Lady Friday. Гарт Никс

      

      LADY FRIDAY

      GARTH NIX

      ILLUSTRATED BY TIM STEVENS

       Copyright

      HarperCollins Children’s Books An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in the USA by Scholastic Inc 2007

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2007

       www.garthnix.co.uk

      Copyright © Garth Nix 2007

      Illustrations by Tim Stevens 2007

      Garth Nix asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN: 9780007175093

      Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780007279159

      Version: 2016-11-17

      To Anna, Thomas, Edward and all my family and friends; and with particular thanks to all the staff at Scholastic in the USA, Allen & Unwin in Australia, and HarperCollins UK.

      Contents

       Title Page Copyright Dedication Prologue Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Keep Reading About the Author Also By About the Publisher

       PROLOGUE

      Leaf woke with a start and sat up in bed. For a moment she was disoriented because she wasn’t in her own bed. No band poster stared back at her from the wall at the foot of the bed because there was no wall. The bedside table was missing too, and on the other side there were no winking red eyes from her four-foot-high troll clock, the one she’d made with her brother Ed several years before for a school science project.

      She wasn’t in her normal sleeping clothes either: a band T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms. Instead, she was wearing an ankle-length pale blue nightshirt of soft flannel, something she would never have chosen to put on herself.

      The room she was in was much bigger than her bedroom and there were eight other beds. The closer ones definitely had people asleep in them because Leaf could see bodies under the covers and the tops of their heads. The other beds were probably occupied as well.

      It looked like a hospital…

      Leaf suddenly became a lot more awake. She tried to jump out of the bed, but her legs wouldn’t hold her up and it turned into more of a slither on to the floor. Clawing at the bedclothes, she got herself upright and leaned against the mattress while she tried to work out what was going on.

      Slowly it all started to come back. Very slowly, as if her recent memory was broken and her brain was having trouble putting all the pieces back together.

      Leaf remembered visiting her friend Arthur in the East Area Hospital. He’d told her about the House that was the epicentre of the Universe and how he had been chosen to become the Rightful Heir to the Architect – not because he was born to be or anything like that, but because he’d been the right person at the right time. (Or the wrong person at the wrong time, depending on how you looked at it.) The Architect was apparently the creator of everything. She’d made not only the House but also the whole Universe beyond it, including the Earth.

      Arthur had told Leaf about all this, and about Mister Monday and Grim Tuesday, two of the Trustees who had betrayed the missing Architect and refused to execute her Will. But before he’d finished, a huge wave had come from nowhere, washing them both into an ocean that wasn’t even on Earth. Arthur had been carried away even further out on the strange sea, but Leaf had been picked up by a ship, the Flying Mantis…

      “The Mantis,” whispered Leaf. Even a whisper sounded loud in the quiet room. There was no noise at all from the sleeping people in the other beds. Not even a snore. Suddenly Leaf wondered if they were actually dead rather than sleeping, and she stared at the closest bed to check. She could only see the top of the person’s head, just a tuft of hair