Daughter of Deep Silence - Softcover

Ryan, Carrie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0147511607 ISBN 13: 9780147511607

Verlag: Speak, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Available in paperback in a new look!

I’m the daughter of murdered parents.
I’m the friend of a dead girl.
I’m the lover of my enemy.
And I will have my revenge.
 
In the wake of the devastating destruction of the luxury yacht Persephone, just three souls remain to tell its story—and two of them are lying. Only Frances Mace knows the terrifying truth, and she’ll stop at nothing to avenge the murders of everyone she held dear. Even if it means taking down the boy she loves and possibly losing herself in the process.
 
Sharp and incisive, Daughter of Deep Silence by bestselling author Carrie Ryan is a deliciously smart revenge thriller that examines perceptions of identity, love, and the lengths to which one girl is willing to go when she thinks she has nothing to lose.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Carrie Ryan is the New York Times bestselling author of multiple books for both middle-grade and young adult readers, including the Forest of Hands and Teeth trilogy, Infinity Ring series, and The Map to Everywhere. Born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina, Carrie is a graduate of Williams College and Duke University School of Law. A former litigator, she now writes full time. She lives with her writer/lawyer husband, two fat cats and one large rescue mutt in Charlotte, North Carolina. They are not at all prepared for the zombie apocalypse. You can find her online at www.carrieryan.com or @CarrieRyan.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2015 Daughter of Deep Silence

 ONE

When they pull me onto the yacht, I can’t even stand I’ve been adrift in the ocean so long. A young crewman sits me on a teak bench while he calls out for someone to bring him blankets and water. He asks me my name but my tongue is too thick and my throat too raw from screaming and salt water to answer.

I’m alive, I think to myself. The words run on an endless loop through my head as if with repetition I’ll somehow believe it. I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive.

And Libby isn’t.

I should be feeling something more. But it’s all too much too fast. Inside I’m awash with numbness that cocoons a brightly burning knot of rage and despair. Protecting me. For now.

A pair of crewmen pull Libby’s body from the life raft, rolling her onto her back on the yacht’s gleaming deck. I think about how birds have hollow bones and how easy it must be to break them.

That’s how she looks right now: hollow. Her cheeks sunken, her wrists twigs wrapped in tight skin that’s turned to leather from relentless heat and exposure.

A crewman presses his fingers against her neck, a palm in the center of her chest. His expression slides from desperate hope into a mask of efficient resignation. He looks up to where an older man with a ring of white hair around his otherwise bald head hovers, waiting. The crewman shakes his head.

The older man lets out a cry, his face crumpling as he falls to his knees by Libby’s side. He only says one word over and over again as he pushes a tangle of wet hair out of her face: no. His voice cracks and his shoulders slump, shaking, as he sobs.

If I had any tears left in me I’d be crying too, but I’m so dehydrated that all I can do is shake, my lungs spasming with hiccups. I try to talk, my mouth forming a wh– sound over and over again.

“Shh.” The crewman who rescued me drapes a blanket around my shoulders. “It’s okay, you’re safe now.”

I want to believe him. But all I can do is stare at Libby’s body. An hour earlier, and they’d have found her alive. She might have survived. Seven days adrift in the middle of the ocean, and she’d lost it in the last hour.

It doesn’t seem fair. We were supposed to make it together. We’d promised.

Her body is so light and brittle it takes only one person to carry her inside the ship. The older man does it, clutching her against his chest, his eyes red and lips pressed tight together.

“My baby,” he whispers against her temple. Understanding hits with a physical force: This is Libby’s father. He glances at me as he passes, his expression bewildered, and I know he’s wondering the same thing I’ve already been thinking: Why am I the one who survived? Why couldn’t it have been her pulled alive from the raft?

I want to apologize, but seeing him with Libby—a father cradling his broken daughter—I can’t. The unfairness of it is monstrous. I would give anything to have my father here now, to feel him holding me and protecting me the way Libby’s father does.

And he would give anything for his daughter to still be alive.

I close my eyes, unable to stand it. Because in this moment I truly understand just how alone I am. How no one will ever again hold me and care about me the way Libby’s father does her. My parents are dead. Libby is dead. I have no relatives— no other family waiting for me.

I am alone. Utterly and irrevocably alone.

Memories storm through me, fast and sharp, in an unrelenting strobe of sensations—sounds, smells, fragments of sentences. I feel my mother’s hand against my forehead checking for a fever some night, years ago. I hear the way she sneezes, big and loud, and my father laughing in response the way he always, always does.

There’s the smell of the car on the winter morning we go to pick out a Christmas tree, my father singing along to the carols on the radio with his voice always just slightly out of tune. I taste french fries—my fingers slick with fast-food grease—my mom’s treat to me as she drives me home from summer camp.

I lick my lips and gag at the taste of salt. The memories come faster, running over one another, drowning me. Panic claws its way up my throat. My nails are soft and cracked from so long in the water and they split past the quick as I try to dig them into the skin along my thighs, wishing I could gouge it all out of me. The memories. The loss. The pain. The refrain that’s been unspooling in my head for days: gone, gone, they’re all gone, your life is gone.

And inevitably, images from the attack come next: the gun pressed to my father’s head. The blood drenching my mother’s shirt. She’d begged, but it hadn’t mattered. It didn’t matter for anyone on that cruise ship. They’d all been massacred.

Three hundred twenty-seven. That was the total number of passengers and crew on the Persephone. It was one of the things we’d learned during the safety drill before leaving port. In the end, it never mattered how many people a life raft could hold. It never mattered where each cabin’s muster station was.

Nothing we learned during the safety drill mattered.

The attack had come swift and hard in the middle of the night. One minute life on the Persephone was normal, the next the ship was rocked with explosions. They blocked the exits while armed men went room to room, systematic in their assault. Faces passive, expressions detached from their actions, they’d pulled triggers and reloaded magazines with sickening efficiency.

Killing them all.

The bodies. Oh God, the bodies. And the blood and the screams and the smell of it all, like overripe peaches stuffed with pennies.

I gasp and shudder. It was only luck that allowed Libby and me to escape. We talked about it relentlessly during those next seven days adrift, the impossibility that we’d somehow survived.

All of that and she’d ended up dead anyway. It’s so brutally unfair.

The young crewman pushes a plastic bottle of water into my hand, forcing me back into the present. My throat clenches. The bottle’s cold—freezing against my palm—and there’s condensation dripping along the outside. I fumble to open it, my fingers useless, my muscles too weak to even lift it. Finally he takes mercy and twists the cap free.

“Drink slow,” he says, but in my world there’s no such thing and I press that bottle hard to my lips. If I’d died the instant that water rushed across my tongue I wouldn’t have cared. I’m sharply aware of each drop as it cascades down my throat and into my hollow belly. Nothing exists then but that taste—that sensation.

“Easy now,” the man says, gently prying the bottle from my lips. “You don’t want to make yourself sick.” He’s too late; already my stomach revolts in painful cramps. I turn and vomit.

The man rubs my back as I heave, telling me again that I’ll be okay. That I’m safe. “What’s your name?” he asks when I’ve recovered enough to sit up again.

I press the back of my hand to my mouth. My skin tastes like salt, making me retch. “Frances,” I try to tell him, the sound nothing more than a tattered thread.

The storm that had been threatening at the edge of the sky all day finally breaks, sending fat drops of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Speak
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0147511607
• ISBN 13: 9780147511607
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Terminal Video; n.pederzini@terminaldistribuzione.com; ; Via Bruno Buozzi, 24/26,; Granarolo dell'Emilia BO,; Italien