The Lost

BRILLIANTLY RIVETING. *

THOUGHT-PROVOKING AND STIRRING. **

Award-winning author Sarah Beth Durst has been praised for her captivating novels that merge the darkly imagined with very real themes of self-discovery and destiny. In The Lost, we’ll discover just what it means to lose one’s way….

It was only meant to be a brief detour. But then Lauren finds herself trapped in a town called Lost on the edge of a desert, filled with things abandoned, broken and thrown away. And when she tries to escape, impassible dust storms and something unexplainable lead her back to Lost again and again. The residents she meets there tell her she’s going to have to figure out just what she’s missing—and what she’s running from—before she can leave. So now Lauren’s on a new search for a purpose and a destiny. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll be found….

Against the backdrop of this desolate and mystical town, Sarah Beth Durst writes an arresting, fantastical novel of one woman’s impossible journey…and her quest to find her fate.

*Booklist, starred review, on Vessel **Kirkus Reviews, starred review, on Vessel

Praise for Sarah Beth Durst

Vessel

Andre Norton Award Finalist 2012 Kirkus Best Teen Books 2012

“Durst offers a meditation on leadership and power and a vivid story set outside the typical Western European fantasy milieu. From the gripping first line, a fast-paced, thought-provoking and stirring story of sacrifice.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Readers will feel the desert heat, the earth-numbing droughts, the vicious sandstorms and resulting sandwolves, and the bizarre sensations of a goddess living within the body of its human vessel. Brilliantly riveting.”

—Booklist (starred review)

Enchanted Ivy

“Every page of Enchanted Ivy weaves a delightful, seductive spell. Lily is a true heroine—smart, intrepid, and utterly human. I’d give anything to travel to the world of Sarah Beth Durst’s imagination!”

—Jeri Smith-Ready, award-winning author of Shade

“With her deft prose and runaway imagination, [Durst] creates a tale filled with rich characters, wonderful story-telling,

and puzzle pieces that fall together perfectly.” —Chicago Examiner

The Lost

Sarah Beth Durst

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For my mother,

Mary Lee Bartlett

Contents

Poem

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Poem

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Poem

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Poem

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Poem

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Poem

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Acknowledgments

Things I lost:

a stick of Chapstick

a few quarters

one turquoise earring, a gift

my old college roommate’s new phone number

my left sandal

Mr. Rabbit, my favorite stuffie from my preschool years

my way

Chapter One

For the first hundred miles, I see only the road and my knuckles, skin tight across the bones, like my mother’s hands, as I clutch the steering wheel. For the second hundred miles, I read the highway signs without allowing the letters to compute in my brain. Exit numbers. Names of towns. Places that people call home, or not. After three hundred miles, I start to wonder what the hell I’m doing.

In front of me, the highway lies straight, a thick rope of asphalt that stretches to a pinprick on the horizon. On either side of the highway are barbed-wire fences that hem in the few cows that wander through the scrub-brush desert. Cacti are clustered by the fence posts. Above, the sun has bleached the blue until the sky looks like fabric stretched so thin that it’s about to tear. There are zero clouds.

I should turn around.

Instead, I switch on the radio. Static. For a moment, I let the empty crackle of noise spray over me, a match to my mood, but then it begins to feel like prickles inside my ears. Also, I begin to feel self-consciously melodramatic. Maybe as a sixteen-year-old, I’d have left the static on, but I’m twenty-seven. I change the station. Again, static. And again. Again.

First option: an apocalypse has wiped out all the radio transmitters.

Second, much more likely, option: my car radio is broken.

Switching the radio off, I drive to the steady thrum of the car engine and the hiss of wind through the cracked-open window. I wanted the radio so I wouldn’t have to think. I listen to the wind instead and try to keep my mind empty.

I won’t think.

I won’t worry.

I won’t scream.

The wind feels like a snake’s hot breath as it coils through the car. It smells of dust and exhaust. All in all, though, it’s not so bad. The palms of my hands feel slick and sweaty from the steering wheel, but otherwise, I feel like I could drive for hours...and hours and hours until the car runs out of gas in the middle of nowhere and I slowly die of dehydration while the cows lick the remaining moisture from my limp body.

That would make for a humiliating obituary.

Half my funeral audience would consist of family and friends, a few aunts and uncles I’d never met, neighbors who had never spoken to me (except to complain about how I always parked my car askew), friends I’d meant to have lunch with... The other half would be heifers.