by Kaleb Nation
I lifted it up and to test it, snapped one picture. The flash lit up my room and sent another thrill of joy through me. I pressed the review button. The screen immediately changed to show the most recent photograph on the hard drive—it still worked!
Then, at a sudden urge, I clicked the button to go back. The photo unexpectedly changed to one of my sister.
Alli was standing at the corner of a street, head turned away slightly like she had whirled to avoid my lens. But the exposed half of her face was covered in a smile, because she had been laughing as I had struggled to get a snapshot of her. I remembered this scene perfectly—this was the last walk home from school that I had gotten to have with her before…everything. My sister’s face was untainted by fear. This photograph was purity.
I looked around the room at the tatters of the photos on the walls, at everything that remained of my Great Work. I could replace it. I was certain that this was not the end.
There was a creak from the doorway and I looked up quickly. When Callista leaned her head in, I relaxed.
“How’s Alli?” I asked her. She held rolled up papers in the crook of her arm, already studying the walls with astonishment as she stepped inside. She’d never been here before, never seen my Great Work, and I guessed that my description of it had paled in comparison to the real thing. She stammered before she managed to answer me.
“She’s alright,” Callista replied. “Thad called and said she’ll be fine. He’ll probably break her out of there tonight.”
I grinned slightly. Thad’s idea was to take Alli to a small town hospital many miles from Los Angeles. They’d treat her first before asking who she was, or any of the other questions that would follow upon her identification: like how the girl that Michael Asher had supposedly burned to death was, in fact, still alive. We’d be long gone before anyone discovered who Alli was, and she’d have been treated by then.
Callista was enthralled by my photos. She stepped in so that she could see them better, turning in a circle to take it all in. She shook her head and didn’t even try to disguise the wonder in her eyes.
“That’s a lot of pictures,” she said. I nodded.
“I need to get started on a new one,” I told her with a grin. I lifted my camera, snapping a flash at her, but she was quicker. Her hands blocked her eyes and face from view, even though she laughed behind them, until I gave up. She fell to sit next to me with a sigh, dropping the papers into my lap.
“These were outside,” she told me with a lifted eyebrow.
One was a newspaper with my photo on the front page. In the picture, I was being shoved into the armored truck, bloodied and handcuffed with my eyes half-closed and my mouth dangling open grossly. Half of my face was covered by an uplifted microphone from one of the other reporters.
“They call this photography?” I said with disgust. “They couldn’t snap a single one where you can see all of my face?” I fluffed the paper open. “Methinks they should have hired Michael Asher for this.”
Callista let out a light groan of apathy. The headline of the paper read: TEENAGE TERRORIST MICHAEL ASHER LABELED PSYCHOPATH, ESCAPES DURING TRANSPORT. I was really getting a lot of prefixes and suffixes to my name now: Teenager, Terrorist, Psychopath…Ninja Turtle, next? I read the first few lines of the article—the chief of investigation vowed to find me, to avenge their horribly mutilated officers found in an (unusually empty) airplane hangar, to hunt me down until I was brought to justice. There was a new crime, too: I was being accused of an electrical fire that’d burned down a mansion in Beverly Hills.
The rest didn’t seem too interesting so I tossed the paper aside. It was hard to take the media seriously when I knew the truth and how far from it they allowed themselves to venture. It made me wonder how many others had been falsely vilified like me.
There was something else underneath the newspaper. A white envelope.
I glanced up at Callista, doubting what I first believed. The expression on her face nudged me to go on. So I flipped it over and saw my name in bold letters on its front.
The envelope was torn apart in a moment, a single page fluttering into my lap. I spread it open with shaking hands:
To: Mr. Asher,
By the mere fact of you reading this, you have proven that I misjudged you in many ways. It is an error I happily welcome.
You have taken a step down a path from which you cannot turn back, an irreversible decision to remove the coat of one life and take on the armor of another. I will admit to believing you were not strong enough. But you have reminded me of a simple truth: not all things can be judged by appearances. Sometimes behind the mask of a normal person hides the face of a hero.
You have caused a stir where one has never been felt before. Perhaps it is time for the next step in the Grand Design.
Prepare yourself. Don’t trust anyone.
ANON
My hands fell slowly, letting the letter slide into my lap. I couldn’t avoid the thrill that burst from deep inside me, so much that my cheeks felt warm and my fingertips felt electrified. Anon, in his own sparing words, had voiced his renewed support of me, and all at once my failures seemed to be wiped away.
“You know, for the longest time I was sure we weren’t going to make it,” I told Callista, shrugging in an attempt to summarize all the near-deaths we’d faced, and to disguise my excitement. She saw right through me and gave another of her half-grins in return.
“Then Michael, it’s a good thing you’re hardly ever right,” she said.
My first reaction was to counter her, but I didn’t. Not long ago, such a reply would have been an insult to me, but now it was merely a reminder of all the things we’d been through, all the times that I’d thought I was in control and wasn’t. Somehow, we’d ended up alright.
“What else was I not right about?” I asked her suddenly. She looked up to meet my eyes. A burning question in the back of my mind returned, one that I’d barely realized was there until that moment. She waited for me to embellish and continue, and I almost didn’t.
“When you kissed me on the cliff,” I blurted. “Was that really just to make you feel better, or did you mean it?”
She gave that same enthralling, ambiguous smile. For a few moments, we stared at each other across the four or five inches again, the cavern between us almost bridged, if only she would drop her final piece into the center. I wasn’t sure what I wanted her to do, how I wished she would react. Did I want a yes? A no? I couldn’t figure my own hopes out. So I waited for her.
Instead, with a shrug, she gathered her fallen hair back behind her shoulders.
“What do you think, Mr. Eye Guy?” she said elusively. Then she reached across to my hand and took the camera out of it. She turned away, holding it at arm’s length to snap a photo of her face, then dropped it back into my lap.
She pushed up from the bed and walked across my room. Gone again.
The moment she disappeared, my gaze shifted down to the camera, to read the ever-unpredictable truth that hid behind her eyes.
THE END OF BOOK ONE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KALEB NATION is an author and online personality. His blogs and videos have received over 50 million hits online, and he has been featured on NPR, Entertainment Weekly, The Huffington Post and more.
While writing Harken, Kaleb documented his progress through video blogs at Youtube.com/KalebNation. A black belt in taekwondo, Kaleb lives in California with his chinchilla. Harken is his first novel for teens.
Kaleb regularly posts on Twitter (@KalebNation) and blogs at KalebNation.com.
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&
nbsp; Acknowledgements
Louie Pinto, Randy Hancock, Stephen Hall, Peng Joon, Laurence Oliviero, Karsten Arend & Sam Mikhail
for believing in me and making this book far bigger than I could have made it alone,
My Los Angeles YouTube Family
for Maggiano’s and Hollywood Sign nights away from my desk,
The FTW Crew
for poking through my Skype invisibility cloak and making me communicate with people who are not imaginary,
Rachul Gensburg
for dragging me outside to get food that was not cooked by microwave,
Kim Fuller
for suffering through the first draft, the second draft, and all the others, swearing to never let that awful stuff leak out (you did, right?),
Ilana Zackon
for daily manuscript critiques across two countries, from my office to your bedroom closet,
Karen Hansen
for knowing far more about how moms think than I ever will,
Ari Corsetti and Rie Goldie
for being unrelenting, and never letting me slide when you knew I could do better,
Zane Spraggins, Jackie Asbury, Robyn Schneider, Lauren Suero & Cassidy Tucker
for pre-reading this book and helping me get it ready for the world,
The Bennings
for letting me ride in your magnificent Shelby GT500 Mustang, all in the name of research (of course),
Louis Beckett & Ferrari Maserati Beverly Hills
for letting me take photos of your dealership’s Maserati even though I couldn’t buy it (yet),
Elana Roth
for gently telling me what needed to be changed in my first draft, which turned out to be everything,
Taylor
for making the book sparkle more,
And The NATIONEERS
for watching from the very beginning as this story came to life.
SPECIAL ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank the early online fans of HARKEN
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Ally Burgett
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allyson jordan
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