Praise for New York Times bestselling author MARIA V. SNYDER
âInside Out surprised and touched me on so many levels. Itâs a wonderful, thoughtful book full of vivid characters and a placeâInsideâthat is by turn alien and heartbreakingly familiar. Maria V. Snyder is one of my favourite authors, and sheâs done it again!ââNew York Times bestselling author Rachel Caine
âA compelling new fantasy series.â
âSFX magazine on Sea Glass
â⦠the story as a whole is peopled by convincing and well realised charactersâ
âTotal SciFi on Fire Study
âStorm Glass is accessible, unusual and most of all fun. If youâre looking for a quick, entertaining summer read, you couldnât do much better.â
âDeathray
âThis is one of those rare books that will keep readers dreaming long after theyâve read it.ââPublishers Weekly, starred review, on Poison Study
âThis rare sequel to live up to the promise of its predecessor, Magic Study is a wonderful combination of romance and fantasyââAudible.com Editorâs Pick
âSnyder has constructed a work that I see as the beginning to a new and fantastic seriesââyaReads.com
âSnyder delivers another excellent adventure, deftly balancing international and local hostilities against Yelenaâs personal strugglesââPublishers Weekly on Fire Study
MY WORLD CHANGED IN A HEARTBEAT. THATâS HOW it felt to me. As if one second ago, I was Trella the lower level scrub, cleaning the air and water ducts of Inside, and now I am Trella the victorious leader of the Force of Sheep rebellion. Yes the name sounds ridiculous, and I still canât believe we named a major life changing event after livestockâor actually a stuffed animalâbut it made sense at the time.
Why? Because I once thought my fellow scrubs were sheep, passive and content with the status quo. I was wrong and learned if you put enough sheep together you have a herdâa force to be reckoned with. A force that turned our world upside down and inside out.
Of course, it really didnât change in a second. It took six weeks, which in Inside time is six hundred hours (one hundred hours per week). But if I compared it to how long weâve been living here in Insideâ147,019 weeksâitâs a mere four thousandths of a percent. And hereâs the kicker, we have another 852,981 weeks to go before we reach our destination. Mind-boggling!
Where are we going? Good question. According to Logan, our computer expert, our metal cube-shaped world is traveling through Outer Space. And since Outer Space is incredibly huge, it will take us a total of a million weeks to get to a planet where we can go Outside and live. Weâre not sure what exactly Outside is since many of Insideâs computer records have been deleted.
According to our remaining records, another so-called ârebellionâ happened around week 132,076 when Admiral Trava reported saboteurs had tried to destroy the computer systems with magnets, erasing all the historical files. But Logan says itâs bogus and he suspects the Trava family deleted those files so they could rule the people of Inside.
Before that first rebellion, Inside was ruled by a Committee comprised of all the nine families, but the Trava family didnât want to share. Since they were in charge of security, they had the weapons and they took control. Each family had been responsible for the different systems that keep us all alive. Air, water, hydroponics, shepherds, recycling, the infirmary, the power plant, and the kitchen. Yeah thatâs a lot, but when youâre living in a big metal cube in the middle of Outer Space, you need every one.
The Travas separated the people into uppers and lowers (a.k.a. scrubs), and kept us confined to our levels (uppers on levels three & four, scrubs on levels one & two). They sowed the seeds of distrust and created the Population Control Police (a.k.a. Pop Cops) to make sure we all followed the rules. Their propaganda worked. The scrubs, including me, thought the uppers were living in big apartments with big families and cushy jobs, while we lived in overcrowded barracks with no privacy and were forced to clean and maintain the systems (after all, rust and dust are the twin evils of Inside).
It worked. The scrubs hated the uppers and the uppers hated us.
Now back to our rebellion. It started with an upper named Domotor. His first attempt at overthrowing the Travas failed, but he discovered the location of Gatewayâthe mythical Gateway to Outsideâand saved the info on disks.
This is where I come in. Domotor hid his disks in an air duct above his rooms on level three. Later, Domotor recruited me to retrieve his disks and I did. This one event set off a whole heap of trouble for me. And my best and only friend Cog was arrested for covering for me.
Now Iâm not going to detail everything that happened. If you want to know all about it, you can go to your computer and read through this file: ISBN-978-0-373-21006-0.