Beyond the Pale

Some borders are places. This one is a moment.

Robyn is seventeen, furious, and four hundred miles from everything she knows. Her mother is a year dead; her father has moved them to a school at the edge of Scotland and a house with a locked hangar at the bottom of the garden; and the only thing that still makes sense is the weight of a foil in her hand.

At Greenwich Gate they play marbles for keeps, and it is nobody's idea of a game. Then a boy takes three of hers and walks through a solid wall. Two more vanish from a locked laboratory. And Robyn learns what her father keeps in the hangar, and why, in 1978, four boys walked out of this school and never walked back.

Beyond the pale there is a country where your life is worth exactly what you carry in glass, where the weather hunts, and where the one rule that matters is her father's: note the exact time you arrived.

She will cross for the people she loves. She will find a war she did not choose, a currency made of childhood, and a way home that runs backwards through everything she has done.

Robyn thinks the strangest thing about the Cage is that she can cross into it at all. She is wrong. The strangest thing is how well it knows her.

Beyond the Pale is the first book of Where Giants Sleep, one story told across three books.