Excerpt from Girl at War by Sara Novic, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"You're bleeding," I said.

Luka wiped his chin with his arm, tried to make out the line of blood on his sleeve.

"I thought it would happen. I heard my dad talking about it last night." Luka's father worked for the police academy and was in charge of training new recruits. I was annoyed Luka hadn't mentioned the possibility of a raid earlier. He looked comfortable there in the dark, his arm draped on the rung of a bunk bed ladder.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't want to scare you."

"I'm not scared," I said. I wasn't. Not yet.

The siren again, signaling an all-clear. The men pressed back the door and we ascended the stairs, unsure of what to expect. Aboveground it was still daylight and the sun obscured my vision as much as darkness had below. I saw spots. When they dissipated, the playground came into focus just as I'd remembered it. Nothing had happened.

At home I barged through the front door, announcing to my mother that there was no milk left in the entire city of Zagreb. She pushed her chair back from the kitchen table, where she'd been grading a pile of student assignments, and shifted Rahela closer up against her chest as she stood. Rahela cried.

"Are you okay?" my mother asked. She gathered me up in a forceful embrace.

"I'm fine. We went to the kindergarten. Where'd you and Rahela go?"

"In the basement. By the šupe."

The basement of our building had only two notable characteristics: filth and šupe. Every family had a šupa, a padlocked wooden storage unit. I loved to press my face against the gap between the door and the hinges to see inside, a private viewing of a family's lowliest possessions. We kept potatoes in ours, and they fared well in the darkness. The basement didn't seem very safe; there wasn't a big metal door or bunk beds or a generator. But my mother seemed sad when I asked about it later. "It's just as good a place as any," she said.

That night my father came home with a shoe box full of brown packing tape he'd pilfered from the tram office, where he worked some days. He pulled big sticky Xs diagonally across the windows and I followed behind him pressing the tape down, smoothing out the air bubbles. We put a double layer on the French doors that led to the little balcony off the living room. The balcony was my favorite part of our flat. If I ever felt a twinge of disappointment after coming home from Luka's house, where his mother did not have to work and he slept in a real bed, I would step outside and lie on my back, letting my feet swing over the ledge, and reason that no one who lived in a house could have a high-up balcony like mine.

Now, though, I worried that my father would tape the doors shut. "We'll still be able to go outside, right?"

"Of course, Ana. We're just shoring up the glass." The tape was supposed to hold the windows together if there was an explosion. "And anyway," my father said, sounding tired, "a little packing tape's not good for much."

From the book Girl at War by Sara Novi?. Copyright © 2015 by Sara Novi?. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.