From the team that brought you the New York Times bestselling Dry comes a riveting new thriller that explores the opioid crisis.
The freeway is coming.
It will cut the neighborhood in two. Construction has already started, pushing toward this corridor of condemned houses and cracked concrete with the momentum of the inevitable. Yet there you are, in the fifth house on the left, fighting for your life.
Ramey, I.
The victim of the bet between two manufactured gods, Roxy and Addison-Roxicodone and Adderall, the low-level cronies of more illustrious bosses, who more than anything else want to prove their own lethality. The wager-a contest to see who can induce overdose first-is a race to the bottom of a party that has raged since the beginning of time. And you are only human, seduced by the release they bring. Tempted by the control they offer. They are beautiful, and they will give you the world-as long as you promise them forever.
But there are two I. Rameys-Isaac, a soccer player thrown into Roxy's orbit by a bad fall and a bad doctor and Ivy, his older sister, whose increasing frustration with her untreated ADHD leads her to renew her acquaintance with Addy.
Which one are you?
"The novel feels like a stage drama from the tense first chapter to the tragic end...[p]owerful and chilling." Kirkus Reviews
Neal Shusterman is the New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty award-winning books for children, teens, and adults, including the Unwind dystology, the Skinjacker trilogy, Downsiders, and Challenger Deep, which won the National Book Award. Scythe, the first book in his series Arc of a Scythe is a Michael L. Printz Honor Book. He also writes screenplays for motion pictures and television shows. Neal is the father of four, all of whom are talented writers and artists themselves. Visit Neal at StoryMan.com and Facebook.com/NealShusterman.nnJarrod Shusterman is the New York Times bestselling coauthor of novel Dry, which he is adapting for a major Hollywood film studio with Neal Shusterman. He is also the coauthor of the accoladed novel Roxy. His books have all received critical acclaim and multiple starred reviews. Sofi Lapuente and Jarrod are partners in every sense of the word, with love and multiculturalism as an ethos-living between Madrid, Spain, and Los Angeles, California. If they are not working, it means they're eating. For behind-the-scenes author content and stupidly funny videos, follow them on Instagram and TikTok @SofiandJarrod.
Chapter 1: Naloxone 1 Naloxone
I am no superhero. But I can save you from the one who claims to be.
I am no wizard. But I cast a spell that can bring back the dead.
Almost.
And never often enough.
I am, if nothing else, your final defense-your last hope when hope itself has spiraled into that singularity that crushes not just you, but everyone around you.
And so here we are, you and I. The scene is set. Never identical, yet always the same:
Today it's a room in a house on a street that was born when dreams were milky-white appliances, and cars were like landlocked ships, too proud to ever be slung with seat belts.
This was once suburbia, but it was long ago consumed by a gelatinous urban tsunami. The neighborhood struggles and sometimes even thrives. But this street? This street is dead. It has been sacrificed for the greater good.
The trees on either side have already been taken down, their trunks turned into firewood, their limbs fed into a chipper. Most doors and windows have been stripped and salvaged, leaving the homes with the deadest of eyes and gaping, silent mouths. Nearly a mile of this. And just beyond are bulldozers and rubble, and beyond that, towering concrete pillars reach skyward like the columns of an ancient temple.
Because a freeway is coming. A six-lane corridor that will cleave the neighborhood in half, right along this very street, in a brutal rite of passage called eminent domain.
When night falls, the doomed street is engulfed more completely than anywhere else in the city.
And there you are. In the fifth house on the left.
You're not from this part of town, but somehow you found this place, drawn by darkness so dense you can wrap it around yourself like a blanket.
Now flashlights illuminate a familiar tableau. One officer, two paramedics. And me.
A medic leans over you-presses a finger to your neck.
"Hard to find a pulse," she says. "If it's there, it's weak."
This room was once a bedroom. But there's no bed, no dresser. All that remains is a warped desk and a broken chair that no one deemed worth saving. You lie on carpet mottled with mold that has left it looking like a wall-to-wall bruise. It is the very epicenter of abandoned hope.
"I can't detect any breathing. Beginning CPR."
Rats would complete the scene, but vector control has already been here with some of my more vicious cousins to kill the vermin. But they can't get rid of the roaches no matter how hard they try. They are the victors of this world, the roaches. Truly undefeatable.
You, on the other hand, are defeated. How defeated is yet to be seen.
Thirty chest compressions, two rescue breaths. Repeat.
The other medic prepares me for what I've come to do, while the officer gives a deillegalscription of you on his radio. They don't know who you are. I don't know who you are either-but soon you and I will be close. I will be inside you. A kind of intimacy neither of us wants but both of us need. It is, after all, my purpose. And you? You have no choice.
"Administering the naloxone."
"Make sure you get the muscle."
"I never miss."
The needle plunges deep in your left thigh-and I surge forth into muscle tissue, searching for capillaries that will carry me to larger and larger vessels. And yes-you're still alive! I do hear your heartbeat! Slow, faint, but there!
I ride the long sluggish wave of your beat into the chambers of your heart, and out again, up and up toward your brain. Only there can I save you. I will rip you free of the hold they have over you.
They.
The 