THE MIND RAIDER
Chapter One
An exclusive preview of the novel
Hollow Ground
Kiam woke just past midnight with his father’s voice in his head.
North, to the Pole, my son!
He sat up, sweat dripping down his back.
The room stood silent except for his brother’s steady breathing in the bunk below. Kiam rubbed a hand over his face and climbed down the ladder to the floor. His foot landed on a Viking helmet, a remnant of last Halloween. He picked it up and set it beside his brother’s bed, the dream still tugging at his heavy eyelids.
The mattress creaked.
“Enta mnih?” Rami mumbled, slipping into Arabic. He rubbed his eyes, squinting at Kiam. “You were talking in your sleep. Again.”
Kiam sighed and shrugged.
“Bad one?” Rami asked.
“Weird one.” Kiam glanced at the helmet, toeing its bent horn.
Rami pushed himself up on one elbow, studying him. “Some things you feel but can’t see. Like the wind. Or Mom needing help in the kitchen.”
Kiam smiled, letting the words settle in him. A minute ago, he had been inside a dream, but Rami had his own way of bringing him back. “I need some air. You go back to sleep and don’t wait up for me, okay?” He held his older brother’s gaze for a moment before slipping quietly out of the room.
Unpaid bills slumped in a stack on the kitchen table, a red notice sticking out. On the couch, his mom slept in her work clothes, clutching a worn copy of Beyond Mirrors to her chest.
The book his father wrote.
The one she kept close, as if a door back to him might open somewhere between its pages.
On the coffee table sat the remnants of a small birthday cake, candles melted to stubs. It had been five years. His mother no longer talked about recovery. She no longer spoke of the day his father would wake up or become himself again.
Instead, she clung to a smaller hope: that somewhere behind those distant eyes, some part of him still remained.
Once, when Kiam had asked if Baba was ever coming back, his mother had pointed to his father’s bald head and said, “Your Baba’s still in there. I have to believe that.” She had held onto that belief like a lifeline, and so did Kiam.
He pulled a blanket over her shoulders and she stirred just long enough to say, “If the old man knocks, don’t answer.”
He nodded, though she was already asleep.
Kiam crossed the living room to where his father sat slumped in his recliner, angled toward the window. His eyes were open, fixed on something far beyond Brooklyn, or maybe on nothing at all.
Kiam leaned down and kissed his father’s forehead. The skin was still warm. The familiar scent of antiseptic clung to him, mixed with the sharper note of the lotion his mother rubbed into his father’s hands each night.
“Happy birthday, Baba.”
His father didn’t blink, but Kiam waited anyway, like he always did, for the tiniest flicker of acknowledgment. A small breath, a muscle twitch, something.
Nothing.
He straightened and looked around him. Over by the window, a spider worked patiently at its web, threading silk across the cracked paint, and dodging strips that hung down from last winter’s leaks.
Power like that appears delicate only from a distance, he thought.
“Scared them today, didn’t we?” Kiam said.
The spider didn’t answer, but the faint rumble of the R train passing under Fourth Avenue at that exact moment made its threads tremble.
The web shook, but held. Kiam watched the fine strands pull against their anchors and wondered what was still holding him.
* * *
Earlier that day, before the dream chased Kiam from sleep, Mr. Whitman’s tenth-grade history class had turned into a total disaster. Outside, a tow truck hauled a cab from a fresh sinkhole on Flatbush Avenue.
Kiam’s mind wandered while he sat there at his desk.
Was Brooklyn built on hollow ground?
He flipped open his sketchbook and began to draw.
“Kiam! Get your eyes off that window and answer the question!” Mr. Whitman barked.
He froze. Snickers rippled through the classroom. He didn’t need to look up. His classmates’ thoughts pressed in his head, heartless and cruel.
Zoning out again.
Freak.
Can’t blame his dad for checking out.
Kiam’s jaw clenched. Today, of all days, the words scratched at him like claws. His nails dug into the desk.
Usually, he would let the voices simply pass through him or swallow them before they could become anything else.
But this time, something in him shoved back.
A pressure built behind his eyes. The air went still, like the second before lightning strikes. Then the images broke free, threading through the room and slipping into every mind in it before he could pull them back.
For three seconds, nothing happened.
Then Maya Sanchez slapped at her collarbone.
“Ow—what the—”
She looked down and went rigid.
A black spider crawled from beneath her shirt collar. Then another. Then dozens poured from her sleeves, tangled in her hair, skittered across her cheeks.
Maya screamed so hard her voice cracked.
“Get them off me! Get them off!”
The room detonated.
Chairs scraped backward. A desk crashed onto its side. Someone shrieked and tore their sweatshirt over their head, flinging it across the aisle. Another student stumbled into shelves lining the far wall, knocking books and pencils everywhere.
“They’re in my bag!”
“Oh my god, they’re all over me!”
“Make it stop!”
A boy slapped both hands against his neck again and again, his face white with panic. Maya clawed at her shirt, sobbing now, while two girls beat frantically at their own sleeves, each convinced the spiders had found them.
“Everybody calm down!” Mr. Whitman shouted. “There are no—”
He stopped. His eyes dropped to his sleeve.
Kiam saw the exact moment the illusion reached him, too. Mr. Whitman’s mouth fell open as his gaze locked onto his wrist, horror spreading across his face.
“Wait,” Kiam whispered. But the word had no force.
The images spread. More gasps. More screams. More hands clawing at sleeves and hair, scratching at collars, reaching frantically into open mouths. The spiders weren’t real. The terror was. It poured through the room and reverberated back to Kiam in waves, every mind screaming at once.
He pressed his palms to his temples. The pressure behind his eyes flared white-hot. For one awful second, he felt their fear and his own anger tangled together, impossible to separate. Part of him wanted them to be scared. Part of him wanted them to know what it felt like to have something inside your head that didn’t belong there.
Maybe then they would stop.
“Kiam!” a voice cut through the chaos from somewhere nearby.
He looked up to find Nev staring at him. The look on her face did what the screams hadn’t.
Kiam recoiled. The illusion snapped loose, and just like that, every nightmare disappeared.
For a heartbeat, no one moved. The room was left wrecked and breathless: desks overturned, Maya curled on the floor with both arms over her head, Mr. Whitman clutching the edge of his desk like he might be sick.
“What was that?” one student asked.
“They were real! I felt them!”
“Maya’s bleeding.”
Students rushed for the door, shoving into one another, crying and cursing as instinct took over. Mr. Whitman kept saying, “Out. Everyone out. Slowly,” though no one listened.
Kiam stayed frozen at his desk. His hands were shaking.
Near the window, Leo’s chess book was still open, but they weren’t reading anymore. Ying stood halfway out of her chair, the start of a grin already dying on her face. Nev rolled her wheelchair closer to Kiam through the wreckage.
“Spiders?” Ying stared at him. “Kiam, what the hell?”
Leo looked from the overturned desks to where Maya had stood, then back to Kiam. “That wasn’t suggestion.” Their voice had gone quieter. “That was induced mass panic.”
Nev stopped beside him. “Kiam.”
He couldn’t look at her. His stomach turned.
Freak.
Can’t blame his dad for checking out.
This time, the thoughts might have been someone else’s. Or they might have been his own. It was hard to tell now.
He scraped back his chair. “Sorry for wrecking last period,” he said, heading toward the door.
“Hey,” Ying said sharply. “Don’t do that. Don’t walk away like this is nothing.”
“I didn’t say it was nothing.”
“Then tell us what happened.”
Nev caught his hand as he passed. Her grip was gentle, which somehow made it worse. “That wasn’t like you.”
Kiam turned to face her. “They don’t get to decide who we are.”
It came out harsher than he meant it to.
Nev didn’t flinch. For a moment she simply held his eyes. “I wasn’t talking about them.”
He looked past her then pulled his hand free. “I need space.”
He left before any of them could reach him.
The hallway outside Mr. Whitman’s room had become a bottleneck. Students stood on tiptoe trying to see inside while teachers ushered them back toward their classrooms. Someone kept asking if Maya was okay. Another insisted
there had been spiders everywhere. No one seemed to agree on what they had seen.
Kiam kept his head down and pushed through the crowd.
At the far end of the hall, a man moved against the current of students. Faded school polo. Keys clipped to his belt. Eyes scanning faces.
Asher.
“Hey, Ash!” a boy called from the side, loud enough for others to hear. “I hear Maya puked in the bathroom. And looks like you forgot your mop.”
A few kids laughed.
Asher didn’t even turn. Didn’t slow either. His gaze had already found him.
“Kiam, slow down,” Asher said upon reaching him. His eyes dropped to Kiam’s shaking hands, then lifted to his face.
“Hey, it’s okay, take a deep breath.”
Kiam tried to step around him.
Asher shifted to block his path. “Whatever comes next can wait thirty seconds.”
At that, Kiam finally looked up. Asher held his gaze, asking nothing more of him.
Kiam nodded once. Then he turned toward the front doors, needing distance more than anything. And yet, Asher’s words stayed with him much longer than thirty seconds.
* * *
That night, in his family’s apartment, Kiam opened the window to the fire escape. Outside, a streetlamp flickered.
Sirens wailed in the distance. The spider’s web trembled in the frame, a fly now trapped in its threads, its wings beating uselessly.
He watched the fly struggle while the spider waited, patient and certain.
The weight of the day settled over him: his father trapped inside his own mind, Maya’s screams, the heat still lingering beneath his skin.
He felt things were slipping away.
But today, for the first time in a long while, he hadn’t felt helpless.
And it had felt good.
He climbed onto the fire escape, sat down, and opened his sketchbook. The dream that had woken him came roaring back under his pencil.
North, to the Pole, my son!