State of Grace Read Online Free PDF

the lights. Over and over, so mesmerising and peaceful and beautiful I’m starting to wonder if Blaze has a point about being quiet sometimes.
    In the end, I’m the first to suggest going to sleep. I’m shaking off my wet arms and legs when Blaze goes, ‘How about here?’
    I’d been busy imagining the awesomely soft bed back in my hut. I definitely had not been planning on spending the entire night with Blaze. But now he’s said it, sleeping right here seems sort of okay. So I curl up in the grass and Blaze lies down beside me. Not touching or anything but nearby, definitely.
    ‘Comfy?’ I ask. ‘I can shift over.’
    When I hook up with someone (which is basically the only time I’m ever sleeping beside someone else) I always have to be the last one to say something. Beside me, Blaze’s breathing has already gone all deep and slow.
    ‘See you in the morning.’
    ‘Yeah,’ he says. His lifts his hand and rests it on my lower back.
    You’re okay , he seems to mean, without actually having to say it.
    I tell him, ‘Goodnight.’
    In a soft, blurry mumble he adds, ‘Sleep tight.’
    And that’s when this cold, precalm feeling starts creeping its way all over me. Even though sleep tight doesn’t mean anything, it really feels like it does. There’s something about that combination of words, but I can’t say what. All I know is, I don’t want Blaze to keep talking.
    Even though there’s no way I can know what Blaze is going to say, I know what comes next even before he actually says it.
    ‘Don’t let the bed bugs bite.’
    Then Blaze makes this snuffling sound, which is how I know for sure that he’s asleep.
    Not me.
    Goodnight, sleep tight, don’t let the beg bugs bite keeps kind of rolling around and around in my head. And suddenly I’m thinking a whole lot of things that make no sense at all.

05
    I T’S LIKE LOOKING at pieces of a broken water jug or something. That’s the best way I can describe it. All these fragments tumbling through the air and I can only glimpse each one before it’s gone. Except the fragments aren’t bits of clay or anything like that. Instead they’re images. Pictures inside my head.
    I’m sitting on a bed, but it’s not my bed. At least, not the bed in my hut or anyone else’s either. I’m somewhere I’ve never seen before. Which, by the way, is impossible because I’ve been inside every hut in creation. I don’t recognise the bed cover, blue with a pattern of clouds on it. Or the wooden X hanging from the roof with all the coloured balls dangling off it.
    A word swims into my head.
    Mobile .
    Is that what it’s called? How do I know that?
    I see other things in the room. A fluffy purple animal with a bit of tongue showing in the corner of its mouth, not moving or anything. Apparently not real.
    Rows and rows of what I somehow recognise as books. But they’re not the Books of Dot. They don’t even have screens.
    Then it gets even more prenormal. Because next thing I’m looking at is a whole entire person I don’t know. He’s much smaller than any of Dot’s creations. Creations fell from the sky in all different sizes, sure, but there’s not a single one as small as this. As in, this little person is maybe half my height. Perfectly formed, only in miniature. Stunted, I guess you could say. And he’s just sitting all casually beside me in bed.
    I reach out to smooth the little creature’s hair but as soon as I flatten one curl another springs up somewhere else. Seriously, it’s major stomach-flop material because I realise I feel something for him, whoever or whatever the creature is.
    His hair isn’t even down to his chin, let alone covering his neck, which is the minimum length according to the Books. And the thing about that is, my own hair’s hardly any longer. It’s the usual reddish-brownish colour but it doesn’t spiral down my back the way it should.
    That’s not the only way I look different. I’m wearing some kind of sleeveless sungarb