Halo (Blood and Fire Series (A Young Adult Dystopian Series)) Read Online Free PDF

of Falin Asha’s hand. Penny looks like she wants to pull him away from me, but then she covers her face in her hands, which are red and sticky with blood.
    “Zip up your jacket,” she sobs through her fingers. I don’t respond at first, but when she reaches out and slaps me, I do it. The zip comes up so fast I catch the skin beneath my chin, and a lump rises in my throat. It hurts so much, it makes my eyes water. Then, exactly then, is when I realise: my halo, it isn’t working.
    Penny gives me a warning look as the adjudicator approaches, smiling with just the right amount of faux happiness on his face. He offers his hand out to me and I take it so he can pull me upright. I don’t even help him as he drags me up, and it’s only when my feet are firmly underneath me that I swallow hard and look around.
    No one is watching what’s happening on the arena floor. No one could have seen what just took place. Close by, Miranda and Lowrence stand at the edge of their box, talking with Falin Asha’s True father. The man with the same deep brown eyes as Falin Asha shakes his head ruefully while counting out money. He hands it over to Miranda and then his shoulders shake up and down and his face creases, crinkly, because he’s laughing at something my father has said.
    My head is spinning by the time the alarm sounds out overhead, signalling the victor’s announcement. The adjudicator takes hold of my hand carefully as though he expects me to still be hiding a knife up my sleeve.
    “Are you ready?” he asks.
    “Yes,” I tell him. With that, he makes a hand signal to cue up the fanfare, and then we wait a heartbeat. The fanfare kicks in, and the adjudicator lifts my hand into the air, and I lean forward and throw up.

LEAVE

    Cooking smells waft into my bedroom like an unwelcome visitor. My birth mother’s making me vegetable soup, because she thinks I’m still sick. That kind of explains why I’ve been sweating and running a fever for the past three days, and why I have locked myself away in my room. I am suffering from the worst kind of withdrawals, and I never even knew I was drugged. The Sanctuary have rules about quarantine, and staying home and avoiding contact with the outside world is number one on the list. I am so relieved that everyone automatically assumed I am ill, because I don’t think I could have done it. I couldn’t have thought up the lie when it felt like my insides are being crushed. Nothing has ever felt like this.
    I want it to stop.
    Getting home from the Colosseum was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. It felt like I was crumbling from the inside while I worked overtime, trying to keep the emotion from my face. All those times where I’d thought I could live without my halo, without the control ― I couldn’t have been more wrong. I felt everything—the crushing guilt, the sheer horror—on that journey home, and I had to hide it all. The gaping chasm in my chest just grew and grew, and I could only ever imagine it getting bigger.
    Since then I’ve lain here in my bed, checking my halo over and over again. The only place it is still securely attached is around the back of my neck. Everywhere else it lifts up, free from my skin. A jolting, bewildering sensation shoots through me every time I feel it rub against me.
    Thankfully, no one has bothered to visit except my birth mother, who brings me food. It’s easy enough to hide my broken halo from her underneath the blankets. I have no idea what I’m going to do, or how I’m going to control this seething mess of raw feeling inside me. All I know is that my friend wanted me to do this for some reason, and I feel like I owe it to him to follow it through.
    I’m still buried in my sheets when my mother brings in the vegetable soup. We have the same dark chocolate hair and hazel eyes; I’ve been told I am going to look just like her when I grow older, and that makes me panic. Will I be making vegetable soup for a child I feel nothing