Dearly, Beloved - Couverture rigide

Habel, Lia

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0345523342 ISBN 13 : 9780345523341

Editeur : Del Rey, 2012

Synopsis

Book by Habel Lia

A propos du livre

Extrait :

9780345523341|excerpt

Habel / DEARLY, BELOVED

1 Nora

When I got to the top of the hill, the zombie caught me. I dropped my parasol and leather-­bound digital diary in shock. He pulled me to his body from behind, imprisoned my tiny hands in his so I couldn’t fight back, and parted his cold lips at the nape of my neck.

I squealed with delight, even as I drummed my boot heel on his shin. “Bram, let go!”

“Never,” he growled against my skin following the kiss, his voice causing me to flush. Before I could protest further he actually picked me up, starting to spin. Laughing despite the ridiculousness of it, I kept my eyes open, watching the scenery fly by—­especially the hilly area to the east that eventually rose into the city of New London, Nicaragua. The capital of New Victoria. The heart of all the world I’d ever known, now transformed, somehow shattered—­half dead and half alive.

Dawn was just beginning to cup the earth in her pale hands. To the west, miles off, the mansions of the rich and titled lay mostly abandoned; only the odd light dared to advertise the presence of people. A few lights shone from the city, the shimmering of holographic building facades and electrified advertisements, but for the most part New London still slumbered on, dimmer than I ever remembered it being. There was only the red-­tinted lantern on the top of my fallen electric gas-­lamp parasol to light our way upon the low hump of earth that marked the location of the Elysian Fields, the underground housing complex my family called home. I might’ve chosen one of the colors meant to advertise the romantic availability of young ladies—­pink for dating, etc.—­but I wasn’t romantically available.

I was spoken for by the zombie, and the leaders of feminine teenage trends had decided red should be the color for that. The color of sympathy for the dead. I normally didn’t care about such things, but in this I was willing to be trendy.

Bram freed me, and I staggered away from him, eventually falling to the ground amidst my skirts. “That’s the only way to make you be still sometimes.”

“So . . . unfair,” I panted as he limped over to join me. As he did, he glanced at the city himself. The view was spectacular, and the area landscaped to invite enjoyment of it, with circular pathways and benches crafted of the same marble used for the gated entrance located at the base of the hill. Although it was exposed, it was also isolated—­and thus the perfect place to sneak away to every morning. “You’re bigger than me.”

“I enjoy the walk up here as much as being here, you know. When you run ahead—­that’s unfair. Besides . . .” He sat and fixed me with his cloudy blue eyes. “You think you’d know by now that when you run from me, every instinct I have wants to chase you.”

As I caught my breath to reply, I found myself staring at him. Bram Griswold was two years dead and still so handsome and full of life, his ghost-­white features expressive, his body tall and strong. The light atop my parasol didn’t chase the shadows off his face fully, didn’t highlight his brown hair, and I was reminded of the first time I’d seen him, cloaked and lit by streetlamps.

Then, I’d thought him a monster. Now, I loved him so much I didn’t know what to do with myself.

“The zombies came from here,” I reminded him. “We should probably walk yards and yards apart. If anyone was watching us, they could get nervous.”

“I should be the one in front, if we’re going that route.” Picking up my digidiary, he handed it to me. “And I’d rather not think about that.”

Chastened, accepting the book, I felt the warm April breeze stirring my black curls, playing with the hem of my long pink dress and the bit of red ribbon Chastity had cheekily tied to the hip holster for my pistol. The fact that my beau was dead didn’t disgust me, didn’t scare me. Not after all I’d seen. Everything was still so fresh, and I wasn’t sure if this was ultimately a sign of madness or compassion.

I truly was my father’s daughter.

“We’re here, at any rate,” I said. “Assume the position.”

Laughing, Bram moved back. “I didn’t die just so I could be your pillow, you know.”

“Then why are you always the perfect temperature?”

We sat on the grass as a New Victorian sometime-­schoolgirl of middling social rank and a Punk miner, member of a tribe my people had long ago exiled to the southernmost reaches of our Territories, should never sit—­Bram lying on his back, watching the sky slowly banish the stars, me on my stomach with my chin and my backlit digidiary propped up on his lifeless chest. Alone. It was horribly scandalous, naughty behavior—­and to us, commonplace. We’d been in the thick of it during the Siege almost four months ago, the attack by hordes of mindless, ravenous, “evil” zombies upon the city. We’d spent months afterward holed up in the jungle on an archaic airship with a heteromortal crew of scientists and soldiers, returning to the city only when it seemed like the vaccine my father had created against the reanimating illness known as the Lazarus might work. Our courtship had taken place on secret army bases, aboard airships, and finally in Eden. Altogether, it had been a marvelous success. But now we were back in civilization, and we had to be more circumspect. At least according to Papa.

I pushed him out of my mind, even as I tried to do the fabulously stupid, petty, useless thing he wanted me to, using my fingertips to access my school-­issued digital copy of Deportment and You: A Text for Young Ladies of Refinement.

“Oh, look. Handily enough, this chapter talks about Punk manners, or lack thereof,” I said teasingly as the book loaded. “Want to do the end-­of-­chapter quiz with me? I’ll try to find the least insulting questions.”

“As if the answers won’t also be insulting?” Bram said, his lips quirking. “I know how your people work. They’re polite to your face, and get you the second your back is turned. No offense.”

“None taken. You speak God’s truth.” I flicked through the pages. “Okay, then. How about courtship etiquette? That’s extremely relevant to our interests.”

“Is this chapter going to club me over the head with yet more ways I can’t touch you or talk to you?”

“Pretty much.”

“Skip that one, too.”

I paged through and laughed, turning the digidiary around to show him a section about wedding etiquette. “Look. This part is seriously about forty pages long. This is curriculum at St. Cyprian’s, a school that costs my father a small fortune every year. That he’s insisting I try to keep up with, even though, you know, Apocalypse.”

Bram tilted his head to the side, as if regarding a puzzle. “Forty pages about weddings? Don’t you usually just go to a judge or a preacher for something like that?”

“Girls are supposed to obsess over them. Aunt Gene wanted me to.”

“Is this a hint, Miss Dearly?” As he asked this question he drew a serpentine pattern on the small of my back with his fingers, just above my bustle, and I shivered a little. And not just because his hand was freezing.

“No!” I flushed and shut the digidiary, sitting up and hurling it halfway across the hill. As I did, I released a primal scream—­well, as much as I could. I still looked and sounded immature, even though I was now seventeen. Bram laughed and pulled me back down, and my cheek found his shoulder. “I give up for another day. I tried, but studying how to be a lady is still too mind-­blowingly stupid to focus on, given all that’s going on in the world. Tell me a story?”

Bram thought for a moment, and then started in on a story he knew I’d like—­about the big Punk cities I’d never even heard about before I met him. About how they were founded where the Punks had fought battles against the southern tribes to maintain the borders of their settlement area, and how they were populated by a mixture of Punks and mysterious southern tribesmen, peaceful accords having been reached after years of struggle. The actual stone and metal buildings, and how they were vastly superior to holograms in every way; the automaton shows; the Punk fashions. His voice was rough and low, a sound I adored. A sound I could lose myself in.

As he spoke, I watched the sky brighten. I wanted to see the rest of the remaining world—­from the glacier-­locked Wastelands of the far North to the deserts of the South. All of it. I couldn’t drive, but that didn’t stop me from occasionally imagining myself stealing the keys to Aunt Gene’s electric horseless carriage and flooring it. I knew the world was changing, reacting to the revealed existence of the undead. Reacting to the fact that two weeks ago a few vaccinated people had been bitten during a riot and still contracted the Lazarus. Reacting with fear, with anger, with . . .

I stomped on that thought before my imagination could run with it. Since learning of the postvaccine infections, fear about what the living might do if they lost their feelings of security around the “civilized” dead had been threatening to consume me, and I was growing sick of it. It kept robbing me of sleep, forcing me to forge guesses about a future I couldn’t possibly know. It was changing my father, too, making him both demanding and distant, taking him away from me again. It kept ruinin...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Can the living coexist with the living dead?
 
That’s the question that has New Victorian society fiercely divided ever since the mysterious plague known as “The Laz” hit the city of New London and turned thousands into walking corpses. But while some of these zombies are mindless monsters, hungry for human flesh, others can still think, speak, reason, and control their ravenous new appetites.
 
Just ask Nora Dearly, the young lady of means who was nearly kidnapped by a band of sinister zombies but valiantly rescued by a dashing young man . . . of the dead variety.
 
Nora and her savior, the young zombie soldier Bram Griswold, fell hopelessly in love. But others feel only fear and loathing for the reanimated dead. Now, as tensions grow between pro- and anti-zombie factions, battle lines are being drawn in the streets. And though Bram is no longer in the New Victorian army, he and his ex-commando zombie comrades are determined to help keep the peace. That means taking a dangerous stand between The Changed, a radical group of sentient zombies fighting for survival, and The Murder, a masked squad of urban guerrillas hellbent on destroying the living dead. But zombies aren’t the only ones in danger: Their living allies are also in The Murder’s crosshairs, and for one vengeful zealot, Nora Dearly is the number one target.
 
As paranoia, prejudice, and terrorist attacks threaten to plunge the city into full-scale war, Nora’s scientist father and his team continue their desperate race to unlock the secrets of “The Laz” and find a cure. But their efforts may be doomed when a mysterious zombie appears bearing an entirely new strain of the illness—and the nation of New Victoria braces for a new wave of the apocalypse.
 
Lia Habel’s spellbinding, suspenseful sequel to Dearly, Departed takes her imaginative mash-up of period romance, futuristic thriller, and zombie drama to a whole new level of innovative and irresistible storytelling.

“A realistic and exciting world with a swoon-worthy romance . . . The plot is addictive, the characters well-rounded.”—RT Book Reviews
 
“Nora and Bram’s touching and tender relationship, with its emphasis on equality and living in the moment, feels particularly special.”—Publishers Weekly, on Dearly, Departed

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Del Rey
• Date d'édition: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0345523342
• ISBN 13: 9780345523341
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 484