Tether Read Online Free PDF Page A

done.
    “Grant,” I said, suddenly remembering the reason we were there in the first place. “Why did you call me?”
    Grant cleared his throat. “I’m moving.”
    “
Moving?
Moving where?”
    “My dad offered to let me live with him,” he said. “For the rest of the summer.”
    “And after that?”
    He shrugged. “We’ll see how it goes.”
    “But Los Angeles is so far away.” Grant wouldn’t stay in touch. When you’re running from something, you’re not supposed to look back. Cutting ties would be easy for him. He was dying to do it. He just hadn’t been able to work up the nerve until now.
    He paused, shuffling wood chips with the toe of his Chucks. “I can’t breathe here. There’s no way I’ll be able to survive another year.” Grant was supposed to start college in the fall, but he’d deferred, because he couldn’t bear to thinkabout school. Neither could I; every time I caught a glimpse of September on the calendar, I started to panic. In a classroom full of people, there would be nowhere to hide.
    “What’s that look?” he asked, searching my face.
    “Nothing,” I said, because the truth was embarrassing. As much as it hurt to look at Grant, the prospect of never seeing him again was a hundred times worse. He was the only connection to Thomas I had left, and the only person on Earth who understood even a fraction of what I’d experienced. Without him, I would truly be alone.
    And then, all of a sudden, Grant’s face wasn’t his face, and it wasn’t Thomas’s, either. It was another boy’s, nobody I recognized. I could see him only dimly, as if I were looking through a piece of fogged-up glass. His lips moved, but I couldn’t hear him at first, and then his voice came at me in a rush of sound:
Are you sure you want to do this?
I didn’t know how to answer him, or if I even could, but I heard myself say
Yes, I’m sure
before his face faded away.
    “Sasha?” Grant shook my shoulder. I blinked, trying to erase the image of the unfamiliar boy’s face from my mind. “Are you okay?”
    “I’m fine.” Maybe I should’ve told him, but I didn’t know how to explain it, not even to myself. All I could be sure of was that the visions coming through the tether that bound me to Juliana were getting worse. They didn’t happen only in dreams anymore. They could strike at any moment, shards of another life slicing through my own reality. Sometimes I couldn’t tell whether something was happening to me or to my analog.
    And sometimes I couldn’t tell whether the visions were coming from Juliana or someone else. These new visions were not like the ones I’d had before. They feltdifferent—intentional, even. Like messages instead of dreams. I was afraid to think too hard about who might be sending them, but I knew she was there, and that neither she nor Juliana was going away. I would have done anything to make them stop, but I couldn’t figure out what to do.
    “Come on,” Grant said, steering me toward the sidewalk. “How about you let
me
walk
you
home? It’s getting dark.”
    The house was empty. Most of the time, I liked the quiet, but tonight it was oppressive. It was weird having Granddad gone; he hadn’t wanted to leave me alone, but his hovering was getting on my nerves and I persuaded him to give me space. I needed time to finish my project. It would be a relief not to have to hide what I was doing. I could spread out across the whole house if I wanted.
    The first thing I did when I got to my room was the first thing I did every time I woke up, or came home, and the last thing I did before bed every night. Two items had come with me through the tandem—just two, plus Juliana’s clothes, which I’d been wearing. The clothes had lost their magic a long time ago, but I pulled a plastic bag out of my nightstand drawer, removed its contents, and laid them flat on the bed.
    Item number one was the drawing Callum had given me in the Castle gardens. The edges were torn where