Hanna tried to scuttle backward on her butt, but her body sank uselessly into the mud. I’m going to die, she thought. This is it.

  Finally, a hand moved to the person’s lips. “Shhhhh.”

  Hanna dug her nails into the cold, half-frozen ground, her teeth chattering with terror. But the figure took three big steps away from her. Then, just like that, whoever it was turned and vanished, without the slightest sound of footsteps. It was as if Hanna had dreamed the whole thing.

  33 SOMEONE KNEW TOO MUCH

  The whimper kept growing closer and then farther away, as if it were being bounced around by a mirror. Aria ran through the woods without looking where she was going or checking to see how far she had gone. When she turned around, she realized that the Hastingses’ house was far in the distance, just a minuscule glowing yellow light through the thick, tangled branches.

  When she came to a small ravine, she froze. So many of the trees were twisted and knotted, growing improperly. One tree right in front of her split into two, forming a seat between the two trunks. Even when Aria, Ali, and the others had been friends, they’d rarely come back here to hang out. One of the few times Aria had been back here was when she’d staked out Ali’s house to steal her Time Capsule flag.

  After Ali had marched to the back of her yard and told the four of them that someone else had already stolen her piece of the flag, the girls had gone their separate ways, disappointed. Aria cut through these woods back to her house. As she was passing a clump of particularly eerie-looking trees—maybe these very trees exactly—she’d seen someone running right for her from the other direction. Her insides had crackled with excitement when she realized it was Jason.

  Jason had stopped, a guilty look washing over his face. His eyes immediately dropped to something dangling out of his hoodie’s front pocket. Aria looked too. It was a piece of blue cloth, the same bold cerulean as the Rosewood Day flag that hung in every classroom. There were drawings all over the cloth, too, and words in familiar, bubbly handwriting.

  Aria thought about where she’d just been, what Ali had just told all of them. You’re too late, she said. Someone already stole my piece. I’d decorated it and everything. She pointed at Jason’s pocket, her hand shaking. “That’s not…?”

  Jason looked from Aria to the flag, disarmed. And then, wordlessly, he thrust it into Aria’s hands. He disappeared through the trees, back toward the DiLaurentis house.

  Aria sprinted home, Ali’s piece of the flag burning in her pocket. She didn’t know what Jason wanted her to do with it—give it back? Redecorate it for herself? Was it somehow tied to the weird fight Jason and Ian had had on the Rosewood Day common just days before? Over the next few days, she’d waited to see if he’d tell her what he’d been thinking and what she should do. Maybe Jason had realized they were soul mates, and had given it to Aria specifically because he thought she deserved it. But no instructions ever came. Even when the Rosewood Day administration made an announcement over the PA that one piece of the Time Capsule flag hadn’t been accounted for and that whoever had it should please come forward. Was it some kind of test? Was Aria just supposed to know? If she passed, would she and Jason be together forever?

  After Aria became friends with Ali, she felt too embarrassed and ashamed to explain the whole debacle, so she’d hidden the piece of the flag in her closet, never looking at it again. If she opened the shoe box at the back of her closet marked Old Book Reports, there Ali’s piece of the flag would still be, completely decorated and ready to go.

  Footsteps crunched behind her. Aria jumped and swiveled around. Hanna’s eyes glowed in the darkness. “You guys,” she breathed heavily. “I just saw the weirdest—”

  “Shhh,” Aria interrupted. A dark shadow on the other side of the ravine caught her eye. She clamped down hard on Emily’s arm, trying not to scream. A flashlight clicked on, sliding across the ground. Aria put her hand to her mouth, letting out a relieved, shuddering sigh.

  “Spencer?” she called, taking a tentative step through the slush.

  Spencer was wearing a rain slicker that came to her knees and big riding boots that flapped around her skinny calves. She beamed her flashlight up at them, looking like an animal caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck. The whole front of her black dress was covered in mud and slush, as was her face. “Thank God you’re okay.” Aria took a few steps forward.

  “What the hell were you doing out here?” Emily cried. “Are you crazy?”

  Spencer’s jaw trembled. Her eyes lowered toward whatever it was on the ground. “It doesn’t make any sense,” she said tonelessly, as if she were hypnotized. “I just got a note from him.”

  “From who?” Aria whispered.

  Spencer pointed her flashlight at a massive object next to her. At first, Aria thought it was just a fallen tree, or maybe a dead animal. But then the light danced over something that looked like…skin. It was a large, pale, human hand, curled into a fist. There was what looked like a Rosewood Day class ring on one of the fingers.

  Aria took a huge step back, clapping her hand to her mouth. “Oh my God.”

  Then Spencer shined the light on the person’s face. Even in the darkness, Aria could tell that Ian’s skin was a ghostly, oxygenless blue. One eye was closed and the other was open, as if he were winking. Dried blood pooled at his ear and his lips, and his hair was matted with dirt. There were big purple welts around his neck, as if someone had grabbed him hard and squeezed. There was something about him that seemed very cold and stiff, as if he’d been like this for quite some time.

  Aria blinked rapidly, unable to comprehend what she was looking at. She thought about how Ian hadn’t shown up at his trial yesterday. The cops had run out of the room, vowing to find him. Ian could have been here all along.

  Emily dry-heaved. Hanna took a huge step back, crying out. It was so quiet out in the woods, it was easy to hear Spencer’s shaky swallow. She shook her head. “He was like this when I got here,” she whimpered. “I swear.”

  Aria was afraid to move any closer to Ian, and kept her eyes fixed on his immobile hand, almost certain he was going to spring up and grab her. The air around him was absolutely dead and still. Far off in the distance, she swore she heard someone giggle.

  And then Aria’s cell phone, tucked inside her small, clam-shaped clutch, started to ring. She let out a small “eep,” surprised. Then Spencer’s buzzed, and Aria’s chimed. Hanna’s cell phone, which was nestled inside her now-muddy clutch, let out a bleat.

  The girls stared at one another in the darkness. “There’s no way,” Spencer whispered.

  “It can’t….” Hanna held her phone by the very tips of her fingers, as if afraid to really touch it.

  Aria stared at her Treo’s screen in disbelief. One new text message.

  She glanced back at Ian, his stiff limbs twisted, his beautiful face vacant and lifeless. With a shudder, she looked down at the screen again and forced herself to read the text.

  He had to go.

  —A

  WHAT HAPPENS NEXT…

  Yup, Ian’s dead. And our favorite foursome probably wish they were. Hanna’s daddy hates her. Spencer’s broke. Aria’s a hot mess. And Emily’s switched teams so many times I’m getting whiplash. I’d feel bad for them, but y’know, that’s life. Or, um, death, in Ian’s case.

  I suppose I could let bygones be bygones, forgive and forget, yadda yadda. But where’s the fun in that? These pretty little bitches got everything I ever wanted, and now I’m going to make sure they get exactly what they deserve. Does that make me sound awful? Sorry, but as every pretty little liar knows, sometimes the truth’s ugly—and it always hurts.

  I’ll be watching….

  Mwah!

  —A

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am overjoyed to be writing yet another acknowledgment letter for the next Pretty Little Liars adventure. Thanks, as usual, to those at Alloy who help flesh out the creepy, thrilling world of Rosewood: Josh Bank and Les Morgenstein, whose ideas are beyond compare, Sara Shandler, who is thoughtful and incredibly smart, Kristin Marang, who brought PLL to online fans, and Lanie Davis, who nurtured Wicked from start to finish with such clever, poignant insights and suggestions. Thank you all for caring so much about this series! Words cannot properly express my gratitude. Thanks too to Jennifer Rudolph Walsh at William Morris, and to the lovely team at HarperCollins: Farrin Jacobs, Elise Howard, and Gretchen Hirsch. All of you give these books that extra-special sparkle. Love to my parents, Shep and Mindy, to my sister, Ali, and her killer cat, Polo, and to my husband, Joel, for yet again reading various drafts of this book—and providing me with a few factual tidbits woven through the pages. And last but not least, a huge shout out to my fabulous cousins: Greg Jones, Ryan Jones, Colleen Lorence, Brian Lorence, and Kristin Murdy. Here’s to plenty more human pyramids and feats of strength in the very near future!

  Credits

  Hand Lettering by Peter Horridge

  Doll design by Tina Amantula

  Excerpt from The Lying Game

  PROLOGUE

  I woke up in a dingy claw-foot bathtub in an unfamiliar pink-tiled bathroom. A stack of Maxims sat next to the toilet, green toothpaste globbed in the sink, and white drips streaked the mirror. The window showed a dark sky and a full moon. What day of the week was it? Where was I? A frat house at the U of A? Someone’s apartment? I could barely remember that my name was Sutton Mercer, or that I lived in the foothills of Tucson, Arizona. Had someone slipped me something?

  “Emma?” a guy’s voice called from another room. “You home?”

  “I’m busy!” called a voice close by.

  A tall, thin girl opened the bathroom door, her tangled dark hair hanging in her face. “Hey!” I leapt to my feet. “Someone’s in here already!” My body felt tingly, as if it had fallen asleep. When I looked down, it seemed like I was flickering on and off, like I was under a strobe light. Freaky. Someone definitely slipped me something.

  The girl didn’t seem to hear me. She stumbled forward, her face covered in shadows.

  “Hello?” I cried, climbing out of the tub. She didn’t look over. “Are you deaf?” Nothing. She pumped a bottle of lavender-scented lotion and rubbed it on her arms.

  The door flung open again, and a snub-nosed, unshaven teenage guy burst in. “Oh.” His gaze flew to the girl’s tight-fitting T-shirt, which said new york new york roller coaster on the front. “I didn’t know you were in here, Emma.”

  “That’s maybe why the door was closed?” Emma pushed him out and slammed it shut. She turned back to the mirror. I stood right behind her. “Hey!” I cried again.

  Finally, she looked up. My eyes darted to the mirror to meet her gaze. But when I looked into the glass, I screamed.

  Because Emma looked exactly like me.

  And I wasn’t there.

  Emma turned and walked out of the bathroom, and I followed as if something was yanking me along behind her. Who was this girl? Why did we look the same? Why was I invisible? And why couldn’t I remember, well, anything? The wrong memories snapped into aching, nostalgic focus—the glittering sunset over the Catalinas, the smell of the lemon trees in my backyard in the morning, the feel of cashmere slippers on my toes. But other things, the most important things, had become muffled and fuzzy, as if I’d lived my whole life underwater. I saw vague shapes, but I couldn’t make out what they were. I couldn’t remember what I’d done for any summer vacations, who my first kiss had been with, or what it felt like to feel the sun on my face or dance to my favorite song. What was my favorite song? And even worse, every second that passed, things got fuzzier and fuzzier. Like they were disappearing.

  Like I was disappearing.

  But then I concentrated really hard and I heard a muffled scream. And suddenly it was like I was somewhere else. I felt pain shooting through my body, before a final, sleepy sensation of my muscles surrendering. As my eyes slowly closed, I saw a blurry, shadowy figure standing over me.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered.

  No wonder Emma didn’t see me. No wonder I wasn’t in the mirror. I wasn’t really here.

  I was dead.

  1 THE DEAD RINGER

  Emma Paxton carried her canvas tote and a glass of iced tea out the back door of her new foster family’s home on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Cars swished and grumbled on the nearby expressway, and the air smelled heavily of exhaust and the local water treatment plant. The only decorations in the backyard were dusty free weights, a rusted bug zapper, and kitschy terra-cotta statues.

  It was a far cry from my backyard in Tucson, which was desert-landscaped to perfection and had a wooden swing set I used to pretend was a castle. Like I said, it was weird and random which details I still remembered and which ones had evaporated away. For the last hour, I’d been following Emma trying to make sense of her life and willing myself to remember my own. Not like I had a choice. Everywhere she went, I went. I wasn’t entirely sure how I knew these things about Emma, either—they just appeared in my head as I watched her like a text message popping in an inbox. I knew the details of her life better than I did my own.

  Emma dropped the tote on the faux wrought-iron patio table, plopped down in a plastic lawn chair, and craned her neck upward. The only nice thing about this patio was that it faced away from the casinos, offering a large swath of clear, uninterrupted sky. The moon dangled halfway up the horizon, a bloated alabaster wafer. Emma’s gaze drifted to two bright, familiar stars to the east. At nine years old, Emma had wistfully named the star on the right the Mom Star, the star on the left the Dad Star, and the smaller, brightly twinkling spot just below them the Emma Star. She’d made up all kinds of fairy tales about these stars, pretending that they were her real family and that one day they’d all be reunited on earth like they were in the sky.

  Emma had been in foster care for most of her life. She’d never met her dad, but she remembered her mother, with whom she had lived until she was five years old. Her mom’s name was Becky. She was a slender woman who loved shouting out the answers to Wheel of Fortune, dancing around the living room to Michael Jackson songs, and reading tabloids that ran stories like baby born from pumpkin! and bat boy lives! Becky used to send Emma on scavenger hunts around their apartment complex, the prize always being a tube of used lipstick or a mini Snickers. She bought Emma frilly tutus and lacy dresses from Goodwill for dress-up. She read Emma Harry Potter before bed, making up different voices for every character.

  But Becky was like a scratch-off lottery ticket—Emma never quite knew what she was going to get with her. Sometimes Becky spent the whole day crying on the couch, her face contorted and her cheeks streaked with tears. Other times she would drag Emma to the nearest department store and buy her two of everything. “Why do I need two pairs of the same shoes?” Emma would ask. A faraway look would come over Becky’s face. “In case the first pair gets dirty, Emmy.”

  Becky could be very forgetful, too—like the time she left Emma at a Circle K. One summer night not long after that, Emma slept over with Sasha Morgan, a friend from kindergarten. She woke up in the morning to Mrs. Morgan standing in the doorway, a sick look on her face. Apparently, Becky had left a note under the Morgans’ front door, saying she’d “gone on a little trip.” Some trip that was—it had lasted almost thirteen years and counting.

  The sliding glass door opened, and Emma wheeled around. Travis, her new foster mom’s eighteen-year-old son, strutted out and settled on top of the patio table. “Sorry about bursting in on you in the bathroom,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” Emma muttered bitterly, slowly inching away from Travis’s outstretched legs. She was pretty sure Travis wasn’t sorry. He practically made a sport of trying to see her naked. Today, Travis wore a blue ball cap pulled low over his eyes, a ratty, oversized plaid shirt, and baggy jean shorts with the crotch sagging almost to his knees. There was patchy stubble on his pointy-nosed, thin-lipped, pea-eyed face; he wasn’t man enough to actually grow facial hair. His bloodshot brown eyes narrowed lasciviously. Emma could feel his gaze on her, canvassing her tight-fitting new york new york camisole, bare, tanned arms, and long legs.

  With a grunt, Travis reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a joint, and lit up. As he blew a plume of smoke in her direction, the bug zapper glowed to life. With a crisp snap and a fizzle of blue light, it annihilated yet another mosquito. If only it could do that to Travis, too.

  Back off, pot breath, Emma wanted to say. It’s no wonder no girl will get near you. But she bit her tongue; the comment would have to go into her Comebacks I Should’ve Said file, a list she’d compiled in a black cloth notebook hidden in her top drawer. The Comebacks list, CISS for short, was filled with pithy, snarky remarks Emma had longed to say to foster moms, creepy neighbors, bitchy girls at school, and a whole host of others. For the most part, Emma held her tongue—it was easier to keep quiet, not make trouble, and become whatever type of girl a situation needed her to be. Along the way, Emma had picked up some pretty impressive coping skills: At age ten, she honed her reflexes when Mr. Smythe, a tempestuous foster parent, got into one of his object-throwing moods. When Emma lived in Henderson with Ursula and Steve, the two hippies who grew their own food but were clueless about how to cook it, Emma had begrudgingly taken over kitchen duties, whipping up zucchini bread, veggie gratins, and some awesome stir-fries.

  It had been just two months since Emma had moved in with Clarice, a single mom who worked as a bartender for VIP gamblers at The M Resort. Since then, Emma had spent the summer taking pictures, playing marathon games of Minesweeper on the banged-up BlackBerry her friend Alex had given her before she’d left her last foster home in Henderson, and working part-time operating the roller coaster at the New York New York casino. And, oh yeah, avoiding Travis as much as she could.