Free Liesl & Po by Lauren Oliver

might on distant memories of something vast and white burning high up in the sky, and its outline began to glow like a star peeking out against the darkness: faintly at first, then clearer and clearer, the outline of a child whose body was all made of blackness and air.
    Po said, “Boo.”
    Bundle went, Grrr .
    Then:
    Karen dropped her tray.
    Karen cried, “God help us!”
    Karen turned and went running down the attic stairs as quickly as she could, a little noise of utter terror bubbling from her throat.
    And:
    In her haste, Karen forgot to lock the door behind her.
    “Quickly,” Po said to Liesl. Liesl flung away her covers and stood up. She was not dressed in her thin nightshirt, but in trousers, a large, moth-eaten sweater, an old purple velvet jacket, and regular shoes. She had not worn anything but slippers in so long, she had difficulty walking at first.
    “We don’t have much time,” Po said, skating silently in front of her. The effort of appearing to the servant girl had been tiring, and Po allowed itself to ebb back to its normal shadowed state. “Hurry, hurry.” Bundle zipped back and forth, materializing in various corners, and then briefly on the ceiling, in its excitement.

    “I’m hurrying,” Liesl whispered back. She slung the small sack she had packed earlier—containing a change of clothes, her drawing supplies, and a few odds and ends from the attic—over her shoulder, and moved carefully to the door. A feeling of fear and wonder swept over her. It had been ever so long since she’d been out of the attic. She was almost afraid to leave it behind. She could no longer remember clearly what was on the other side of the door; what it felt like to stand outside, in the open air. She did not know how she would manage with no money and no clear idea of where she was going, and for a moment she thought of saying to Po, I’ve changed my mind .
    But then she thought of her father, and the willow tree, and the soft moss that grew over her mother’s grave, and instead she said, “Good-bye, attic,” and followed the ghost’s dark shape out of the door and down the stairs.
    And while Karen was babbling to Milly in the kitchen, and Milly was fussing and murmuring, “Calm down, calm down, I can’t understand a word of what you’re saying” and wondering, privately, why every single servant had to be either a drunk or completely off her rocker, a little girl and her ghostly friend and a small ghostly animal were taking from the mantel in the living room a wooden box containing the most powerful magic in the world, and afterward stealing with it out into the street.

Chapter Eleven

    WHEN LIESL FIRST STEPPED OUT OF THE HOUSE, she drew a sharp breath, and Po had to urge her forward.
    “Come,” the ghost said. “Before we are discovered.”
    So Liesl followed the two shadows—the larger, person-shaped shadow and the smaller, animal-shaped shadow—down the path and through the iron gates and out onto the street. But there again she had to stop, overwhelmed.
    She said, “It’s so big. Bigger than it looks from the attic. I had forgotten.” She didn’t mean just the street, of course. She meant the world—roads, intersections, lefts and rights, twists and turns, choices.
    Over the months Liesl had watched several baby sparrows hatch and grow in the little nest just outside of the attic window. She had always been particularly fascinated by the birds’ first teetering steps to the edge of the roof: awkward, ungainly, and childlike, they looked like toddling children. And then suddenly the baby sparrows would launch into the air as their parents twittered their approval.
    She had always wondered at the bravery of it. The sparrows jumped before they knew how to fly, and they learned to fly only because they had jumped.
    Liesl felt a bit like a baby sparrow, standing in the cold, dark, empty street, with the city spread all around her and the world spread all around the city: as though she was