Excerpt:
He had not wanted to leave Ares to fend for himself in the Underland. Despite extraordinary sacrifices, Ares was an outcast among the humans and bats. He had let his first bond, Henry fall to his death to save Gregor’s life. Even though Henry was a traitor and Ares had done the right thing, the Underlanders hated him. They also blamed the bat for not killing the Bane although, technically, that had been Gregor’s job. Gregor had a bad feeling that wherever Ares was, he was suffering. But that was just a guess, of course, because no one had bothered to tell him everything!

As he yanked open the door to his school, Gregor tried to replace thoughts of the Underland with his math assignments. Every Friday they had a quiz first thing. Then there was half-court basketball in gym, some kind of sugar crystal experiment in science, and finally lunch. Gregor’s stomach was always growling at least a full hour before he reached the cafeteria. Between the cold, trying to make the groceries stretch at home, and just growing, he was hungry all the time. He got free school lunch and he ate everything on his tray, even if he didn’t like it. Fortunately, Friday was pizza day, and he loved pizza.

“Here, take mine,” said his friend Angelina, plunking down her slice of pizza on his plate. “I’m too nervous to eat, anyway.” The school play opened that night and she had the lead.

“Want to run your lines again?” asked Gregor. Her script was in his hand in a flash. “Are you sure you don’t mind? I come in right here.”

Like he didn’t know. Gregor and their friend Larry had been running lines with Angelina every day for six weeks. Usually Gregor did it, though. The cold, dry winter air aggravated Larry’s asthma so reading out loud made him cough. He’d been in the hospital last week with a bad attack and was still looking kind of wiped out.

“It doesn’t matter, you won’t remember a thing,” said Larry, who was drawing something that looked like a fly’s eyeball on his napkin. He didn’t look up.

“Don’t say that!” gasped Angelina.

“You’ll be rotten, just like you were in that last play,” said Larry.

“Yeah, we could barely sit through that,” Gregor agreed.

Angelina had been wonderful in that last play. They all knew it. She tried not to look pleased.

“What were you again? Some kind of bug, right?” said Gregor.

“Something with wings,” said Larry.

She had been the fairy godmother in a version of Cinderella set in the city.

“Can we start now?” said Angelina. “So I don’t totally humiliate myself tonight?”

Gregor ran lines with her. He didn’t mind really. It distracted him from darker thoughts.

“Keep your head in the Overland,” he told himself.

“Or you’ll just make yourself nuts.”

And he did a pretty good job of it for the rest of the day. He got through his classes and took Lizzie home and then went over to Larry’s apartment. Larry’s mom ordered out Chinese food for a special treat, and they went and saw the play. It was fun and Angelina was the best thing in it. When he got home, Gregor gave his sisters a pocketful of fortune cookies he’d saved from dinner. Boots had never seen fortune cookies and kept trying to eat them, paper and all.

They went to bed earlier than usual because it was just too cold to do anything else. Gregor piled not only his blankets but his coat and a couple of towels on top of him. His mom and dad came in to say good night. That made him feel secure. For so many years his dad had been absent or too ill to come in. To have both parents tuck him in seemed like a real luxury.

So he was doing all right, keeping his head in the Overland, until his dad leaned down to hug him good night and whispered in a voice his mom couldn’t hear, “No mail.”

No mail. Two little words that brought the entire Underland and all its troubles whoosing right back into his brain. He and his dad had worked out a system. Gregor’s mom had put the laundry room off-limits last summer. You couldn’t blame her. In the last few years, first her husband, then Gregor and Boots had fallen through a grate in the laundry room wall that had led to the Underland. Their disappearance was agonizing. How his mom had kept the family going both emotionally and financially through all this…well, Gregor couldn’t say. She had been amazing. So it seemed a small enough thing to let have her way about the laundry room.

The tricky thing was…that made checking the grate that led to the Underland impossible for Gregor. But his dad knew how anxious he was for news of Luxa and the others, so once a day he would make a brief visit to the laundry room and see if a message had been left for his son.

They didn’t tell his mom; she would have just been upset. It was different for her. She had never been to the Underland. In her mind, everyone who lived there was somehow connected to the abduction of her husband and children. Unlike Gregor and his dad, who both had friends down there.

So there was no mail. No word again. No answers. Gregor stared into the dark for hours, and when he finally fell asleep, his dreams were troubled.