Excerpt from The Tyrant's Daughter by J.C. Carleson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

What's going on? What are you doing?" As my father's daughter, I could speak to the driver with a certain amount of imperiousness.

But the driver was hunched over the wheel, too focused to answer. I whirled around just in time to glimpse what had caused him to swerve.

Out the thick, tinted window, I saw it. Bastien did too.

There was a body in the street.

A man, probably, but it was hard to tell. It was a man-sized heap, anyway, lifeless and crumpled in the middle of the road. I suppose it could have been a person only injured or unconscious, but something about the wretched stillness of the body made me certain that death had long since paid its visit.

But as horrible a sight as it was— a discarded corpse almost close enough to touch— what happened next was worse.The car behind us— whether my father's car or the decoy even I didn't know— did not swerve. It did not veer even an inch to avoid the object in its path.

That car, heavy with its armored plating, drove over the ragged corpse as if it were nothing more than a piece of trash in the road. I heard a thump as it happened, although it was probably only my imagination— my brain giving the gruesome image its own gruesome soundtrack.

I may have imagined the sound of the impact, but I definitely did not imagine the sound of the chief of security shouting, firing the driver on the spot as soon as we pulled into the razor-wire safety of our vacation compound. Our chauffeur, the man who had been white- knuckled with the effort of steering us safe of the terrible obstacle just a few minutes earlier, did not say a word to defend himself. He accepted his punishment with the slumped shoulders of someone who knows he has made an unforgivable mistake.

Only later could I bring myself to ask Father what the driver had done wrong. He frowned when I asked, and looked as if he didn't want to answer. He did answer, though. That was something about my father. He always told me the truth if I asked the right question.

"Laila, dearest, it was a matter of safety." His frown deepened as he chose his words. "There are people who put things in the road to force us to change our course. And then they booby-trap the path that looks safest. Do you understand? A driver who swerves is the driver most likely to trigger a road-side bomb. The protocol is to never deviate from the planned course, no matter what, and your driver violated that protocol. He put you in danger, so he had to be fired."

"But it was a body. A person!" A tear escaped and my voice cracked, causing my father to turn away. He didn't like displays of weakness. I didn't care. Not at that moment, anyway, though normally even the faintest hint of irritation was enough to make me scramble to amend whatever it was I had done to displease him. I didn't want to accept his explanation. I didn't want to live in his world. A world in which windows were sealed shut and bodies were mere bumps in the road. I ran from the room, and we never discussed it again.

But now my six-year-old brother marvels at a bus that stops for squirrels.

Bastien darts away from me, shoving his leather satchel into my hands so that he can run over to the shabby playground across from our apartment. As he scampers toward the rusty swing set, I wonder if he tried the window on the bus. When he found that it would open, how did he react? Was he grateful for the breeze, or was he frightened by the possibility of what dangers could enter along with the wind?

I hope the former, but truly I do not know. We have been shaped differently by our past, Bastien and I.

Excerpted from The Tyrant's Daughter by J.C. Carleson. Copyright © 2014 by J.C. Carleson. Excerpted by permission of Knopf Children's Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.