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Audio Book (MP3) [ 164.1 Mb ]Street Date: Monday, December 14, 2009  Audio Book (WMA) [ 83.7 Mb ]Street Date: Monday, December 14, 2009 Listen to the MP3 excerpt of this title! Listen to the WMA excerpt of this title! Prologue | YOU'RE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE Wisty IT'S OVERWHELMING. A city's worth of angry faces staring at me like I'm a wicked criminal—which, I promise you, I'm not. The stadium is filled to capacity—past capacity. People are standing in the aisles, the stairwells, on the concrete ramparts, and a few extra thousand are camped out on the playing field. There are no football teams here today. They wouldn't be able to get out of the locker-room tunnels if they tried. This total abomination is being broadcast on TV and the Internet too. All the useless magazines are here, and the useless newspapers. Yep, I see cameramen in elevated roosts at intervals around the stadium. There's even one of those remote-controlled cameras that runs around on wires above the field. There it is—hovering just in front of the stage, bobbing slightly in the breeze. So there are undoubtedly millions more eyes watching than I can see. But it's the ones here in the stadium that are breaking my heart. To be confronted with tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of curious, uncaring, or at least indifferent, faces...talk about frightening. And there are no moist eyes, never mind tears. No words of protest. No stomping feet. No fists raised in solidarity. No inkling that anybody's even thinking of surging forward, breaking through the security cordon, and carrying my family to safety. Clearly, this is not a good day for us Allgoods. In fact, as the countdown ticker flashes on the giant video screens at either end of the stadium, it's looking like this will be our last day. It's a point driven home by the very tall, bald man up in the tower they've erected midfield—he looks like a cross between a Supreme Court chief justice and Ming the Merciless. I know who he is. I've actually met him. He's The One Who Is The One. Directly behind his Oneness is a huge N.O. banner— THE NEW ORDER. And then the crowd begins to chant, almost sing, "The One Who Is The One! The One Who Is The One!" Imperiously, The One raises his hand, and his hooded lackeys on the stage push us forward, at least as far as the ropes around our necks will allow. I see my brother, Whit, handsome and brave, looking down at the platform mechanism. Calculating if there's any way to jam it, some means of keeping it from unlatching and dropping us to our neck-snapping deaths. Wondering if there's a last-minute way out of this. See my mother crying quietly. Not for herself, of course, but for Whit and me. I see my father, his tall frame stooped with resignation, smiling at me and my brother—trying to keep our spirits up, reminding us that there's no point in being miserable in our last moments on this planet. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm supposed to be providing an introduction here, not the details of our public execution. So let's go back a bit.... Part One | NO CRIME JUST PUNISHMENT Chapter 1 Whit SOMETIMES YOU WAKE UP and the world is just plain different. The noise of a circling helicopter is what made me open my eyes. A cold, blue-white light forced its way through the blinds and flooded the living room. Almost like it was day. But it wasn't. I peered at the clock on the DVD player through blurry eyes: 2:10 a.m. I became aware of a steady drub, drub, drub—like the sound of a heavy heartbeat. Throbbing. Pressing in. Getting closer. What's going on? I staggered to the window, forcing my body back to life after two hours of being passed out on the sofa, and peeked through the slats. And then I stepped back and rubbed my eyes. Hard. Because there's no way I had seen what I'd seen. And there was no way I had heard what I'd heard. Was it really the steady, relentless footfall of hundreds of soldiers? Marching on my street in perfect unison? The road wasn't close enough to the center of town to be on any holiday parade routes, much less to have armed men in combat fatigues coursing down it in the dead of night. I shook my head and bounced up and down a few times, kind of like I do in my warm-ups. Wake up, Whit. I slapped myself for good measure. And then I looked again. There they were. Soldiers marching down our street. Hundreds of them as clear as day, made visible by a half-dozen truck-mounted spotlights. Just one thought was running laps inside my head: This can't be happening. This can't be happening. This can't be happening. Then I remembered the elections, the new government, the ravings of my parents about the trouble the country was in, the special broadcasts on TV, the political petitions my classmates were circulating online, the heated debates between teachers at school. None of it meant anything to me until that second. And before I could piece it all together, the vanguard of the formation stopped in front of my house. Almost faster than I could comprehend, two armed squads detached themselves from the phalanx and sprinted across the lawn like commandos, one running around the back of the house, the other taking position in front. I jumped away from the window. I could tell they weren't here to protect me and my family. I had to warn Mom, Dad, Wisty— But just as I started to yell, the front door was knocked off its hinges. Part One | NO CRIME JUST PUNISHMENT Chapter 2 Wisty IT'S QUITE HIDEOUS to get kidnapped in the dead of night, right inside your own home. It went something like this. I woke to the chaotic crashing of overturning furniture, quickly followed by the sounds of shattering glass, possibly some of Mom's china. Oh God, Whit, I thought, shaking my head sleepily. My older brother had grown four inches and gained thirty pounds of muscle in the past year. Which made him the biggest and fastest quarterback around, and, I must say, the most intimidating player on our regional high school's undefeated football team. Off the playing field, though, Whit could be about as clumsy as your average bear—if your average bear were hopped-up on a case of Red Bull and full of himself because he could bench-press 275 and every girl in school thought he was the hunk of all hunks. I rolled over and pulled my pillow around my head. Even before the drinking started, Whit couldn't walk through our house without knocking something over. Total bull-in-a-china-shop syndrome. But that wasn't the real problem tonight, I knew. Because three months ago, his girlfriend, Celia, had literally vanished without a trace. And by now everyone was thinking she probably would never come back. Her parents were totally messed up about it, and so was Whit. To be honest, so was I. Celia was—is—very pretty, smart, not conceited at all. She's this totally cool girl, even though she has money. Celia's father owns the luxury-car dealership in town, and her mom is a former beauty queen. I couldn't believe something like that would happen to someone like Celia. I heard my parents' bedroom door open and snuggled back down into my cozy, flannel-sheeted bed. Next came Dad's booming voice, and he was as angry as I've ever heard him. "This can't be happening! You have no right to be here. Leave our house now!" I bolted upright, wide awake. Then came more crashing sounds, and I thought I heard someone moan in pain. Had Whit fallen and cracked his head? Had my dad been hurt? Jeez, Louise, I thought, scrambling out of bed. "I'm coming, Dad! Are you all right? Dad?" And then the nightmare to start a lifetime of nightmares truly began. I gasped as my bedroom door crashed open. Two hulking men in dark-gray uniforms burst into my room, glaring at me as if I were a fugitive terrorist-cell operative. "It's her! Wisteria Allgood!" one said, and a light bright enough to illuminate an airplane hangar obliterated the darkness. I tried to shield my eyes as my heart kicked into overdrive. "Who are you?!" I asked. "What are you doing in my freaking bedroom?" Part One | NO CRIME JUST PUNISHMENT Chapter 3 Wisty "BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL with her!" one of the humongous men cautioned. They looked like Special Forces operatives with giant white numbers on their uniforms. "You know she can—" The other nodded, glancing around my room nervously. "You!" he snapped harshly. "Come with us! We're from the New Order. Move one step out of line, and we will punish you severely!" I stared at him, my head spinning. The New Order? These weren't ordinary policemen or EMS personnel. "Um—I—I—," I stammered. "I need to put on some clothes. Can I...can I have a little privacy?" "Shut up!" the first commando guy barked. "Grab her! And protect yourself. She's dangerous—all of them are." "No! Stop! Don't you dare!" I screamed. "Dad! Mom! Whit!" Then it hit me like a runaway tractor trailer on ice. This was what had happened to Celia, wasn't it? Oh God! Cold sweat beaded on the back of my neck. I need to get out of here, I thought desperately. Somehow, some way. I need to disappear. Part One | NO CRIME JUST PUNISHMENT Chapter 4 Wisty THE SERIOUSLY MUSCLE-BOUND MEN in gray suddenly froze, their blocklike heads whipping back and forth like puppets on strings. "Where is she? She's gone! Vanished! Where'd she go?" one said, his voice hoarse and panicky. They shone flashlights around the room. One of them dropped to his knees and searched under my bed; the other rushed over to look in my closet. Where'd I go? Were these guys totally insane? I was right there. What was going on? Maybe they were trying to trick me into running for it so they had an excuse to use force. Or maybe they were escapees from an asylum who had come to get me the way they'd come to get poor Celia— "Wisty!" My mom's anxious shout from the hallway pierced the fog that had invaded my brain. "Run away, sweetheart!" "Mom!" I shrieked. The two guys blinked and stepped back in surprise. "There she is! Grab her! She's right there! quick, before she disappears again!" Big klutzy hands grabbed my arms and legs, then my head. "Let me go!" I screamed, kicking and struggling. "Let. Me. Go." But their grip was like steel as they dragged me down the hall to the family room and dumped me on the floor like a sack of trash. I quickly scrambled to my feet, more floodlights whiting out my vision. Then I heard Whit shouting as he was thrown onto the living room floor next to me. "Whit, what's going on? Who are these...monsters?" "Wisty!" he gasped, coherently enough. "You okay?" "No." I almost cried, but I couldn't, wouldn't, absolutely refused, to let them see me wuss out. Every awful true-crime movie I'd ever seen flashed through my head, and my stomach heaved. I nestled close to my brother, who took my hand in his and squeezed. Suddenly the floodlights turned off, leaving us blinking and shaking. "Mom?" Whit shouted. "Dad?" If my brother hadn't been stone-cold sober already, he sure was now. I gasped. My parents were standing there, still in their rumpled pajamas, but held from behind like they were dangerous criminals. Sure, we lived on the wrong side of the tracks, but no one in our family had ever been in trouble before. Part One | NO CRIME JUST PUNISHMENT Chapter 5 Wisty ONE OF THE MOST TERRIFYING THINGS in the world you can never hope to see is your parents, wide-eyed, helpless, and truly scared out of their wits. My parents. I thought they could protect us from anything. They were different from other parents...so smart, gentle, accepting, knowing...and I could tell at this moment that they knew something Whit and I didn't. They know what is going on. And they're terrified of it, whatever it is. "Mom...?" I asked, staring hard into her eyes, trying to get any message I could, any signal about what I should do now. As I looked at Mom, I had a flash, a collage of memories. She and Dad saying stuff like "You and Whit are special, honey. Really special. Sometimes people are afraid of those who are different. Being afraid makes them angry and unreasonable." But all parents thought their kids were special, right? "I mean, you're really special, Wisty," Mom had said once, taking my chin in her palm. "Pay attention, dear." Then three more figures stepped forward from the shadows. Two of them had guns on their belts. This was really getting out of hand. Guns? Soldiers? In our house? In a free country? In the middle of the night? A school night, even. "Wisteria Allgood?" As they moved into the light, I saw two men and... Byron Swain? Byron was a kid from my high school, a year older than I, a year younger than Whit. As far as I knew, we both hated his guts. Everyone did. "What are you doing here, Swain?" Whit snarled. "Get out of our house." Byron. It was like his parents knew he'd turn out to be a snot, so they'd named him appropriately. "Make me," Byron said to Whit, then he gave a smarmy, oily smile, vividly bringing to life all the times I'd seen him in school and thought, What a total butt. He had slicked-back brown hair, perfectly combed, and cold hazel eyes. Like an iguana's. So this jerk extraordinaire was flanked by two commandos in dark uniforms, shiny black boots that came above their knees, and metal helmets. The entire world was turning upside down, with me in my ridiculous pink kitty jammies. "What are you doing here?" I echoed Whit. "Wisteria Allgood," Byron monotoned like a bailiff, and pulled out an actual scroll of official-looking paper. "The New Order is taking you into custody until your trial. You are hereby accused of being a witch." My jaw dropped. "A witch? Are you nuts?" I shrieked.  $0.49 Rewards 
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Chapter 1 Part 1 Discontinuity 1: Seeker For thirty million years the planet had cooled and dried, until, in the north, ice sheets gouged at the continents. The belt of forest that had once stretched across Africa and Eurasia, nearly continuous from the Atlantic coast to the Far East, had broken into dwindling pockets. The creatures who had once inhabited that timeless green had been forced to adapt, or move. Seeker's kind had done both. Her infant clinging to her chest, Seeker crouched in the shadows at the fringe of the scrap of forest. Her deep eyes, under their bony hood of brow, peered out into brightness. The land beyond the forest was a plain, drenched in light and heat. It was a place of terrible simplicity, where death came swiftly. But it was a place of opportunity. This place would one day be the border country between Pakistan and Afghanistan, called by some the North-West Frontier. Today, not far from the ragged fringe of the forest, an antelope carcass lay on the ground. The animal was not long dead-its wounds still oozed sticky blood-but the lions had already eaten their fill, and the other scavengers of the plain, the hyenas and the birds, had yet to discover it. Seeker stood upright, unfolding her long legs, and peered around. Seeker was an ape. Her body, thickly covered with dense black hair, was little more than a meter tall. Carrying little fat, her skin was slack. Her face was pulled forward into a muzzle, and her limbs were relics of an arboreal past: she had long arms, short legs. She looked very like a chimpanzee, in fact, but the split of her kind from those cousins of the deeper forest already lay some three million years in the past. Seeker stood comfortably upright, a true biped, her hips and pelvis more human than any chimp's. Seeker's kind were scavengers, and not particularly effective ones. But they had advantages that no other animal in the world possessed. Cocooned in the unchanging forest, no chimp would ever make a tool as complex as the crude but laboriously crafted axe Seeker held in her fingers. And there was something in her eyes, a spark, beyond any other ape. There was no sign of immediate danger. She stepped boldly out into the sun, her child clinging to her chest. One by one, timidly, walking upright or knuckle-walking, the rest of the troop followed her. The infant squealed and pinched her mother's fur painfully. Seeker's kind had no names-these creatures' language was still little more sophisticated than the songs of birds-but since she had been born, this baby, Seeker's second, had been ferociously strong in the way she clung onto her mother, and Seeker thought of her as something like "Grasper." Burdened by the child, Seeker was among the last of the troop to reach the fallen antelope, and the others were already hacking with their chipped stones at the cartilage and skin that connected the animal's limbs to its body. This butchery was a way to get a fast return of meat; the limbs could be hauled quickly back to the relative safety of the forest, and consumed at leisure. Seeker joined in the work with a will. The harsh sunlight was uncomfortable, though. It would be another million years before Seeker's remote descendants, much more human in form, could stay out in the light, in bodies able to sweat and store moisture in fatty reserves, bodies like spacesuits built to survive the savannah. The shrinking of the world forest had been a catastrophe for the apes that had once inhabited it.... $0.59 Rewards
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Audio Book (MP3) [ 192.8 Mb ]Street Date: Tuesday, May 10, 2005 Audio Book (WMA) [ 86.4 Mb ]Street Date: Tuesday, May 10, 2005 Listen to the MP3 excerpt of this title! Listen to the WMA excerpt of this title!     
Adobe ePub [ 2.3 Mb ]Street Date: Tuesday, December 18, 2007 Adobe Digital Edition [ 1.3 Mb ]Street Date: Tuesday, December 18, 2007 Microsoft Reader [ 0.6 Mb ]Street Date: Tuesday, December 18, 2007 MobiPocket (OD) [ 0.4 Mb ]Street Date: Tuesday, December 18, 2007 eReader [ 0.3 Mb ]Street Date: Tuesday, December 18, 2007 Audio Book (MP3) [ 35.7 Mb ]Street Date: Monday, January 25, 2010 Audio Book (WMA) [ 18.2 Mb ]Street Date: Monday, January 25, 2010 Listen to the MP3 excerpt of this title! Listen to the WMA excerpt of this title! From the bookChapter One At eight o'clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn't feel very good. He woke up blearily, got up, wandered blearily round his room, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and stomped off to the bathroom to wash. Toothpaste on the brush--so. Scrub. Shaving mirror--pointing at the ceiling. He adjusted it. For a moment it reflected a second bulldozer through the bathroom window. Properly adjusted, it reflected Arthur Dent's bristles. He shaved them off, washed, dried and stomped off to the kitchen to find something pleasant to put in his mouth. Kettle, plug, fridge, milk, coffee. Yawn. The word bulldozer wandered through his mind for a moment in search of something to connect with. The bulldozer outside the kitchen window was quite a big one. He stared at it. "Yellow," he thought, and stomped off back to his bedroom to get dressed. Passing the bathroom he stopped to drink a large glass of water, and another. He began to suspect that he was hung over. Why was he hung over? Had he been drinking the night be- fore? He supposed that he must have been. He caught a glint in the shaving mirror. "Yellow," he thought, and stomped on to the bedroom. He stood and thought. The pub, he thought. Oh dear, the pub. He vaguely remembered being angry, angry about something that seemed important. He'd been telling people about it, telling people about it at great length, he rather suspected: his clearest visual recollection was of glazed looks on other people's faces. Something about a new bypass he'd just found out about. It had been in the pipeline for months only no one seemed to have known about it. Ridiculous. He took a swig of water. It would sort itself out, he'd decided, no one wanted a bypass, the council didn't have a leg to stand on. It would sort itself out. God, what a terrible hangover it had earned him though. He looked at himself in the wardrobe mirror. He stuck out his tongue. "Yellow," he thought. The word yellow wandered through... $0.49 Rewards
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From the book ReturnBisesa Dutt gasped, and staggered. She was standing. She didn't know where she was. Music was playing. She stared at a wall, which showed the magnified image of an impossibly beautiful young man crooning into an old-fashioned microphone. Impossible, yes; he was a synth-star, a distillation of the inchoate longings of subteen girls. "My God, he looks like Alexander the Great." Bisesa could barely take her eyes off the wall's moving colors, its brightness. She had forgotten how drab and dun-colored Mir had been. But then, Mir had been another world altogether. Aristotle said, "Good morning, Bisesa. This is your regular alarm call. Breakfast is waiting downstairs. The news headlines today are--" "Shut up." Her voice was a dusty desert croak. "Of course." The synthetic boy sang on softly. She glanced around. This was her bedroom, in her London apartment. It seemed small, cluttered. The bed was big, soft, not slept in. She walked to the window. Her military-issue boots were heavy on the carpet and left footprints of crimson dust. The sky was gray, on the cusp of sunrise, and the skyline of London was emerging from the flatness of silhouette. "Aristotle." "Bisesa?" "What's the date?" "Tuesday." "The date." "Ah. The ninth of June, 2037." "I should be in Afghanistan." Aristotle coughed. "I've grown used to your sudden changes of plans, Bisesa. I remember once--" "Mum?" The voice was small, sleepy. Bisesa turned. Myra was barefoot, her tummy stuck out, fist rubbing at one eye, hair tousled, a barely awake eight-year-old. She was wearing her favorite pajamas, the ones across which cartoon characters gamboled, even though they were now about two sizes too small for her. "You didn't say you were coming home." Something broke inside Bisesa. She reached out. "Oh, Myra--" Her daughter recoiled. "You smell funny." Shocked, Bisesa glanced down at herself. In her jumpsuit, scuffed and torn and coated with sweat-soaked sand, she was as out of place in this twenty-first-century London flat as if she had been wearing a spacesuit. She forced a smile. "I guess I need a shower. Then we'll have breakfast, and I'll tell you all about it . . ." The light changed, subtly. She turned to the window. There was an Eye over the city, a silver sphere, floating like a barrage balloon. She couldn't tell how far away it was, or how big. But she knew it was an instrument of the Firstborn, who had transported her to Mir, another world, and brought her home. And over the rooftops of London, a baleful sun was rising. The Peak of Eternal Light Mikhail Martynov had devoted his life to the study of Earth's star. And from the first moment he saw the sun, at the beginning of that fateful day, he knew, deep in his bones, that something was wrong. "Good morning, Mikhail. The time on the Moon is two o'clock in the morning. Good morning, Mikhail. The time is two o'clock and fifteen seconds. Good morning . . ." "Thank you, Thales." But he was already up and moving. As always he had woken to within a minute of his personal schedule, without need of Thales's softly spoken electronic wake-up call, a schedule... $0.49 Rewards
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Chapter One February 2069 It wasn't like waking. It was a sudden emergence, a clash of cymbals. Her eyes gaped wide open, and were filled with dazzling light. She dragged deep breaths into her lungs, and gasped with the shock of selfhood. Shock, yes. She shouldn't be conscious. Something was wrong. A pale shape swam in the air. "Doctor Heyer?" "No. No, Mum, it's me." That face came into focus a little more, and there was her daughter, that strong face, those clear blue eyes, those slightly heavy dark brows. There was something on her cheek, though, some kind of symbol. A tattoo? "Myra?" She found her throat scratchy, her voice a husk. She had a dim sense, now, of lying on her back, of a room around her, of equipment and people just out of her field of view. "What went wrong?" "Wrong?" "Why wasn't I put into estivation?" Myra hesitated. "Mum--what date do you think it is?" "2050. June fifth." "No. It's 2069, Mum. February. Nineteen years later. The hibernation worked." Now Bisesa saw strands of gray in Myra's dark hair, wrinkles gathering around those sharp eyes. Myra said, "As you can see I took the long way round." It must be true. Bisesa had taken another vast, unlikely step on her personal odyssey through time. "Oh, my." Another face loomed over Bisesa. "Doctor Heyer?" "No. Doctor Heyer has long retired. My name is Doctor Stanton. We're going to begin the full resanguination now. I'm afraid it's going to hurt." Bisesa tried to lick her lips. "Why am I awake?" she asked, and she immediately answered her own question. "Oh. The Firstborn." What could it be but them? "A new threat." Myra's face crumpled with hurt. "You've been away for nineteen years. The first thing you ask about is the Firstborn. I'll come see you when you're fully revived." "Myra, wait--" But Myra had gone. The new doctor was right. It hurt. But Bisesa had once been a soldier in the British Army. She forced herself not to cry out. From the Hardcover edition. $0.42 Rewards
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Listen to the WMA excerpt of this title! From the book DISCOVERY Eragon knelt in a bed of trampled reed grass and scanned the tracks with a practiced eye. The prints told him that the deer had been in the meadow only a half-hour before. Soon they would bed down. His target, a small doe with a pronounced limp in her left forefoot, was still with the herd. He was amazed she had made it so far without a wolf or bear catching her. The sky was clear and dark, and a slight breeze stirred the air. A silvery cloud drifted over the mountains that surrounded him, its edges glowing with ruddy light cast from the harvest moon cradled between two peaks. Streams flowed down the mountains from stolid glaciers and glistening snowpacks. A brooding mist crept along the valley's floor, almost thick enough to obscure his feet. Eragon was fifteen, less than a year from manhood. Dark eyebrows rested above his intense brown eyes. His clothes were worn from work. A hunting knife with a bone handle was sheathed at his belt, and a buckskin tube protected his yew bow from the mist. He carried a wood-frame pack. The deer had led him deep into the Spine, a range of untamed mountains that extended up and down the land of Alagaësia. Strange tales and men often came from those mountains, usually boding ill. Despite that, Eragon did not fear the Spine--he was the only hunter near Carvahall who dared track game deep into its craggy recesses. It was the third night of the hunt, and his food was half gone. If he did not fell the doe, he would be forced to return home empty- handed. His family needed the meat for the rapidly approaching winter and could not afford to buy it in Carvahall. Eragon stood with quiet assurance in the dusky moonlight, then strode into the forest toward a glen where he was sure the deer would rest. The trees blocked the sky from view and cast feathery shadows on the ground. He looked at the tracks only occasionally; he knew the way. At the glen, he strung his bow with a sure touch, then drew three arrows and nocked one, holding the others in his left hand. The moonlight revealed twenty or so motionless lumps where the deer lay in the grass. The doe he wanted was at the edge of the herd, her left foreleg stretched out awkwardly. Eragon slowly crept closer, keeping the bow ready. All his work of the past three days had led to this moment. He took a last steadying breath and--an explosion shattered the night. The herd bolted. Eragon lunged forward, racing through the grass as a fiery wind surged past his cheek. He slid to a stop and loosed an arrow at the bounding doe. It missed by a finger's breadth and hissed into darkness. He cursed and spun around, instinctively nocking another arrow. Behind him, where the deer had been, smoldered a large circle of grass and trees. Many of the pines stood bare of their needles. The grass outside the charring was flattened. A wisp of smoke curled in the air, carrying a burnt smell. In the center of the blast radius lay a polished blue stone. Mist snaked across the scorched area and swirled insubstantial tendrils over the stone. Eragon watched for danger for several long minutes, but the only thing that moved was the mist. Cautiously, he released the tension from his bow and moved forward. Moonlight cast him in pale shadow as he stopped before the stone. He nudged it with an arrow, then jumped back. Nothing happened, so he warily picked it up. Nature had never polished a stone as smooth as this one. Its flawless surface was dark blue, except for thin veins of white that... $0.38 Rewards
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