First published in Great Britain 2013

by Electric Monkey – an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London, W11 4AN

Copyright © The Shadow Gang 2013

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First e-book edition 2013

ISBN 978 1 7803 1491 4

www.egmont.co.uk

michaelgrantbooks.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Please note: Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont cannot take responsibility for any third party content or advertising. Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet.

EGMONT

Our story began over a century ago, when seventeen-year-old Egmont Harald Petersen found a coin in the street. He was on his way to buy a flyswatter, a small hand-operated printing machine that he then set up in his tiny apartment.

The coin brought him such good luck that today Egmont has offices in over 30 countries around the world. And that lucky coin is still kept at the company’s head offices in Denmark.

For Katherine, Jake and Julia

“I am not a brave man.”

Grey McLure started a war.

In his own words,

he tells us why.

Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Plath

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

Back series promotional page

Praise for the GONE series

Praise for the BZRK

ALSO BY MICHAEL GRANT

Plath

I should destroy this. There’s no such thing as secure data. Once a thing is written it will somehow escape. But I can’t. I never knew my father wrote anything about himself.

Mr Stern recovered this from a laptop my father once used. A long time ago, now. Or seems a long time ago to me.

This was his story. Mine, too, though at the time I understood almost nothing of what was happening. But this is how . . . well, it’s at least part of how everything began.

My father, Grey McLure. Burnofsky. Lear. Even Caligula. It’s all here. And I could trash can it all, wipe it clean. Except that these are my father’s words, and he’s talking about my mother and my brother. And he’s talking about me. And I find now that every word is infinitely precious.

Soon secrecy won’t matter. Soon very little will matter. But love will matter as long as anything. And I loved my dad.

I am Plath. My enemies have come to fear that name, and I revel in their dread.

But once I was just Sadie. Sadie who loved her dad.

ONE

I am not a brave man.

I am not well-armored against fear. Fear now rules my world, or perhaps I should say ‘fears’ plural; unless you believe that all fears are only one fear, the big one, the fear of death.

I don’t believe that. To me, fear is granular. Fear is specific. Each fear has its own smell and taste, its own picture and face.

The great fear for me now is not death. The great fear is madness. The destruction of a creature smaller than the full stops on this page can drag me down, helpless, like being sucked into a whirlpool.

I fear that madness. I fear it so badly that I shake from it as I write this.

The things I have seen. And touched, though not with my own hands.

We live in a series of comforting illusions, beginning with the illusion that we are a human, a singular, separate and discrete object called a human. We say, “That’s a man,” or, “That’s a woman,” and we mean only the parts that are undeniably human, and not any of the bits and pieces that live on or in that human.

We are not, any of us, a singular object. We are an ecosystem. We are a Brazilian rainforest of life.

Some of us may understand this intellectually, we may hear the statistics about how we have more bacterial cells within us than strictly human cells. We may even make a disgusted face when we hear the fact. But that kind of fact? A bit of math? A line of data? That’s nothing to give a sane man sweaty nightmares. That’s nothing to twist his every notion of reality.

There are facts, and there is truth, and the two are not always quite the same. Facts are dry. The truth is sometimes soaked in blood.

My wife is dying. Her name is Birgid. Mine is Grey. Grey McLure.

Our son Stone is trying to play the stoic, and maybe he really is able to master his emotions, I don’t know. I’ve never been a great father to him. I don’t know him as well as I should. What is he now, thirteen? Hah, I’m not sure unless I do the math. Yes, thirteen. I should know that.

I’m closer in some ways to my daughter, Sadie. She’s only twelve, on the verge of becoming a woman. An old soul, a smart, perceptive girl who watches her mother waste away and demands to know why.

Why is this happening?

Sadie is angry, looking for someone to blame.

Both kids are old enough to understand about cancer, but their understanding is almost poetic. Cancer as demon. Cancer as foe. But they have not seen what I have seen. They have not touched it. They have not walked on the surface of that tumor. They have not seen the capillaries turning to the tumor like flowers turning to the sun.

The capillaries welcome the tumor, did you know that? My wife’s own body, her own blood vessels feed the monster within. Like slaves rushing to a murderous master. It’s an act of self-destruction, cancer is. It is the body’s own mindless suicide.

And you may think you grasp that, but like my children you see it only in the abstract. It’s an idea to you. It’s a dry fact. But it is not yet truth for you.

Walk on the surface of a tumor and then . . .

I created the technology. I created it, you see, but I am not a brave man and never wanted to use it. I thought it was a job I could outsource. I thought there was time.

My great work. My brilliant work. It opened up a whole new world for me. A world of madness and terror and red, red truth.

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