The Mad Scientist's Daughter by Cassandra Rose Clarke - Sample Chapters

it.”

“Is Finn coming?”

Her mother and her father looked at each other, a look that had been passing between them more and more frequently in the last few months, an arc of electric current Cat didn’t quite know how to define.

“No,” her father said. “He needs to stay behind and do some things for me.”

Cat slid out of bed and blearily dressed. She skipped breakfast – it was too early, and the sight of her mother eating a cereal bar turned her stomach – and they set out as the sun peeked pink and violet over the edge of the horizon. Cat fell asleep in the car after they passed through town, at the place where the road was lined with scrubby rows of cotton.

When Cat woke up, the car was stopped. She rubbed at an ache in her neck. Her parents laughed in the front seat. Cat pulled herself up and looked out the window, blinking. The sun was high and bright, and they were surrounded on all sides by cars, glinting glass and metal and shimmering waves of exhaust, and then a ring of decaying skyscrapers, their innards wrapped in the steel cast of construction.

“Why aren’t we moving?” Cat said.

“Traffic jam,” her father answered. “We’ll be out of it soon.”

Cat craned her neck to look out the window. A pair of impossibly tall cranes swung in tandem across the bleached sky. Everything glittered. Cat rubbed