"Burn"

Sarah Fine is a clinical child psychologist and the author of the Guards of the Shadowlands series and Of Metal and Wishes. She is also a co-author, with Walter Jury, of Scan and Burn.

Under his real name, Walter Jury is one of the movie producers of the Divergent series, among other films and television shows he is developing.

Fine applied the Page 69 Test to Burn and reported the following:

From page 69:

“Don’t touch me,” I slur, my defiance hardwired even though it feels like I’m swimming in a sea of motor oil and rebar, everything sharp and jagged, the air too thick to breathe. I’m upright, but only because I’m bound to a chair.

Congers is squatting in front of me as I open my eyes. His expression is stern, and his face is paler than it was before. “Cooperate, and I won’t.”

It takes effort, but I raise my head. I’m in a windowless box of a room. Buzzing fluorescent lighting above me. Old radiator against the wall. Not a new building, nothing high-tech. I glance at the door, painted metal, covered in nicks and scrapes. I blink, trying to gather my wits.

“I expected your lab facility to be a little swankier,” I say, my consonants a bit more defined this time.

Congers slides his finger along the bridge of his nose. “We thought it best not to flee straight to a top secret facility.”

“And what exactly would constitute ‘cooperating’?” My hands are cuffed behind the office chair I’m sitting on. My ankles are shackled to its legs. Graham is standing near the door, his gray-green eyes on me. His posture straightens as I size him up.

Congers glances at the young agent before returning his attention to me. “As you are aware, your father had something that belongs to us. We need to reacquire it immediately, especially given this evening’s unfortunate series of events. Even more unfortunate, we need your help.”

I think page 69 of Burn is very nicely representative of the entire book. Here we have Tate, our main character, in a really tight spot—he’s seemingly at the mercy of an enemy who has him drugged and shackled to a chair. But even here, we see him analyzing his surroundings, both the logistical and concrete as well as the emotional—he’s in the process of trying to figure out this young agent named Graham—and all this information will be useful to him in the pages that follow.

Page 69 encapsulates some of the conflict in the book nicely as well. Congers is an H2 agent—he’s one of the aliens who wants not only the scanner Tate’s father invented, but also access to his father’s lab, which contains pieces of extraterrestrial tech that everyone is trying to acquire. And on this page, they’re also dealing with a new variable. Congers mentions fleeing—and that’s because they have a new enemy in Burn, one that makes Tate question everything he thought he understood.

This page gives readers a taste of the characters and conflict in the entire book, and I certainly hope they’ll want to keep reading!

Visit Sarah Fine's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch, and Walter Jury's Twitter perch.

--Marshal Zeringue