We present an extract from Long Live Evil, the new book by Sarah Rees Brennan.
When her whole life collapsed, Rae still had books. Dying, she seizes a second chance at living: a magical bargain that lets her enter the world of her favourite fantasy series. She wakes in a castle on the edge of a hellish chasm, in a kingdom on the brink of war. Home to dangerous monsters, scheming courtiers and her favourite fictional character: the Once and Forever Emperor. He's impossibly alluring, as only fiction can be. And in this fantasy world, she discovers she's not the heroine, but the villainess in the Emperor's tale...
Rachel is dying, her only comfort a series of fantasy books, and its dangerous main character the Emperor. Until a strange woman walks into her hospital room, and offers her the opportunity to walk into the book, and find a magical cure to her illness. Obviously, Rae has her doubts...
"Consider this. You say 'I love you' to someone you don’t know. Is that a lie?"
Rae regarded the woman warily. "Yes."
The woman’s eyes were still in a way that suggested depth, much happening below the tranquil surface. "Later you learn the heart of the person you lied to. You say the same words, and ‘I love you’ is a great truth. Is truth stone, or is it water? If enough people walk through a world in their imaginations, a path forms. What’s reality, except something that really affects us? If enough people believe in something, doesn’t it become real?"
"No," said Rae flatly. "Reality doesn’t require faith. I’m real, all on my own."
The woman smiled. "Maybe somebody believes in you."
Wow, someone was getting the good drugs.
"It’s a story."
"Everything is a story. What is evil? What is love? People decide upon them, each taking a jagged shard of belief and piecing the shards together. Enough blood and tears can buy a life. Enough faith can make something true. People invent truth the same way they do everything else: together."
Once Rae led her team. Once her family worked as a team, helping each other, until Rae couldn’t help anyone any longer.
Once upon a time was a long time ago.
"What gives a story meaning?" the woman pursued. "What gives your life meaning?"
Nothing. That was the insulting truth of death. The worst thing that had ever happened to Rae didn’t really matter. Her desperate struggle made no difference. The world was moving on without her. These days Rae was all alone with death.
That was the true reason she loved the Emperor. Finding a favourite book character was discovering a soul made of words that spoke to your own. He never held back and he never gave up. He was her rage unleashed. She didn’t love the Emperor despite his sins, she loved him for his sins.
At least one of them could fight.
In Greek plays, catharsis was achieved when the audience saw treachery, twisted love, and disaster. They purged through impossible tragedy until their hearts were clean. In a story, you were allowed to be wracked by feelings too terrible for reality to hold. If Rae showed how furious she felt, she would lose the few people she had left. She was powerless, but the Emperor shook the stars from the sky. Rae shook with him, in the confines of her narrow hospital bed. He was company for her there.
Rae refused to be a hopeful fool. "I can’t go to Eyam. Nobody can."
A real country would have a map, she wanted to argue, then remembered the map of Eyam that took up the best part of her sister’s bedroom wall.
The woman gestured. "I can give you an open door."
"That door leads to a hospital hallway."
"Does the door lead, or do you? Walk out of this room and find yourself in Eyam, in the body of the person most suited to you. A body the previous occupant is no longer using. In Eyam, the Flower of Life and Death blooms once a year. You get one chance. Once you have the flower, a new door will open. Until then, your body sleeps waiting for you. If you get the flower, you wake up, cured. If you don’t get the flower, you don’t wake up."
"Why are you doing this?" Rae demanded.
There was a serious note in the woman’s voice. "For love."
"How many people have taken you up on your offer?"
"Too many." The woman sounded a little sad.
"How many woke up cured?"
"Maybe you’ll be the first."
The button to summon the nurses was obviously broken. Rae could stick her head out into the passage and yell for help, or stay here getting ranted at.
Rae chose action.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed, setting her feet on the floor. Moving through the world when sick took focus. Every step was a decision Rae made while weighing her odds. A wrong move meant a bad fall.
The woman’s voice rang at her back. "When the story takes and twists you, will you beg for mercy?"
Desire flew through Rae sharp and bright as a burning arrow.
What if the offer was real? Her lips curved at the wild sweet notion.
Imagine a door could open as a book does, right into a story. Imagine a big adventure instead of hospital walls closing in and life narrowing down to nothing. Being not an escape artist but an art escapist, running away to imaginary lands.
Behind a bathroom door while Rae threw up bile and blood, she’d heard a voice tell her mother, Time to let her go.
Rae couldn’t let herself go. She was all she had.
Once she believed her future would be an epic. She hadn’t known she would only get a prologue.
She no longer had a ponytail, but she tossed her head and fired a wink over her shoulder. "By the time I’m done with it, the story will beg me for mercy."
Rae grabbed the loop of the door handle. She pushed the door open with all her remaining strength.
Light broke like sparkling glass in her eyes, followed by rushing darkness. Rae looked over her shoulder in alarm. Colour drained from the world behind her, leaving her hospital room black and white as ink on a page.
Long Live Evil is published by Orbit
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