To whet your appetite for book two of the series, I happily present this brief excerpt. (Please note that this is a work in progress and that all content is subject to change–and copyright. )

Just for fun, I’ve included direct allusions to two notable literary works which I find to be thematically relevant to my story. And for even more fun, I’ve decided that the first two people to correctly identify the texts–the first person to guess Text A and the first person to guess Text B–will receive a free copy of the book when it’s released! (Send your answer to authorkatierobison@gmail.com.) Good luck, and enjoy!

The hippopotamus begat a clamshell. For a long time, the clamshell danced on top of the mountains. And then it grew tired of its game and swallowed the earth.

This time I hear the roar as it clamps down its jaws, flattening the cliffs. The boom punches through my eardrums, and once again I’m falling toward razor-edged sand dunes.

“How long?”

“The whole time, or thereabouts.”

“You must have used a lot of hop.”

“That and a few other things.”

It’s raining again. Why does it always rain when I want to have a parade? Mom told me the rain would stop. She was such a liar.

“Will there be brain damage?”

“No. I was careful. She’ll come around soon enough.”

Clamshells hate the sun. They only let pale blue light into the sky—squiggly pale blue and purple. And rain. Always rain. It makes the sand glop into mud. At least the hippopotamus is happy.

The mud slips away from under my feet, and cold waves drill through my stomach as I somersault into the Mariana Trench.

“Steady on!”

“Well I didn’t mean to, did I?”

“You’re being careless.”

“I’m plain knackered, that’s what.”

“Stop your whinging and pick up her feet.”

A gray bird swims past me and promptly eats a whale. It swallows the blubber down then crows in joy. A second later, it’s eaten by a shark. I can still hear it crowing and shrieking inside the shark’s body. The shark swims by me, and I grab its fin, ride up with it to the surface.

Loud vibrations sing through my bones. The clamshell must be chewing on us. That, or it’s the sea turtles, hammering on their shells. I try to plug my ears, but the shark won’t let me. Instead, it starts to sing.

From far away, a Great White answers his song. “Kia tupato,” she wails. “Kaua e takahia te mana o te tangata.”

“Can you please pass the salt?” I ask. “This clam is bland.”

I swim away from the shark and the purple-blue light in search of my seasoning. I know salt lives in the ocean, but I can’t find the shaker.

There! Inside a coral reef. How typical.

But just as I’m about to grab it, the rain gets in the way.

Fine, I’ll give up on the ocean. I turn around and swim for the sky. I fly through the rain and say so long to the drumming drum-drum-a-long turtles.  If only crazy bird would leave me alone.

And it rained. And it rained. And it rained.

I find shelter under a tunnel. An old woman is there playing cards. Her long gray hair flows in the breeze. Behind her, the bricks of the tunnel wall ooze with damp, collecting into drops and sliding down the rock. When they reach the ground, they turn into pieces of bone. The woman looks at me and holds up a card. I see her arm is really a snake.

“No, thank you,” I say.

“Then you can be wool,” she responds.

The bone water flies off the wall toward me. But before I can catch the droplets, they disappear into the wool that’s now stuffed inside my head and arms and chest and toenails.

“There it falls!” I gasp through the wool in my mouth as the bird’s head plops to my feet. I think the snake killed it.

Then the bird’s head screams, blasting a hole in the wool—a tiny prick of light in the thick wall of fleece. The dense blanket melts and curls away, the light waxing blisteringly hot. And then I feel the blast rip through my arms and legs as the wool is yanked from my bones.

My eyelids shudder open, and I gasp for air. For a moment, all I can hear is my hoarse breathing; all I can feel is an ache in my limbs. And then the room around me slides into focus.

I’m in an old house. I can tell because of the smell—damp walls, rotted wood, a bland odor like boiled vegetables. I’m lying on my back, wrapped in hand-knitted blankets, on a bed that takes up practically the entire floor. The beige plaster on the wall in front of me is peeling. To my left, a sketch of a bird hangs off-center.

In another room, I hear the shrill scream of a kettle boiling over. The angry air pushes the brain cells around in my head, making it very hard to think.

Where am I? There’s something mundane about that old smell, but the harder I think about it the less familiar it grows. Am I at the home of one of Sue’s friends? Maybe Rose down the street? But why am I in one of her bedrooms?

On my right is a glass door leading to the outside. I sit up slowly—my head pitches against my skull—and push aside the blankets. My arm stings, but I ignore it. I ignore my legs too, the sudden pricking in my blood, as I carefully lower my feet to the ground. An inexplicable dread is growing in my stomach, as if I sneaked inside to steal something and fell asleep on the job. I need to get out of here.

I force open the glass door and hobble into the sunshine. After a few blinding steps, I realize I’m on a dirt path and that directly ahead of me is a large body of water.

Am I at the lake? Maybe I got tired and someone let me take a nap in their cabin. But I’ve never been to this part of the shoreline; I don’t recognize a thing. Where is Sue? Jack and Maisy? Why did they leave me alone?

I curse as I step on something prickly and pick up my foot, tripping over logs and rocks. And then suddenly my toes are sinking into softness, and the slamming sound of waves is rushing into my ears. I get a mouthful of pungent salt as I turn my head to face an endless expanse of gray sand, strewn with driftwood and backed by dunes of spiky shrubs.

There are no beaches like this at Lake of the Woods.

I stagger toward the pounding water, hundreds of questions plugging up my mind, the dread in my gut growing exponentially. I look around desperately for something to tell me where I am. A sign, a person, a newspaper. But there’s nothing.

And then I stop and squint at the sand, my pulse rising in my ears. On the beach, directly in front of me, is a footprint.

I continue to stare. Something isn’t right. I look up and down the shoreline, but I don’t see any other tracks. How is that possible? We’re too high up the beach for the water to have erased any impressions. No one could have left an isolated print like that.

No one, except …

“Kava.” I stumble backward and trip again, this time falling to the ground. My elbow smacks a rock, and I cry out from more than the pain. It’s all surging back now. Winnipeg. The camp. Rye. The fortress. The bomb. And, them.

I have to get out of here! I stand up, forcing aside the protesting throb in my leg.

But when I raise my head, I freeze. Standing on the beach behind me, only a few yards away, is a tall woman with flowing gray hair. Her hands are on her hips, and black tattoos snake down her left arm.

“Sorry, love,” she says, “There’s nowhere for you to go.”