Luminosity (Gravity Series #3) (The Gravity Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t move, and being incorporeal, she didn’t disturb the mattress. She had come back to me as a ghost last year after I’d destroyed a sacrificial symbol she had been bled on. Not your usual test of friendship, but at least we’d passed.
    I’d figured out how she was killed, but I’d also promised to get to the bottom of why she was killed, and I hadn’t reached an answer yet. My plan was to identify the bigger picture. In the past few months, however, Jenna had acted blasé about the whole thing, even making jokes about her death. School and life had gotten in the way of investigating.
    “You look like you had a rough day,” she said. I’d grown used to the fact that she was always dressed in the summer outfit she died in, despite the chill of the basement.
    “Rough isn’t really the word. Frustrating is more like it.” I tried adjusting my pillow under my head, but I could still feel every lump.
    “Feel like talking about it?”
    “I met Theo’s dad.” I had previously explained about Theo to Jenna although she didn’t seem to completely grasp the concept of my having a new best friend. Sometimes our friendship appeared to make her jealous. “He’s a total jerk to her, and to me, although I wasn’t nice myself.”
    “You, not nice? How is that possible?” Jenna joked, smirking at me.
    “Meh. It’s possible. I wish you could have been there; you would have told him off properly. Then I come home and I find my parents ready to jump into a cage match. Get this—Claire’s got it in her head that she’s going to join Thornhill.”
    Jenna frowned, looking bewildered. “Why would she do that?”
    “Well, supposedly it’s only a first meeting. But I know how my mom works; if she wants to get in, she’ll find a way. The one thing I don’t understand is why they approached her.”
    “That’s really weird,” Jenna agreed.
    I rubbed the back of my neck, my muscle strained with tension. “What do you think? Do you think that they’re headed for a divorce or something?”
    Jenna surprised me by giggling her high-pitched, eerie ghost laugh. It sounded so unlike the guttural guffaw she’d had in life. “What, do you think that by dying I got a degree in marriage counseling at the pearly gates?”
    “No, I’m just asking someone whose parents were having trouble,” I said. “Someone who is supposed to be my best friend.”
    She shrugged noncommittally. “Believe me or don’t, but I think the sand is running out of the hourglass on that one, chica.”
    “I can’t even think straight,” I said, rubbing both of my temples with my fingertips.
    “Probably didn’t help that you didn’t sleep well last night.”
    “What do you mean?” I asked, trying and failing to sound like I didn’t know what she was talking about. I dropped my hands and stared at her.
    “You were tossing and turning like crazy,” Jenna said, peering at me curiously and tilting her head to the side. Her curly hair tumbled over her shoulder.
    “Must have been something I ate.”
    She continued to stare at me suspiciously, as if expecting a better answer. Then she got up and went to the door. “Sweet dreams,” she said, and left me alone.
    In reality, I was frightened of going to sleep, in case I woke up in front of the Dexter Orphanage again. Being drawn inside by its force, towards the flames eating away at the roof and heat scalding my skin, terrified me. It didn’t seem like a rational fear when I was around other people at school. But now, alone in my room, it seemed inevitable and dangerous.
    I didn’t want to vocalize this to Jenna. Why make her worry when I didn’t know if there was a reason behind it?
    I wrote in my science notebook for a little while, trying to concoct a theory about the birds for Golem’s class. I came up dry; the cold front really did seem like a logical explanation. My eyes were getting blurry, the lids heavy, and I told myself I’d just rest them for a moment.
    The next thing I