The Mad Scientist's Daughter by Cassandra Rose Clarke Read Free Book Online Page A

Finn. Cat blinked. Finn switched off the learning tablet and all the math blinked out of existence. Cat lay her head on the table. The sunlight streaming through the windows was bright and hot.
      "You are improving," said Finn. But Cat only sighed.
     
    Time passed. Cat learned enough algebra to prompt her mother to ask about trigonometry. There was a fight at the dinner table, and Cat stormed up to her room and slammed her door shut so hard the walls of the house shook. Then, only a few weeks later, Cat's parents announced she would be attending the consolidated high school in town the following autumn.
      "What?" she shrieked. They were sitting at the table in the kitchen – her parents and Cat. No Finn. A storm churned up the soil outside. It had rained constantly that summer.
      "I don't want to go to school," Cat said. "I thought you said it wasn't very good. Why are you suddenly changing your minds?"
      Her mother sighed and pressed her hand to her forehead. Her father leaned forward over the table.
      "We think it would be a good idea for you to make some friends," he said. "Friends your own… age."
      Cat slouched down in her chair, arms crossed over her chest. School. She associated the word with things she had seen on shows or read in stories: a place where you had to sit in the same room for eight hours a day, where you couldn't run through the woods in the sparkling mornings, where kids would torment you because you didn't have the right haircut. Cat touched her own reddish-brown hair reflexively.
      "I won't go."
      "You have to," her mother said.
      "Why? Because you said so?"
      "Basically."
      Cat wanted to scream. Instead she pushed away from the table and put on her rain boots and raincoat and went outside. The trees thrashed and shimmered from the rain. Through the foggy kitchen window she could see her parents sitting at the kitchen table, leaning forward, faces intent. Talking about her. She kicked at a patch of loose grass, and it splattered out across the yard, mud mixing in with the rainwater. Cat trudged toward the woods. School. They can't make me go . But she knew they could. Her parents' acts of injustice had been increasing lately, to the point where Cat could barely stand to look at them. They ignored her all through her childhood and now suddenly they wanted to take an interest in her development.
      Cat walked all the way down to the river, slipping a little over the wet grass, grabbing on to the tree branches to make sure she didn't fall. The leaves came off in her hands and pasted themselves to her skin.
      The river had risen since the last time she'd been out here, a few days ago. Then it had been calm, but now it twisted and churned and swirled with clouds of silt and mud, rushing up against the cypress trees. Cat stood right at the water's edge and watched as it carried along smooth round stones and broken sticks and clumps of drowned grass.
      The rain dripped off the hood of her raincoat and into her eyes. She grabbed hold of one of the trees and leaned out over the water, and that's when she saw Finn, standing several meters away from her, looking out over the river, not moving, not wearing a rain coat or boots. His hair curled with the weight of water.
      "Finn!" Cat shouted. He turned, and she waved. Then she began to make her careful way along the river's edge toward him. She had done this many times before, clinging to the cypress trees' low-hanging branches to propel herself along. But today she was upset by her parents, by the threat of school, and the rain kept falling into her eyes. She lost her handling on the trees and fell.
      Time slowed until it became immeasurable. She hung suspended above the water rushing toward the sea, the rain dropping in perpendicular lines across her bare face.
      She was in Finn's arms.
      He'd caught her, nearly instantly, even from the place where he'd been standing. He pulled her away from the edge of the