Baker Trust

Book One: Between Lions Series
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9864317-0-8
Verlag: Jodi Baker
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 250 Seiten

TRUST is a young adult, mythological, urban fantasy thrill ride about the darkly fantastical, supernatural Libraries that have secretly protected humanity's greatest treasures for millennia, and Anna, the sixteen-year-old New York girl who is the unknowing Heir to it all. Author Jodi Baker's breathtakingly unique brand of storytelling weaves magical mysticism, forbidden romance, and shocking plot twists into this electrifying first installment of her critically acclaimed Between Lions Series that USA Today called, 'Must-Read YA'!

Autoren/Hrsg.

Baker, Jodi

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE My mother was telling the truth when she told me that the ordinary is much safer than the extraordinary.  “Inside this house, you are very important, Anna,” she had said, holding me close. “But when you are out there, don’t ever be extraordinary. Outside our house you must pretend to be middle of the pack.” Middle of the pack was our mantra. It was the rule we lived by outside of the supposed safety of our brownstone. By the age of three, I had already learned not to talk enough to be remembered, but not to be so silent as to be noticed.  “Don’t trust strangers,” she told me. Back then I had imagined they would try to lead me off the path like a wicked wolf.  “No,” she said sternly. “This isn’t a fairy tale, Anna. This isn’t a story. This is your life. I am the only one you can count on. Stay in the middle!” Riding the subway, I sat in the middle of the train.  “Standing people don’t stare at sitting people unless they, or the people they are looking at, are crazy. Sitting people watch standing people, look out the window, or read, but they don’t stare at other sitting people.”  When I went out in the city, I always walked in the middle of the sidewalk.  “Busy New Yorkers weave through and past the middle too quickly to notice anything particular about you. Standing on the outside or the inside allows you to be seen,” my mother warned and I obeyed. Back then I always obeyed.  Getting seen at school wasn’t an issue, since I never went. My mother taught me herself, at home. I was reading by the time I was two-and-a-half, but she didn’t have me at an advanced level as far as New York State was concerned. She sat with me as I filled out the tests, making sure I got just enough right and just enough wrong.  Instead of learning to draw circles and sing the alphabet song, I traced hieroglyphs and danced around the apartment acting out all of the parts of the fairies in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Every day we’d sit on our comfy, tattered, red velvet couch and discuss something amazing like the disappearance of the Mayans or how many mitochondria could be in a tiny cell. We’d compare the ancient Roman and modern American systems of government against Hammurabi’s Eye-for-an-Eye code, take turns listing the next number in the Fibonacci Series, or giggle together at the idea of pigs with wings. The more I learned, the more my mother pushed me like an academic centurion, hurling a daily stream of never-ending, no-wrong-answers-allowed quiz questions at me on every conceivable subject, expecting me to answer not just in English, but Greek, Egyptian, and Latin as well.  I loved every second of it. There was only one thing I ever thought was missing: a friend my own age. Before I was a teenager, I’d only actually talked to another kid once. Even though I didn’t know his name, he was my first and only friend. My mother would take me downtown with her twice a year to sell or barter for books. The bookshop wasn’t the kind of store you’d find at a mall; it was a labyrinth of bookshelves, full of what looked like priceless antiques, but whose titles were no longer legible, interspersed with huge glass cabinets showcasing first editions on well-lit pedestals. The floors and walls were covered in dust, but the treasures on the shelves were always pristine and the space in between the stacks was always empty. Except one day, when tiptoeing through the maze of shelves, I came upon a boy a year or two older than me, sprawled out on the floor.  I panicked, the way you would if you came across a lion lounging in a store aisle.  My initial instinct was to back away quietly, but then our eyes met and I froze. He smiled. I didn’t. His fingers were tangled up in a mess of colorful strings. A deeper look revealed that it was some kind of intricate circle of cords. Extending out from that inner sphere, like rays of the sun, were ornate, frayed strands that had been twisted into different sized and shaped knots. “It’s a Kee-poo,” he said. I wanted to laugh at the name, but the fact that he was acting as if I had asked, as if we were having a conversation - which, I had never really had with anyone besides my mother - was too gigantic. I took a few steps back. “You don’t want to see?” Disappointment was threaded through his words. The urge to please was apparently stronger than my need to flee because I moved towards him. He flashed a grin my way as a reward and then lifted the cords up to his face. The elaborate fringe framed his head like a mane. As the boy rose to stand beside me the sunlight hit, making the dust mites that floated between the multi-colored strings look like fairy dust.  “The knots talk,” he whispered to me, making the other-worldliness of the moment even more potent.  My eyes widened. “Not out loud; the knots talk the way lines and swirls on paper talk.” I knew, instantly, that he meant, like letters on a page. “Most people can’t read them,” he said. “Most people can only read the alphabet, but I like to read other things too, like glyphs.” To this day, I have no idea how the words managed to exit my well-trained-in-the-art-of-not-talking-to-strangers-mouth, but somehow, I found myself telling him:  “I love glyphs.”  “Me too!” I felt the invisible magic strands that stretched between us quadruple and then entwine, binding us together.  “You must read a lot,” he commented. “How do you know that?” The grin came again. “Because you smell like books.” I stared at him. “Want me to show you how to read the Kee-poo?” Before I could answer, my mother’s hand closed around my arm. She pulled me backwards, my heels dragging as I watched the only friend I had ever made get smaller and further away. When we got into the cab outside of the store, my mother didn’t say a word. It wasn’t until after we were uptown and safely locked behind the brownstone door that she grabbed and shook me. I was shocked. My mother had never spoken harshly to me until that moment, at least as far as I can remember. I’ll never forget how her eyes sparked like a blue-gold gas flame, or the way the normally tan skin on her face turned sickly pale.  She was afraid. I know that now.  “You cannot talk to strangers. Once you open your mouth, they will know how smart you are. If anyone finds out you’re smart, they’ll take you from me,” she told me hoarsely and I felt myself start to tremble.  I looked at my beautiful mother and saw the most extraordinary woman in the world, my heart, my home, and my safety blanket. She was everything I knew. My lower lip quivered and tears blurred her from my sight. When she hugged me, I breathed deeply, inhaling her lavender and laundry scent, but her comfort made me more hysterical.  I hadn’t known until that moment that I could lose her.  She smoothed my un-smooth-able hair and kissed my tears away. “I know it’s hard. But we don’t want anyone asking questions. The only way to stay together is for them to think you are like everyone else. Just stick to the middle of the pack,” she preached and I swallowed that sermon into my heart and bones.  But later that night when my mother wasn’t looking, I looked up Kee-poo knots. I told myself that it wasn’t disobedience… it was just research. I used to convince myself of a lot of things like that. The search engine informed me that Kee-poo was actually Quipu, an ancient Incan Writing System. They had used cord color, length, knot type, knot location, and the way the cords were twisted to record their stories the way Egyptians used glyphs on papyrus.  I also found out that Spanish invaders did their best to destroy all of the Quipu they could find centuries ago. Scholars were still struggling to translate the few that remained.  I wanted more than anything to see the boy again, find out how he had learned a secret language no one else understood and get him to teach me to read his magic knots. But my mother never took me there again and I knew better than to ask. Back then, when I had been a little kid, I would have never dared to do anything that might cause me to lose us. After her freak out, I thought I understood why we needed to stay in the middle. Middle people were invisible. We had made a pact to be invisible to everyone on the island of Manhattan except each other, so that neither of us got taken away. It wasn’t until my mom gave me a book called Canines of the Wild, that I found out what a pack actually was: a group of dogs with strict rules that had to be followed by every member or they would be punished - without exception. “Punished how?”  “They get bitten. Food is withheld. They could be banished from the pack. It depends what they did wrong,” my mother shrugged. “The Alpha decides.” “Alpha, like the first letter in the Greek alphabet?” “Exactly. Alpha is first so they get the best of everything, but they get those rights because they have the most responsibilities. They’re responsible for protecting the pack, finding food for everyone, finding safe places to sleep. The others follow her rules because it keeps them...