The Burn Zone Read Online Free PDF Page B

casting dots of blood across the wall next to him, and my feet came up off the floor as Red-stamp stormed across the room, colliding with the coffee table and shattering the glass top. Before I could even get my bearings, she ’ d swung me around in a complete circle and then hurled me away. The room tilted, receding as I flew through the air.
     
    My back hit something hard enough to force the air out of my mouth and nose in a spray of snot and spit. Then the surface behind me gave away with an earsplitting crash.
     
    Everything slowed down, and I saw a million sparkles fly away from me as I passed through the cloud of glass. Shards and chunks spun end over end through glittering powder as the living room curtains rushed out after me on a wave of cool, canned air. For just a second, it formed a faint, smoky fog as the hot, humid night breeze outside washed over me.
     
    The balcony rail passed underneath me as the inside of the apartment fell away. Back through the broken window I could see Dragan lying crumpled and still. My momentum slowed and I fell back, staring up through the sparkling glass bits as the stars wheeled by in the night sky above. Then I plummeted away from the balcony, and the windows of hundreds of apartments whipped past in a blur while my clothes billowed and snapped around me.
     
    Hot summer air roared in my ears as I narrowly missed the huge metal frame of a building sign and neon lights began to streak past in a stream of liquid color. Fifty stories below, past the crisscrossing streams of air-cars, the lights of the street were quickly rushing up to meet me. I screamed over the racket of graviton engines and honking horns.
     
    Something tugged at me from behind, and my skin suddenly began to tingle. The tug grew stronger, and the rushing wind let up until the traffic sounds swallowed it. I ’ d begun to fall more slowly somehow, like I was connected to an invisible elastic band that had stretched taut.
     
    The graviton emitter, I thought. One of them ...
     
    Hanging facedown, I dangled in midair sixty stories above the street, the tingle from the field increasing even as I felt it begin to lose its grip. I was too far away, and I was too heavy. Any second now, I ’ d fall again and this time nothing would be able to stop me.
     
    Below, something flashed. A white point of light appeared, and then a second later the lanes of speeding air traffic directly below me were blotted out by a floating patch of empty space. A thin, bright white outline surrounded it in a perfect hexagon while the inside resolved into a view of an alley that appeared to float in midair.
     
    What the fu—
     
    The tether holding me snapped and I plunged, arms and legs pedaling, into the opening. All at once the city around me disappeared and all sense of movement stopped. For a minute, there was no up or down, no frame of reference at all. I just hung in limbo, like I ’ d been frozen in time.
     
    My ears popped and then just as quickly as I ’ d gone into the hole, I ’ d come out again, still screaming, as I tumbled out the mouth of an alley and skidded a few feet before crashing into the side of a parked car. When I looked up, I saw a crowd of people who were standing under a streetlight look over in surprise.
     
    What the hell?
     
    I stood up, gasping as I took stock of myself. Stinging scratches crisscrossed my face, shoulders, and arms, and one palm burned with road rash, but that was it. I was alive, back on the street just outside our apartment building.
     
    Spinning around, I looked down the sidewalk behind me. A stream of people there had stopped to look back, wondering what was happening. I did a complete turn and saw nothing but staring faces looking down at the girl who ’ d just appeared out of thin air.
     
    Across the street, a scrawny boy sat on the neon fiberglass bug shell of an airbike he ’ d just started, gaping at me. I looked back up the sheer building face toward our apartment, too