My name is Rachel Clancy.
If you’ve been reading these books, then you already know that. But I feel the need to introduce myself to you every time I start a new one, like you might have just found me, or you’re a stranger I don’t know. Manners dictate the introduction although I suspect I’ll never know your name in return, which is okay. Maybe it’s better I never do.
I haven’t held anything back from you. I’ve not tried to make myself look better or less selfish or more mature. No, I wrote down everything the way I remember it happening. Someone else might remember the events differently but this is how it happened for me, or at least how I see it when I think about the years between my sixteenth and eighteenth birthdays.
Eighteen would have made me a grown-up in the Before Time, in the days before Dr. Icahn’s experiments nearly ended the entire world. In the time after, sixteen became the year we achieved maturity. Still, for me, since I could remember what my life had been like before, eighteen meant something when I finally got there.
It indicated I had survived, somehow. When I blew out the candles, low-sung lyrics of “Happy Birthday” filling the room, and my mother and father cheering, I couldn’t help but disbelieve I’d actually made it to my birthday. Was this all a dream? Had I died on a field, eaten by a Werewolf, and these thoughts of my eighteenth birthday were imaginings of my dying mind?
Writing these tales, telling them to you, helps me to believe they happened.
But the sad truth is, if you are reading them, then most likely I am dead.
Because I don’t know that I’d give them to anyone in any other set of circumstances.
If you’re reading my books, then it’s possible I never saw year nineteen.
That thought would make me horribly sad if I couldn’t feel in my bones that justice was coming, on her way, down the road—traveling toward us. Those who destroyed humanity will have their reckoning.
Reader, if I didn’t live long enough, I hope it felt really good to see Icahn fall. I hope everyone reveled in it, partied through the night, kissed, and cried out with glee for the way he ended.
Even if I never got to see it.