by AlexinTO
Nobody left a manual for this. Fourteen years old and on his own, Amos has two choices: give up, or figure it out. He figures it out — crawling through air ducts, outwitting a criminal gang, and arming himself from a surplus store whose owner asks very few questions and offers more than he probably should. Then there's Alanah, who turns out to be just as resourceful in the same quiet, serious way Amos is. Together they carve out a hideout, a routine, something that almost passes for a life. Staying alive, it turns out, is only half the fight. The other half is holding onto who you are while doing it. They're managing — until Amos crosses the wrong person. An old-world family matriarch with a long memory and older methods. The curse she places doesn't arrive with warning. It just begins, quietly, to eat him from the inside. With time running short, his friends are pushed to desperate and violent extremes he never asked of them. The End and the Beginning is a coming-of-age story about loss, and the fierce loyalty that grows between people who decide to look out for each other when the world has long since stopped looking out for them.
