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Marinka dreams of a normal life, where her house stays in one place long enough for her to make friends. But her house has chicken legs and moves on without warning... What questions does the Prologue leave you with? Prologue My house has chicken legs. Two or three times a year, without warning, it stands up in the middle of the night and walks away from where we’ve been living. It might walk a hundred miles or it might walk a thousand, but where it lands is always the same. A lonely, bleak place at the edge of civilization. It nestles in dark forbidden woods, rattles on windswept icy tundra, and hides in crumbling ruins at the far edge of cities. At this moment it’s perched on a rocky ledge high in some barren mountains. We’ve been here two weeks and I still haven’t seen anyone living. Dead people, I’ve seen plenty of those of course. They come to visit Baba and she guides them through The Gate. But the real, live, living people, they all stay in the town and villages far below us. Maybe if it was summer a few of them would wander up here, to picnic and look at the view. They might smile and say hello. Someone my own age might visit – maybe a whole group of children. They might stop near the stream and splash in the water to cool off. Perhaps they would invite me to join them. “How’s the fence coming?” Baba calls through the open window, pulling me from my daydream. “Nearly done.” I wedge another thigh bone into the low stone wall. Usually I sink the bones straight into the earth, but up here the ground is too rocky, so I built a knee-high stone wall all the way around the house, pushed the bones into it and balanced the skulls on top. But it keeps collapsing in the night. I don’t know if it’s the wind, or wild animals, or clumsy dead people, but every day we’ve been here I’ve had to rebuild a part of the fence. Baba says the fence is important to keep out the living and guide in the dead, but that’s not why I fix it. I like to work with the bones because my parents would have touched them once, long ago, when they built fences and guided the dead. Sometimes I think I feel the warmth of their hands lingering on the cold bones, and I imagine what it might have been like to hold my parents for real. This makes my heart lift and ache all at the same time. The house creaks loudly and leans over until the front window is right above me. Baba pokes her head out and smiles. “Lunch is ready. I’ve made a feast of shchi and black bagels. Enough for Jack too.” My stomach rumbles as the smell of cabbage soup and freshly baked bread hits my nose. “Just the gate hinge, then I’m done.” I lift up a foot bone, wire it back into place, and look around for Jack. He’s picking at a weathered piece of rock underneath a dried-up heather bush, probably hoping to find a woodlouse or a beetle. “Jack!” I call and he tilts his head up. One of his silver eyes flashes as it catches the light. He bounds towards me in an ungainly cross between flying and jumping, lands on my shoulder, and tries to push something into my ear. “Get off!” My hand darts up to cover my ear. Jack’s always stashing food to save for later. I don’t know why he thinks my ears are a good hiding place. He forces the thing into my fingers instead; something small, dry and crispy. I pull my hand down to look. It’s a crumpled, broken spider. “Thanks, Jack.” I drop the carcass into my pocket. I know he means well, sharing his food, but I’ve had enough of dead things. “Come on.” I shake my head and sigh. “Baba’s made a feast. For two people and a jackdaw.” I turn and look at the town far below us. All those houses, snuggled close together, keeping each other company in this cold and lonely place. I wish my house was a normal house, down there, with the living. I wish my family was a normal family, too. But my house has chicken legs, and my grandmother is a Yaga and a Guardian of The Gate between this world and the next. So my wishes are as hollow as the skulls of the fence. Read the rest on Scribd! Ask your parent or carer to click on the link below to sign up for 30 days' free access to Scribd. https://blog.scribd.com/home/2020/3/17/a-letter-from-the-scribd-ceo-to-our-community

Luke is a comic superfan who shares a treehouse with his Maths-mad older brother Zack. Luke's only mistake is going for a wee right at the wrong time...! What do you think happened while Luke was having a wee?! Chapter 1: The (Not) Chosen One My brother is a superhero, and I could have been one too, except that I needed to go for a wee. My name is Luke Parker, I’m eleven years old and I live in a mild-mannered part of London with my mum, dad and big brother, Zack. He wasn’t always a superhero, but with a name like Zack you’ve got to wonder if my parents had a hunch that one day he’d end up wearing a mask and cape and saving orphans from burning buildings. I mean, come on! It’s not a name, it’s a sound effect. It’s what you get in a comic when a superhero punches a supervillain. Pow! Blam! Zack! It seems to me that in life you are faced with clear-cut moments when things could go one way or another. Vanilla or chocolate. Smooth or crunchy. Drop the water bomb on Dad’s head, or hold fire. It’s up to you which choice to make and sometimes all it takes to change the way your whole life turns out are four little words. “I need a wee.” It was the fateful evening. Zack and I had been in our tree house for about an hour and I was bursting. I was reading an old issue of Teen Titans by torchlight and Zack was doing his maths homework. He’s always been a bit of a swot. Before he became Star Lad, at school he was star boy. “Then go,” he said, solving another quadratic equation with a flick of his pencil. “I’m not stopping you.” The truth was I didn’t want to go down the rope ladder in the dark. It had been hard enough climbing up it in the first place. It’s not that I’m unfit or anything, but put it like this: you won’t ever see me on an Olympic podium. I suffer from hay fever and have funny-shaped feet that mean I have to wear these things in my shoes called “orthotics”. When Mum first told me I needed them I was excited. I thought they sounded like supersoldier-power armour, but when they finally arrived they turned out to be bendy foot-shaped supports and not a cybernetic exoskeleton suit. That was a disappointing Thursday. I hung my head out of the tree house door. “Maybe I could just wee from here?” “Out! Get out of here, you disgusting child!” Zack is only three years older than me, but when I’ve done something to annoy him he calls me a child. Of all the things I can’t stand about my big brother, being called a child is number forty-seven. Not that I have a list. OK. I do have a list. Even before he became a superhero the list was up to number sixty-three. Now it’s almost at a hundred. He is very irritating. I climbed down the rope ladder and went into the house. I did a wee. When I returned to the tree house a few minutes later, Zack was sitting there silently in the dark. I knew something was up because he’d stopped doing his homework. I grabbed my torch and levelled the beam in his face. He didn’t even blink. “Zack, are you all right?” He nodded. “Are you sure? You look … different.” He nodded again, very slowly, like he was working out some complicated thought in his head and then said in a croaky voice, “I think … something amazing just happened to me. Luke, I’ve changed.” Now this didn’t come as a great surprise. About six months before, Dad had taken me aside for what he called a man-to-man chat. We sat in his shed – I think that’s because it’s the most manly room we have – and Dad explained that from now on I might notice some changes in my big brother. “Zack’s embarking on a great journey,” said Dad. “Brilliant! When’s he leaving? Can I have his room?” “Not that kind of journey,” said Dad with a weary sigh. “He’s going through something called puberty,” he went on. “His voice will be different, for instance.” “Ooh, will he sound like a Dalek?” “No, not like a Dalek.” “Pity.” “He will become hairier.” “Ooh, like a werewolf?!” “No, not like a werewolf.” This puberty lark didn’t seem up to much. There was other stuff, to do with privacy and girls, but to be honest, after the let-down about the Dalek and the werewolf I stopped taking it in. So, when Zack told me in the tree house that something had changed, I knew exactly what to say. I pursed my lips and gave a serious nod like I’d seen the doctor do when he told me I had glandular fever. “I’m afraid that you have caught puberty.” He ignored me and stared at his hands, turning them over and over. “I think I have superpowers.” Read the rest on Scribd! Ask your parent or carer to click on the link below to sign up for 30 days' free access to Scribd. https://blog.scribd.com/home/2020/3/17/a-letter-from-the-scribd-ceo-to-our-community Story Chair Special Click on the link below for Bubble 4's hilarious Story Chair Special! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVX57rUXMCY

In this multi-award winning novel, eleven-year-old Aya fights to stay in Britain, find her father and pursue her dream of dancing... What do you think has happened to Aya? Aya could hear the music floating through the walls. And the woman’s voice: “One, two … port de bras … lift those arms, girls … three, four … straighter – yes! … five, six … eeeee-longate…” The notes of the piano seemed to trickle down through Aya’s limbs, and her fingertips moved involuntarily towards the tune that tinkled through the stuffy air. The music stopped. Aya wiggled her toes and glanced around. The community centre was crowded – a jumble-sale collection of people, talking in a bustle of different languages. Hot sun spilled through dusty windows and the room smelled of soup and unwashed clothing. And sadness, Aya thought. She sighed and shifted in her seat. The music started again and Aya glanced upwards. The piano notes were coming from somewhere close by. Upstairs? If she closed her eyes really tight and focused hard enough she could almost – almost – imagine herself back home, in the dance studio in Aleppo. With the heat on her limbs, the white-hot sun falling through the skylight, and the aromas of the city trickling through the windows – dusty streets, car fumes, incense. She smiled as she remembered standing at the barre, tracing her pointed toe through a series of rond de jambes, recalling the dust that sometimes trickled across the floor and that drove Madam Belova mad. Anyone looking at Aya at that moment would have seen a small girl who looked much younger than her eleven years, holding a sleeping toddler in her arms. She had her eyes closed, and a curious expression danced over her face as her small foot traced circles on the grubby floorboards. A headscarf covered her black hair, and the clothes she was wearing were too big for her – leggings sagged over her skinny limbs and an old dress, which might perhaps have once been her mother’s, hung limply off her tiny frame. And yet there was something about the way she sat - the bird-like tilt of her pinched face – that made her seem as if she belonged somewhere different. The sounds of music stopped once more and Aya wriggled on the hard plastic seat. She was hungry and Moosa was heavy in her arms. The music made her feel fidgety and restless, and something else she couldn’t find a word for. She shook her head determinedly and sat up straight – she needed to be focused today. To help Mumma. “How long do you think it will it be?” she asked the woman next to her, who just shrugged. Aya wasn’t sure if she’d even understood. She glanced around again. They’d been waiting for three hours to talk to the caseworker – a young man with a beard and tired-looking eyes who sat behind a makeshift desk, papers and files piled up around him. Right now he was talking to Mr and Mrs Massoud – the old couple from the hostel who had told Aya that they came from Damascus. Aya heard the words: “Application for asylum … appeal … lawyers … undocumented … hearing.” “Same old story,” she muttered to Moosa. “Right, Moos! Over and over – wherever we go.” Moosa shifted in his sleep, making the funny little sucking noises that made Aya want to squeeze him tight. “You sound like a baby rabbit, Moos!” she muttered, planting a kiss on her brother’s grubby, tear-stained face. His hair was damp with sweat, his fingers clasped tightly round Aya’s thumb. She remembered the first time she had held him, the wave of love she had felt then. The feeling she’d had that she would never let anything happen to him – ever. “Don’t worry, Moosie!” she whispered into his damp cheeks. “Aya’s here. Aya is going to sort it all out. Promise.” Mumma was sitting next to her. She looked tired and faraway. “It won’t be long now, Mumma,” Aya said. But Mumma did not reply. She just kept staring up at the dusty windows – as if she could see something through them that Aya could not. “You OK, Mumma?” Aya asked. “You hungry? I can get you some food? There is soup today.” But Mumma said nothing. Just then the door to the community centre swung open and the music spilled into the room, louder now. A quicker piece was playing and Aya found her toes tapping out the beat on the floor. “One, two, three… Squeeze, two, three… To the barre, two, three… and – photograph! Loooovely, ladies!” Aya held her breath for a second. “Photograph!” she muttered, half to herself and half to Moosa. Madam Belova liked to say that too. “Photograph!” It meant a moment of stillness, a pause, catching hold of the music and waiting with it. The notes and the dancer suspended in time – hovering in the air – just for a second. Suddenly Aya couldn’t sit still a moment longer. She glanced at the queue of people in front of them. It would be ages before they were called. She could slip out – just for a moment – to go and look. “Mumma, I’m just going out. I won’t be long. I promise I’ll be back to help. And I’ll get you some soup – and bread. You need to eat, OK?” Mumma turned and nodded, but she seemed to have only half heard. I will make sure she eats properly today , Aya said to herself. And rub her temples the way Dad used to do when she got one of her headaches. And I’ll talk to the caseworker and get everything sorted out. Then Mumma will be able to relax – get better. Be herself again . Aya carefully uncurled her little brothers’ fingers from her own and laid him down gently in the battered pushchair that Sally – the nice young volunteer who ran the centre – had found for them. Then she stood up and did a little spin on the spot, which – just for a moment – made old Mr Abdul sitting opposite think of a curling autumn leaf, falling through the air. But Aya was unaware of being leaf-like as she made her way over to the doorway. She just needed to shake off the fidgety feeling that the music had sent trickling through her limbs. Before she burst! Read the rest on Scribd! Ask your parent or carer to click on the link below to sign up for 30 days' free access to Scribd. https://blog.scribd.com/home/2020/3/17/a-letter-from-the-scribd-ceo-to-our-community Story Chair Special Click on the link below for Mr Kurji-Smith's glorious Story Chair Special! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMBXPzZqEbY