A series of mysteries.An explosion of truths.The Explosionist: Someone sets off a bomb outside fifteen-year-old Sophie's boarding school, but no one can figure out who.The Medium: Soothsayers and s_ance leaders are regular guests at her great-aunt's house in Scotland, but only one delivers a terrifying prophecy, directed at Sophie herself.The Murder: When the medium is found dead, Sophie and her friend Mikael know they must get to the bottom of these three mysteries in order to save themselves-even as the fate of all Europe hangs in the balance.Set in a time of subversive politics, homegrown terrorism, and rapidly changing alliances, The Explosionist is an extraordinarily accomplished debut novel for teens that delivers a glimpse of the world as it might have been-had one moment in history been altered.

The Explosionist

Chapter One

As a small child, Sophie used to tell herself the story of her own life, pictures and captions running inside her head just like a real book. Even at fifteen, she found herself now and again transfixed by the sense of her surroundings flattening out into a picture-book illustration: the fair-haired chemistry teacher, beakers and test tubes in racks along the countertops, rows of pupils at their desks, and near the back Sophie's own slight figure, a cone of sunlight conveniently picking out her head and shoulders (gray eyes, snub nose, sallow skin, straight black hair bobbed short with a fringe to keep it tidy) so that there was no mistaking the main character.

The warmth of the sun on her face brought Sophie three-dimensional again. She blinked and breathed deeply, the pungent smell of fresh-cut grass cutting through the fug of waterproofed raincoats and formaldehyde.

"Sophie, don't you know the answer?" whispered Leah Sinclair, Sophie's lab partner.

The answer to what?

Sophie stole a quick look at the blackboard, which held the formula C3H5(ONO2)3. Beside it stood Mr. Petersen looking even more harried and chalky than usual, so that Sophie had to fight a ridiculous impulse to get up and brush the dust off his tweed jacket. His mixture of handsomeness and haplessness brought out in her a painful tender feeling which she had entirely failed to keep secret from the other girls. Sophie hated being teased, really hated it, but she still couldn't help gazing at Mr. Petersen with an expression of sheeplike devotion. It wasn't surprising the others found it funny.

"Can none of you name this chemical?" said the teacher.

Sophie was about to put up her hand when she heard Leah whisper to the girl on the other side of her. Sophie turned and glared. If Leah had just said something about Sophie being in love with Mr. Petersen, it was grossly unfair; Sophie would never have embarrassed Leah by mentioning the well-known fact of her being in love with the games mistress.

Sophie slouched down in her seat. Through her lashes she could see Mr. Petersen looking surprised, puzzled, even a little hurt. Something in her usually strained to answer him as quickly, as fully, as perfectly as possible, but today she kept her eyes fixed on her hands and fiddled with her mechanical pencil.

Mr. Petersen gave a defeated-sounding sigh and crossed his arms.

"I'll give you three clues," he said. "It has a sharp, sweet, aromatic taste."

The other girls' faces were so blank, it made Sophie squirm (oh, why couldn't she just be like everyone else and not know the answers?). It was horrible having everyone think of her as an evil Goody Two-shoes when she really wasn't like that at all. She bit her lower lip so hard she tasted blood.

"It is sometimes used to treat a heart disease called angina."

A long pause.

"It freezes at thirteen degrees centigrade."

This one was such a dud of a clue that Sophie couldn't stop the answer from bursting out.

"Nitroglycerin," she said about ten times more loudly than she meant to.

"Nitroglycerin," Mr. Petersen repeated. He sounded pleased (Sophie absolutely hated herself for caring what he thought of her). "The active ingredient in dynamite, one of the most powerful explosives known to man."

The other girls perked up. Explosives were good fun. Sophie had more complicated feelings about dynamite, which was only to be expected: She had been a very small child when both her parents died in an accident at the Russian dynamite factory her father directed.

"Nitroglycerin's a powerful blessing to mankind," Mr. Petersen went on. "Doctors use it to treat heart disease, most often in the form of a patch stuck to the skin, although one patient stuck his butter knife into a toaster and received a modest electric shock that actually caused his patch to explode."

Sophie saw a few girls cough so that they would have an excuse to hide their smiles behind their hands. Was the mind of the fifteen-year-old girl a closed book to Mr. Petersen?

"Even a tiny trace of nitroglycerin placed upon the tongue will give you a pulsating, violent headache," the teacher went on, his voice soft, even, and rather sleep-inducing. "A dog given nitroglycerin will foam at the mouth and then vomit; within seven or eight minutes it will pass out and almost cease breathing."

Sophie could hear Priscilla Banks and Jean Roberts almost choking with laughter behind her. She shrank down lower in her seat.

Mr. Petersen pretended not to notice the laughter, but Sophie thought he looked hurt.

"Roughly seventy-five years ago, in the eighteen-sixties," he continued, "half a dozen terrible factory explosions led the Federated European States to ban the production of nitroglycerin altogether. Soon afterward, a massive explosion near the Wells Fargo building in San Francisco led to that city's nitroglycerin being seized and destroyed, and before long to a prohibition on its manufacture in both the Northern Union of States and the Southern Confederacy. We must be grateful to Alfred Nobel (the patron saint, so to speak, of the Hanseatic states) for stabilizing nitroglycerin by mixing it with a porous earth called kieselguhr. In doing so, he invented the explosive that would change the world: dynamite."

He began rooting around in his pockets. "I hadn't meant to show you this, but look. . . ."

They craned forward to see the thing in the palm of his hand: an orange cardboard cartridge that looked like something from a sweetshop window.

"I have enough dynamite here in my hand," said Mr. Petersen, "to blow up the entire school."

The shuffling and whispering stopped. Sophie sucked in her breath.

"Dynamite," he repeated, enjoying the girls' rare attentiveness. "The word comes from the Greek for ‘power.' Dynamite Number One was Nobel's name for his first nitroglycerin compound, manufactured by Nobel Explosives, Limited. Engineers use it to mine metals and blast railway tunnels through tons of rock, but dynamite also allows Scotland and the other members of the New Hanseatic League to retain independence. By providing the Federated European States with the best explosives in the world, we secure for ourselves the power of self-determination."

The Explosionist. Copyright © by Jenny Davidson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from The Explosionist by Jenny Davidson
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.