Read the opening of Extra Life

Book Two comes out in two weeks, so here's how it begins. This is the opening of Chapter 1, "Four Doors Left."

The hallway didn't have any lights in it. Jr had checked.

He'd checked twice, actually, walking the whole length of it with his head tipped back, looking for a bulb or a strip or a window or anything at all, and there wasn't one, and the hallway was lit anyway — a flat, even gray that came from nowhere and didn't cast a shadow.

"You're doing it again," Dakota said.

"Doing what."

"The ceiling thing." Dakota was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, legs stretched out, both socks on, which he had checked twice. "You've looked up there like nine times. It's not gonna grow a light for you."

"It bothers me."

"Everything bothers you. That's your whole personality." Dakota pulled his knees up. "It's a hallway, Jr. It's a boring hallway that's trying to trap children. Let it be mysterious."

…

And the stone one.

Jr put his ear to the stone door and heard a girl explaining something.

Not words he could make out. Just the shape of it — the rise, the pause that wasn't a pause but a breath, the rise again, the rhythm of somebody telling you a thing they have told you before and want to tell you properly this time. It went on the entire time he stood there. It did not stop and it did not get an answer, because there was nobody in there to answer it.

He counted eleven breaths and quit counting and stood there anyway.

The rest of the chapter, and the whole world behind that stone door, arrives November 16.

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