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Overview
Team-written by some of today?ÇÖs most exciting authors, ReMade is brought to you by Matthew Cody (Super), Andrea Phillips (Revision), New York Times Bestseller Kiersten White (And I Darken), Gwenda Bond (Girl on a Wire), Carrie Harris (Bad Taste in Boys), and E. C. Myers (The Silence of Six).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781682101285 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Realm |
| Publication date: | 03/28/2024 |
| Series: | ReMade Series , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 333 |
| Sales rank: | 906,653 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 13 - 17 Years |
About the Author
Kiersten White is the New York Times bestselling author of the Paranormalcy trilogy, the Mind Games series, Illusions of Fate, The Chaos of Stars, In the Shadows with artist Jim Di Bartolo, and the upcoming historical reimagining, And I Darken. She has one tall husband and three small children and lives near the ocean, where her life is perfectly normal. She also gives the world’s most awkward hugs. kierstenwhite.com. @KierstenWhite.
E. C. Myers was assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and a public library in Yonkers, New York. He garnered a degree in Visual Arts from Columbia University which he completely neglects to use in his current life as a freelance writer and editor. A graduate of Clarion West, his stories have been published in Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and Space and Time magazine. His novel Fair Coin won the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy. ECMyers.net. @ECMyers.
Andrea Phillips is a transmedia writer, game designer and author. She is on the writing team for season 2 of the urban fantasy serial Bookburners as well as ReMade. Her debut novel is Revision, an SF thriller about a wiki where your edits come true. She has also worked on iOS fitness games Zombies, Run! and The Walk; The Maester's Path for HBO's Game of Thrones; human rights game America 2049; and the independent commercial ARG Perplex City. She also writes an ongoing column about video games called "Metagames" for Strange Horizons. Her nonfiction book A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling is used to teach digital storytelling at universities around the world. AndreaPhillips.com. @Andrhia.
Carrie Harris was born in Chicago but if you ask her, she’ll say she’s from Ohio. Her interests include English Literature, brains, and hot geek boys. She has held a string of very incongruous jobs but in between autopsies and studying mad cows, she wrote for various tabletop roleplaying games and textbook companies. These days she writes books for teens, tweens, and adults while also being the Marketing Director for Evil Hat Productions. Her published works include Bad Taste in Boys, and Demon Derby. CarrieHarrisBooks.com. @CarrHarr.
Gwenda Bond writes for children and young adults. Her books include Lois Lane: Fallout, Girl on a Wire, and Girl in the Shadows, as well as the graphic novel Girl Over Paris with Kate Leth and Ming Doyle. She holds an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and has written for Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post amongst others. She currently resides in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky with her husband and their menagerie. GwendaBond.com. @Gwenda.
Read an Excerpt
Someone shouted Holden's name. A girl's voice, calling to him—or had he been dreaming? Either way, he didn't like getting yelled at. He wanted to ask her to calm down, he wanted to ask what was wrong, but when he tried to talk his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth like cotton. He opened his eyes, but the bright light overhead burned spots into his vision. He closed them again and he saw little exploding stars.
"I'm sorry," he mumbled, but his words didn't sound right in his own ears. His thick tongue got in the way.
Then the dream—surely he must be dreaming—changed. A beautiful girl leaned over him. Almond skin and a dusting of glitter on her cheeks like frost. She wore a crown of leaves in her hair.
She whispered in his ear. "O, how I love thee. How I dote on thee!"
Holden knew that face. It belonged to Titania the Fairy Queen. Wait, that wasn't right.
The Fairy Queen suddenly screamed his name, terrified.
The next time he opened his eyes there were monsters. They surrounded him, poked at him with spindly metallic arms. He saw himself reflected in their glassy eyes, multifaceted like prisms. A dozen Holdens all screamed at once, but someone had turned his voice off. There was no sound. When he tried to fight back his body wouldn't do what he asked it to. He couldn't even close his eyes anymore; he couldn't blink. He had to watch what they were doing as they jabbed him with needles that made his body spasm.
"He's awake," said a voice near his ear. Rough, gravelly. Not like Titania's at all. "You shouldn't do this to him while he's awake. It hurts him."
All at once the metal spiders froze, like Holden was living in a video that had stopped playing. Buffering . . . buffering . . .
They came back to life as one of them jabbed another needle into Holden's throat.
"It hurts him!" said the voice again, and Holden was looking into the face of one of the ugliest women he'd ever seen. Her heavy brow and broad, whiskered chin made her look almost simian. But she smiled at him with her yellow, crooked teeth and laid a hand on his forehead.
"Go back to sleep," she whispered in his ear. "We'll wake you when it's all over." There was a tiny pinprick as she stuck him with a needle of her own, but this one didn't hurt so much. Within seconds all the pain went away and Holden was sinking into a warm, dark bath. The woman's hands were rough and calloused, but she was gentle as she brushed her fingers over his eyes, closing them for him as one would for a corpse.
Two things occurred to him before he slipped back into darkness. First, he wondered if Titania would be waiting for him. And second, he feared that he hadn't been dreaming at all.
---
Holden Black wanted to be absolutely sure he'd be the last one out of the building, so he sat alone in his dressing room and waited. It was really a storage closet, but for the weekend run of A Midsummer Night's Dream it did double duty. For the time being, he had to share it with a plastic mop bucket on wheels and several crates of industrial-strength cleaner—the kind that was strong enough to dissolve dried gum off desks. Using grease paint from his makeup kit, Holden had drawn a smiley face on one of the bottles and started using it as a wig stand. Unfortunately, the school janitors still used this closet during the daytime, because when Holden arrived at half-hour tonight there was a note taped to it that read, "Pls clean! NOT a toy!"
Holden's sparkly wig now hung on a mop pole instead.
Being the only male, Holden couldn't dress with the other fairies, so he was stuck with a makeshift dressing room inside a janitor's closet. That meant he was also closest to the "cafetorium" that doubled as a stage. Laughter and congratulations filled the lobby just outside his door. The closet didn't lock from the inside, so Holden changed into his street clothes as fast as he could, making sure to keep his back to the door. Not that anyone would get curious about a janitor's closet, but still. Holden could just picture that door accidentally opening onto a crowded roomful of teenagers and their parents, and him standing there in his boxer briefs and eye shadow. It would be a Holden moment to remember.
He nearly tripped over his own legs as he yanked his jeans on, but it was even harder getting off his glittery stage makeup. The only water in the closet came out of a slop sink, and Holden didn't trust the brownish liquid that sputtered from that faucet, so he did the best he could with wet wipes and a handheld mirror. The glitter had gotten everywhere, and the eye shadow made him look like a raccoon. His fairy tights had given him jock itch.
I should take a picture of all this crap, he thought. Start a Tumblr called "What's the stupidest thing you've done for love?"
He finished cleaning off his makeup as best he could, but there were still voices outside. People sure were taking their time high-fiving one another.
To pass the minutes, Holden used the grease paint to doodle on a few more bottles of cleaner. At first he kept the smiley face theme, but then he switched to really pissed-off faces. After all, how would you feel if you were a bottle of industrial strength gum dissolver? He hid these ones way in the back of the crates. Maybe one day they'd give someone a laugh.
He ignored the lone card on his makeshift dressing table. It sat there unopened, with his name written in curling letters and the message "Break a leg!" carefully hand drawn to look like the words were exploding out of a champagne bottle. Holden hadn't read what was on the inside. Eventually he would, just not yet.
In time, the commotion outside his door died down and Holden grabbed his backpack. Three new texts on his phone, all from the same person, but he didn't read them. Time for that later. He started out the door, stopped, went back for the unopened card, and shoved it into his pocket.
I'll deal with it tonight. I will.
The cafetorium was finally empty. The rest of the cast would already be headed to the opening night party, but not Holden. No cast party, no way. He'd rather die than spend the next few hours glued to the snack table. Don't mind me. I don't care if no one bothers to talk to me. I'm cool being alone. Just me and the onion dip, yo.
He couldn't go home yet, anyway. There were still the unanswered texts on his phone, the unopened card in his backpack. His phone buzzed in his pocket. Shit. He couldn't put it off any longer. I'll stop by on the way home. We'll talk. Make it quick, like pulling off a Band-Aid, right?
Right. He should at least read the card first. It would be a dick move not to—he resolved to read it just as soon as he got to his car.
Holden thought he'd be the last one to leave, but when he stepped out into the parking lot he was surprised to find another car still there. By the light of the streetlamps he recognized the Darwin fish-with-legs sticker on the back bumper, incongruously sandwiched between stickers for Amnesty International and the Police Officers' Association.
Holden stopped and stared, his car keys dangling from his hand and his heart pounding up near his ears.
Seyah Jackson sat in the driver's seat, her face lit blue by the glow of the phone she held to her ear. She kept turning the key in the ignition, but nothing happened. Holden stood there like a dumb statue, like a bottle with a face painted on it. After a few more tries she finally gave up and opened the car door. That's when she spotted Holden standing there in the shadows.
"Wait, stay on with me for a minute," she said into the phone. "There's some guy standing here watching me."
Some guy?
Of course. He must look like a psycho killer standing stock-still in the dark parking lot. Christ, he was straight out of a Japanese horror film.
"Hey, Titania," he said, stepping into the light of the streetlamp. "It's me!"
She stopped and squinted at him. "Peaseblossom?"
"Uh, Mustardseed, actually," he said. "Something wrong with your car?"
She relaxed a little and talked into the phone. "No, it's one of the fairies. Mustardseed . . . Yeah, the boy one. Hold on." She cupped her hand over the phone and said to Holden, "It won't start."
Holden knew absolutely nothing about cars, so what he said next was pointless, but it seemed the thing for a guy to do. "You want me to take a look?"
"It's cool," she said, still talking into the phone. "Let me call you back." Then, smiling at Holden, "I think the battery's dead. I probably left my lights on."
"I do that all the time." He'd never done it even once.
"I'm sorry, but I'm totally blanking on your name."
"Oh, it's Holden. We ran lines together once on a break. Well, you ran lines, I didn't really have any in that scene." Or any at all. The director had cut Holden's part, which was small to begin with, down to a walk-on role.
"Right, of course. I didn't want to keep calling you Mustardseed."
"The name sucks," said Holden. "Titania's not bad, though. Shakespeare was better at naming his leads, I guess."
"I guess. So, do you want me to pop the hood?"
"Huh?"
"You said you could take a look at the engine."
"Oh, yeah," said Holden. "Yeah, pop the hood. I'll look at the engine and see if . . . You know. What's up in there."
Holden lifted the hood as Seyah leaned over his shoulder and used her phone as a flashlight. He tried to keep his eyes on the engine and not stare directly at her from only inches away. Because that would be creepy. Almost as creepy as commenting on how good her shampoo smelled, not too flowery but tart like a freshly sliced lemon.
That would be super creepy.
"Hmm." Holden touched a few things under the hood. Tapped on a metal thing here, peered interestedly at that other thing there. "I don't really see anything wrong." It was technically true.
Seyah sighed. "Yeah, I think it's the battery. My friends were gonna leave the cast party and come and get me, but you don't have any jumper cables, do you?"
Holden paused as he pictured the cables his dad made him carry in his trunk. They were still wrapped in the store plastic, ready to use.
The phone vibrated in his pocket. Another text. And a split-second decision.
Yeah, what is the stupidest thing you've ever done for love?
"No jumper cables, sorry," lied Holden. "But if you want, I can give you a ride to the party. I'm headed there anyway."