Before Her Armor

A prequel to the award winning SIR...The origin of the woman at the heart of the Metronome series — how a girl who survived a massacre spent the following years building herself into something that could never be hurt again.On April 15, 2002, at 2:47 in the afternoon, fifteen-year-old Lydia Johnstone survives twelve minutes that kill thirteen of her classmates. She goes to the floor, and she lives. And in the silence afterward, waiting for the grief everyone expects of her, she notices something colder settling into its place — a clarity, a curiosity, an instinct to understand the thing that was supposed to have destroyed her.Before Her Armor is the story of what she does with that instinct. Pulled out of her old life by wealthy parents who love her the only way they know how — by buying the best care money can find — Lydia spends the years that follow studying: people, danger, herself. She learns that observation is a kind of safety, and that a self can be built on purpose, piece by piece, into something the world can't reach.But armor has a cost, and not everyone she meets is trying to get past it. Some are simply, quietly, offering her another way to survive.Tracing Lydia from the worst day of her life through her college years, Before Her Armor is the origin story behind the woman readers of the Metronome series already know — and the account of exactly how she became her.