*~*Passenger by Alexandra Bracken – Excerpt & Giveaway*~*

Title:  Passenger (Passenger Series Book #1)

Author:   Alexandra Bracken

Release Date:  January 5, 2016

Genre:   YA, Fantasy, Romance

In one devastating night, violin prodigy Etta Spencer loses everything she knows and loves. Thrust into an unfamiliar world by a stranger with a dangerous agenda, Etta is certain of only one thing: she has traveled not just miles, but years from home. And she’s inherited a legacy she knows nothing about from a family whose existence she’s never heard of. Until now.

The amazing thing was, each time she looked at them, Etta still saw something new—something she hadn’t noticed before.

The paintings had been hanging in their living room for years, in the exact same spot behind the couch, lined up like a movie reel of the greatest hits of her mom’s life. Now and then, Etta felt something clench deep in her stomach when she looked at them; not quite envy, not quite longing, but some shallow cousin of both. She’d done her own traveling with Alice, had hit the international violin competition circuit, but she’d seen nothing like the subjects of these paintings. Nothing like this mountain with its spiraling, shining path up through the trees, toward the clouds, to its hidden peak.

It was only now, leaning over the back of the couch, that Etta noticed Rose had painted two figures working their way up the trail, half-hidden by the lines of bright flags streaming overhead.

Her eyes skimmed over the other paintings beneath it. The view from the first studio Rose had lived in, off of Sixty-Sixth Street and Third Avenue. Then, the next painting: the steps of the British Museum, spotted with tourists and pigeons, where she’d done portraits on the spot after moving back to London. (Etta always loved this one, because her mom had painted the moment that Alice had first seen her, and was walking over to scold Rose for skipping school.) The dark, lush jungle reaching out to caress the damp stone of the Terrace of the Elephants at Angkor Thom—Rose had scraped together enough money by the time she was eighteen to fly to Cambodia and sweet-talk her way into working on an archeological dig site, despite her complete and total lack of qualifications. Next was the Luxembourg Garden in full summer bloom, when she’d finally studied at the Sorbonne. And below that, perched on the back of the couch and leaning against the wall to the left, was a new painting: a desert at sunset, cast in blazing rose gold, dotted with crumbling ruins.

It was the story of her mom’s life. The only pieces of it Rose had been willing to share. Etta wondered what the story was with the new one—it had been years since Rose had had the time to paint for herself, and even longer since she’d used the paintings as prompts for bedtime stories to get a younger Etta to fall asleep. She could barely remember what her mom had been like then, before the endless traveling to lecture on the latest restoration techniques, before her countless projects in the conservation department of the Met, cleaning and repairing works by the old masters.

The keys jangled in the door, and Etta jumped off the couch, straightening the cushions.

Rose shook out her umbrella in the hall one last time before coming inside. Despite the early autumn downpour, she looked almost pristine—wavy blonde hair, twisted into a knot; heels damp but not ruined; trench coat buttoned up all the way to her throat. Etta self-consciously reached up to smooth back her own hair, wishing she’d already changed into her dress for the performance instead of staying in her rainbow-colored pajamas. She used to love the fact that she and her mom looked so much alike—that they were a matching set—because not having to see her father looking back at her from a mirror made it easier to accept life without him. But now, Etta knew the similarities only ran skin-deep.

“How was your day?” Etta asked as her mom flicked her gaze down at her pajamas, then up again with a cocked eyebrow.

“Shouldn’t you already be dressed?” Rose answered instead, her English accent crisp with the kind of disapproval that made all of Etta’s insides give an involuntary cringe. “Alice will be here any moment.”

While Rose hung up her coat in their small apartment’s even smaller coat closet, Etta dashed into her room, nearly slipping on the sheet music spread over her rug and almost tumbling headlong into the old wardrobe that served as her closet. She’d picked out the ruby-red cocktail dress for the event weeks ago, but Etta wavered now, wondering if her mom would think it was too informal, or somehow too cutesy with the ribbons that tied at each shoulder. This was a private fundraising event for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Etta didn’t want her mom’s bosses to think she was anything less than a true professional.

Etta wanted to see her mom smile again when she played.

She put the red dress away, pulled out a more serious, subdued black dress instead, and sat down at her desk to start her makeup. After a few minutes, her mom knocked on the door.

“Would you like some help with your hair?” Rose asked, watching her in the mirror that hung on the wall.

Etta was perfectly capable of taming her hair, but nodded and handed her the bundle of bobby pins and her old brush. She sat up straight as Rose began to work the tangles out of her hair, smoothing it back over the crown of her head.

“I haven’t done this since you were a little girl,” Rose said quietly, gathering the waves of pale blonde hair in her hand. Etta let her eyes drift shut, remembering what it felt like to be that small, to sit in her mom’s lap after bath time and have her hair combed out, and listen to stories of her mom’s travels before Etta was born.

Now she didn’t know how to reply without sending Rose back into her usual tight, cool silence. Instead she asked, “Are you going to hang up the new painting you finished? It’s really beautiful.”

Rose gave one of her rare, soft smiles. “Thanks, darling. I want to replace the painting of the Luxembourg Garden with this one—don’t let me forget to pick up the hardware for it this weekend.”

“Why?” Etta asked. “I love that one.”

“The play of colors will work better,” Rose explained as she plucked one of the bobby pins off the desk and pinned Etta’s hair back into a twist. “The flow of darkness to light will be more obvious. You won’t forget, will you?”

“I won’t,” Etta promised and then, trying her luck, asked, “What is it of?”

“A desert in Syria . . . I haven’t been for years and years, but I had a dream about it a few weeks ago, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.” Rose smoothed the last few stray strands of hair back and spritzed hairspray over them. “It did remind me, though—I have something I’ve been meaning to give you for ages.” She reached into the pocket of her old, worn cardigan, then opened Etta’s hand and placed two delicate gold earrings in her palm.

Two brilliant pearls rolled together softly, knocking against small, heart-shaped gold leaves. What Etta sincerely hoped were dark blue beads, not actual sapphires, were attached to the small hoops like charms. The gold curved up, etched in meticulous detail to look like tiny vines. Etta could tell by the quality of the metalwork—slightly rough—and the way the designs matched imperfectly, that these had been painstakingly handcrafted many years ago. Maybe hundreds of years ago.

“I thought they’d go beautifully with your dress for the debut,” Rose explained, leaning against the desk as Etta studied them, trying to decide if she was more stunned by how beautiful they were, or that her mom, for the first time, seemed to genuinely care about the event beyond how it would fit into her work schedule.

Her debut as a concert soloist was a little over a month away, but Etta and her violin instructor, Alice, had started hunting for fabric and lace together in the Garment District a few days after she found out that she’d be performing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto at Avery Fisher Hall with the New York Philharmonic. After drawing out her own sketches and ideas, Etta had worked with a local seamstress to design her own dress. Gold lace, woven into the most gorgeous array of leaves and flowers, covered her shoulders and artfully climbed down the deep blue chiffon bodice. It was the perfect dress for the perfect debut of “Classical Music’s Best-Kept Secret.”

Etta was so tired of that stupid label, the one that had chased her around for months after the Times article was published about her win at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. It just reinforced the one thing she didn’t have.

Her debut as a soloist with an orchestra had been coming for at least three years now, but Alice had been staunchly opposed to making commitments on her behalf. As a young girl with crippling stage fright, one who’d had to fight with every ounce of nerve she possessed to overcome it at her early competitions, she’d been grateful. But then Etta had grown out of her stage fright and suddenly was fifteen, and sixteen, and now close to eighteen, and she’d begun to see kids she had squarely beaten making their debuts at home and abroad, passing her in the same race she’d led for years. She began to obsess over the fact that her idols had debuted years before her: Midori at age eleven, Hilary Hahn at twelve, Anne-Sophie Mutter at thirteen, Joshua Bell at fourteen.

Alice had dubbed tonight’s performance at the Met her “soft launch,” to test her nerves, but it felt more like a speed bump on the way to a much larger mountain, one she wanted to spend her whole life climbing.

Her mom never tried to convince her not to play, to focus on other studies, and she was supportive in her usual reserved way. It should have been enough for her, but Etta always found herself working hard for Rose’s praise, to catch her attention. She struggled to gain it, and had frustrated herself time and time again with the chase.

She’s never going to care, no matter how much you kill yourself to be the best. Are you even playing for yourself anymore, or just in the hope that one day she’ll decide to listen? Pierce, her best-friend turned-boyfriend, had shouted the words at her when she’d finally broken things off with him in order to have more time to practice. But they’d risen up again and again as a hissing, nasty doubt in the six months since then, until Etta began to wonder, too.

Etta studied the earrings again. Wasn’t this proof she cared? That she did support Etta’s dream?

“Can I wear them tonight, too?” Etta asked.

“Of course,” Rose said, “they’re yours now. You can wear them whenever you like.”

“Who’d you steal these from?” Etta joked as she fastened them. She couldn’t think of a time in her mom’s forty-four years when she could have afforded something like this. Had she inherited them? Were they a gift?

Her mom stiffened, her shoulders curling in like the edges of the old scroll she displayed on her desk. Etta waited for a laugh that never came—a dry look that acknowledged her stupid attempt at humor. The silence between them stretched past the point of painful.

“Mom . . .” Etta said, feeling the stupidest urge to cry, like she’d ruined whatever moment they’d been having. “It was a joke.”

“I know.” Her mother lifted her chin. “It’s a bit of a sore spot— it’s been years since I had to live the way I did, but the looks I used to get from others . . . I want you to know, I have never stolen anything in my life. No matter how bad things got, or how much I wanted something. Someone tried to pull a fast one on me once, and I’ve never forgotten what that felt like. I almost lost something of your great-granddad’s.”

There was a hum of anger behind the words, and Etta was surprised that her first instinct wasn’t to back off. Her mother so rarely spoke about her family—less than she spoke about Etta’s father, which was next to never—that Etta found herself reaching for the loose thread and hoping that something else would unravel.

“Was it your foster father?” Etta asked. “The one who tried to steal from you?”

Her mother gave a humorless little smile. “Good guess.”

Both parents gone in one terrible Christmas car accident. Her guardian, her grandfather, gone after little more than a year. And the family that had fostered her . . . the father had never laid a finger on her, but from the few stories Etta had heard about him, his control over Rose’s life had been so rigid, so absolute, it was a choice between staying and suffocating, or the risk of running away on her own.

“What was it?” Etta asked, knowing she was pressing her luck. “The thing he tried to steal?”

“Oh, some old family heirloom. The truth is, I only kept it for one reason: I knew I could sell it and buy my ticket out of London, away from the foster family. I knew your great-granddad had bequeathed it to me so I could make a choice about my future. I’ve never regretted selling that old thing, because it brought me here. I want you to remember that—it’s our choices that matter in the end. Not wishes, not words, not promises.”

Etta turned her head back and forth, studying the earrings in the mirror.

“I bought these from a vendor at an old market—a souk—in Damascus when I was about your age. Her name was Samarah, and she convinced me to buy them when I told her it was my last trip, and I was finally going back to school. For the longest time, I saw them as the end of my journey, but now I think they were always meant to represent the beginning of yours.” Rose leaned down and kissed her cheek. “You’re going to be wonderful tonight. I’m so proud of you.”

Etta felt the sting of tears immediately, and wondered if it was possible to ever really capture a moment. Every bitter feeling of disappointment was washed out of her as happiness came rushing through her veins.

There was a knock at the door before Alice used her keys and announced her arrival with a cheerful, “Hullo!”

“Now get going,” Rose said, brushing a piece of lint off Etta’s shoulder. “I need a few minutes to change, but I’ll meet you over there.”

Etta stood, her throat still tight. She would have hugged her mom if Rose hadn’t stepped away and folded her hands behind her back. “I’ll see you there?”

“I’ll be right behind you, I promise.”