Flux

Crouched and grinning, he faced her. Fourteen, wiry and strong, he was tuned to every pulse of his body. Violence sang in his blood, sky met earth and he was a lone dark figure dancing at the center point. At the base of the fence the dog went manic, vaulting itself upward, spiraling into a high-pitched whine. Leaning down, Deller teased it with a dangling hand. "Gotcha, Bunny," he sneered. They'd never trapped her like this before-alone, way out nowhere. Several years earlier Nellie and her mother fled the Interior and its hated security police for the Outbacks, a loose-knit resistance of small cities, towns and rural areas. Since then her mother has disappeared and twelve-year-old Nellie is on her own, scrounging a living where she can find it. When loneliness opens her mind to flux, the ability to alter her vibratory state in the molecular field, she learns to travel to other levels of reality. When a prank by the Skulls, an unruly gang of boys, reveals several large scars on her scalp, Nellie is forced to confront the terrifying truth that her vague memories of experiments that took place while she lived in the Interior are real. Befriended by fourteen-year-old Deller, leader of the Skulls, Nellie learns of the disappearance of his younger brother Fen. Using her ability to travel the levels, she eventually finds Fen trapped in an experimental laboratory deep in another reality. Although Nellie is unable to free him, her discovery precipitates a series of events that lead her and Deller back to the Interior, and straight into the memories she has been trying so hard to forget. Long regarded as one of Canada's finest writers of teen fiction, Beth Goobie's novels have received numerous awards and citations. Flux is the first of two books in a series. Book two is Fixed.Goobie, Beth is the author of 'Flux', published 2004 under ISBN 9781551433141 and ISBN 1551433141.