everyone else away.

Rae turned her head on the pillow and stared out of the silver-blank window, pressing her lips tight together. Then she heaved herself out of bed like an old woman emerging from a bath. She tottered towards the door on legs skinny as sticks that tried to slide out from under her and skitter across the floor. Sometimes Rae felt it wasn’t her legs betraying her, but a world that no longer wanted her tipping her over the edge.

When Rae opened the door, Alice was standing right outside. She fell into Rae’s arms.

“Hey, ugly,” Rae whispered. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry,” sobbed Alice. “I shouldn’t make a fuss over a dumb story.”

“It’s our favourite story.”

Rae was the organized sister. She’d colour-coded their schedule at the convention to optimize their experience. She’d helped Alice make her costume. The story was something they did together.

The story wasn’t real, but love made it matter.

Alice pressed her face into Rae’s shoulder. Rae felt the heat of Alice’s cheeks and the tears sliding from under her glasses, leaving wet spots on Rae’s hospital gown.

“Remember how you used to tell me stories?” Alice whispered. Rae used to do a lot of things.

For now, she could hold her sister. It was strange to be skinnier than reed-thin Alice. Rae was withering away to nothing. Alice had grown more real than Rae would ever be again.

She pressed a kiss to her sister’s ruffled hair. “I’ll tell you a story tomorrow.”

“Really?”

“Trust me. This will be the greatest story you ever heard.” She gave her sister an encouraging push.

Alice hesitated. “Mom will come by if she manages to close the deal.”

Their mother was in real estate. She worked long past visiting hours. They both knew she wasn’t coming. Rae did the cheesy pose from their mother’s posters and delivered the slogan. “‘Live in your fantasy home!’”

Alice was almost gone when Rae called, “Funnyface?”

Her sister turned, trembling with dark beseeching eyes. A fawn lost in the hospital.

Rae said, “I love you.”

Alice smiled a heartbreakingly beautiful smile. Rae staggered back to bed, and lay on her face. She hadn’t wanted Alice to see how exhausted she was from simply raising her voice.

She reached for Time of Iron beside her bed. The first grab failed. Rae gritted her teeth and grasped the book, then found her fingers shaking too badly to open it. Rae hid her face in the pillow. She didn’t have the energy to cry long before she passed out, still holding the closed book.

 

 

When she woke a strange woman sat by her bedside, Rae’s book in her hands. The woman wasn’t wearing a white coat or a nurse’s uniform, but black leggings and an oversized white T-shirt. Box braids were twined into a bun atop her head, and her gaze on Rae was coolly assessing.

Blurred with sleep, Rae mumbled, “Did you get the wrong room?”

The woman answered, “I hope not. Listen carefully, Rachel Parilla. There is much you don’t know. Let’s talk chemotherapy.”

Shock dragged Rae into wakefulness. There was a lever on the side of her bed that propped it up on a slant. Rae pushed the lever so her mattress jerked upward and she could glare from a better angle.

“What is it you think I don’t know?”

Rae gestured to her head with one chicken-wing arm. She got sweaty in her sleep and knew the sheen of moisture on her bald scalp gleamed in the fluorescent lights.

The woman leaned back as if the hospital chair was comfortable. She traced Time of Iron’s cover with a fingertip, her golden nail polish a glittering contrast to her deep brown skin and the glossy book jacket.

“The tumours in your lymph nodes have grown more aggressive. Your prognosis was always grim, but hope remained. Soon the doctors will tell you hope is gone.”

Rae’s head spun, leaving her sick and out of breath. She wanted to sink to the floor, but she was already lying down.

The woman continued, relentless: “The insurance isn’t enough. Your mother will re-mortgage. She will lose her job. Your family loses their house. They lose everything, and their sacrifice means nothing. You die anyway.”

Rae’s breath was a storm shaking the wreck of her body. She scrab- bled for any emotion that wasn’t panic and clutched at anger. She grabbed her water glass and threw it at the woman’s head. The glass smashed onto the floor into a thousand tiny sharp diamonds.

“Do you get a sick thrill from torturing cancer patients? Get out!”

The woman remained composed. “Here’s the last thing you don’t know. Will you save yourself, Rae? Would you go to Eyam?”

Had this lady escaped from the psychiatric ward? Rae hadn’t even known there was a psychiatric ward. She stabbed the button to summon the nurses.

“Great suggestion. I’ll buy a plane ticket to a country that doesn’t exist.”

“Who says Eyam isn’t real?”

“Me,” said Rae. “Bookstores who put Time of Iron on shelves marked fiction.”

She stabbed the button repeatedly. Come save your patient, nurses!

“Consider this. You say ‘I love you’ to someone you don’t know. Is that a lie?”

Rae regarded the woman warily. “Yes.”

The woman’s eyes were still in a way that suggested depth, much happening below the tranquil surface.

“Later you learn the heart of the person you lied to. You say the same words, and ‘I love you’ is a great truth. Is truth stone, or is it water? If enough people walk through a world in their imaginations, a path forms. What’s reality, except something that really affects us? If enough people believe in something, doesn’t it become real?”

“No,” said Rae flatly. “Reality doesn’t require faith. I’m real, all on my own.”

The woman smiled. “Maybe somebody believes in you.” Wow, someone was getting the good drugs.

“It’s a story.”

“Everything is a story. What is evil? What is love? People decide upon them, each taking a jagged shard of belief and piecing the shards together. Enough blood and tears can buy a life. Enough faith can make something true. People invent truth the same way they do everything else: together.”

Once Rae led her cheerleading team. Once her family worked as a team, helping each other, until Rae couldn’t help anyone any longer. Once upon a time was a long time ago.

“What gives a story meaning?” the woman pursued. “What gives your life meaning?”

Nothing. That was the insulting truth of death. The worst thing that had ever happened to Rae didn’t really matter. Her desperate struggle made no difference. The world was moving on without her. These days Rae was all alone with death.

That was the true reason she loved the Emperor. Finding a favour- ite character was discovering a soul made of words that spoke to your own. He never

held back and he never gave up. He was her rage unleashed. She didn’t love the Emperor despite his sins, she loved him for his sins.

At least one of them could fight.

In Greek plays, catharsis was achieved when the audience saw treachery, twisted love, and disaster. They purged through impossible tragedy until their hearts were clean. In a story, you were allowed to be wracked by feelings too terrible for reality to hold. If Rae showed how furious she felt, she would lose the few people she had left. She was powerless, but the Emperor shook the stars from the sky. Rae shook with him, in the confines of her narrow hospital bed. He was company for her there.

Rae refused to be a hopeful fool. “I can’t go to Eyam. Nobody can.”

A real country would have a map, she wanted to argue, then remembered the map of Eyam that took up the best part of Alice’s bedroom wall. Rae had seen the jagged peaks and pencil-thin swoops of the Cliffs Cold as Loneliness, the sprawl of the Valerius family’s great estate, and the palace’s intricate secret passages, grand throne room and greenhouse.

Rae had never been to Eyam. She’d never been to Peru either. She still believed in Peru.

The woman gestured. “I can give you an open door.”

“That door leads to a hospital hallway.”

“Does the door lead, or do you? Walk out of this room and find yourself in Eyam, in the body of the person most suited to you. A body the previous occupant is no longer using. In Eyam, the Flower of Life and Death blooms once a year. You get one chance. Discover how to get into the imperial greenhouse and steal the flower when it blooms. Once you have the flower, a new door will open. Until then, your body sleeps waiting for you. If you get the flower, you wake up, cured. If you don’t get the flower, you don’t wake up.”

“Why are you doing this?” Rae demanded.

There was a serious note in the woman’s voice. “For love.”

“How many people have taken you up on your offer?”

“Too many.” The woman sounded a little sad.

“How many woke up cured?”

“Maybe you’ll be the first.”

The button to summon the nurses was obviously broken. Rae could stick her head out into the passage and yell for help, or stay here getting ranted at.

Rae chose action.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed, setting her feet on the floor. Moving through the world when sick took focus. Every step was a decision Rae made while weighing her odds. It was like being on top of the cheerleading pyramid. A wrong move meant a bad fall.

The woman’s voice rang at her back. “When the story takes and twists you, will you beg for mercy?”

Desire flew through Rae sharp and bright as a burning arrow. What if the offer was real? Her lips curved at the wild sweet notion. Imagine a door could open as a book does, right into a story. Imagine a big adventure instead of hospital walls closing in and life narrowing down to nothing. Being not an escape artist but an art escapist, running away to imaginary lands.

Behind a bathroom door while Rae threw up bile and blood, she’d heard a teacherly voice tell her mother, Time to let her go. Rae couldn’t let herself go. She was all she had.

Once she believed her future would be an epic. She hadn’t known she would only get a prologue.

She no longer had a ponytail, but she tossed her head and fired a wink over her shoulder. “By the time I’m done with it, the story will beg me for mercy.”

Rae grabbed the loop of the door handle. She pushed the door open with all her remaining strength.

Light broke like sparkling glass in her eyes, followed by rushing darkness. Rae looked over her shoulder in alarm. Colour drained from the world behind her, leaving her hospital room black and white as ink on a page.