Noah (Raven #2, working title)

Here's an excerpt from The Gliesians, a book that I hope to try and get published:

PROLOGUE: JACE

            It was early, way before sunrise. My room was pitch black. I rolled across the bed, to the opposite side, and propped my head up on my hand. I stayed there like that, twisted in the sheets, watching Keeley get dressed.

            She found her shirt discarded on the ground where we’d left it in frantic hurry last night. I watched her slip her arms into the straps, pull it over her head, and wrestle with it a few minutes longer, making sure the thin cloth covered her smooth back. If I was her boyfriend, someone in love with her, I might have taken the opportunity to skim my fingers across the warm, brown flesh in attempt to get her to reverse the action—take the shirt off and crawl back underneath the covers. But that’s not who we were to each other. We weren’t in love. She was just a habit I couldn’t seem to quit. One that always made my skin crawl with guilt the morning after.

Keeley had pulled on her pants. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, fiddling with the snap and zipper. I glanced down at the ground. Her right foot was resting atop my boxers. So much for getting dressed, I thought with a frown. I didn’t like being like this, naked under the sheets. It made me feel vulnerable, something I wasn’t used to feeling, something I wasn’t allowed to feel anymore, not since my parents died, turning me into a teen foster parent.

“You’re coming this afternoon, right?” she asked over her shoulder. I rolled onto the pillow and focused my eyes on the ceiling above me. The room was dark, but even though I couldn’t really see it, I knew the ceiling was bumpy—a popcorn ceiling. I remembered how before the blackout, back when we’d had furniture, Ty and I had slept in bunk beds. Mine had been the top one. At night, whenever I was bored, I reached my hand up, rubbed it against the rough surface, making little pieces of painted plaster rain down on my head and shoulders.

            “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Keeley was part of a rebellion group, one of many that had sprung up in the past few weeks since the landing. The Gliesians, members of our country’s first terraformed planet, had finally answered our distress calls.

Just before the blackout, the government had sent out a series of intergalactic calls, messages travelling at the speed of light, to the people of Gliese, begging them to come home, to help us. Three years later they’d finally deemed us worthy of an interstellar intervention.

Some Earthlings were ecstatic. They packed up their belongings, their children, and headed towards what used to be downtown, towards the old university where the small group of Gliesians assigned to our city had established themselves. Others, like Keeley, weren’t so welcoming. In those three years since the blackout, things had changed, power had shifted from the hands of the rich and polished politicos. And even though our world was crap—nights spent hiding from bandits and Centaurians, doglike creatures with a thirst for human flesh; days spent scavenging food in the forest or trying to grow it beside rusted swing sets and the frames of what had once been trampolines—the people with said power weren’t willing to give it up. Even if it meant a return to the past—technology, lights, civilized living.    

She twisted around. Even in the dark I could see the flash of anger in her eyes. “You’re coming,” she said. This time it wasn’t a request, but a command. “Joe really wants to meet with you. And if you’re smart, you won’t piss him off.”

I turned my head to face her. Even in the dark there was no denying how beautiful she was—long dark lashes, big supple lips and curves that always seemed to get me into trouble.

Since she’d started hanging out with Joe and his band of rebels I’d found my feelings for Keeley shifting from like, to indifferent, to hate. But my body never seemed to fall in line. Even now, when she was doing this to me, forcing me to do something I swore I’d never do, it was betraying me.

I fisted my hands in the sheets and counted to ten, trying to get myself back under control. Knowing exactly what she did to me, Keeley moved closer.

“In the city, they’re projecting holograms, images from the Gliesian leader. They’re going to open up the school to everyone, all kids, Gliesian and Earthling. That’s their plan you know. They want to train our youth to save Earth. ”

“What a stupid plan,” I spat out, trying to mask my fear. There were only two kids around here—Mac, Keeley’s adopted sister, and Emmett, my youngest brother, neither of which I wanted anywhere near the Gliesians. But I couldn’t let Keeley know that. She thrived on danger and fear—hers and that of others. If she sensed my apprehension, she’d only be more eager to send our Mac and Emmett into the fray.

Keeley reached over and gently raked her fingernails over my exposed chest.

“That’s what Joe said. He doesn’t believe it. He wants us to get on the inside, to find out what they’re really up to.”  

I could feel my pulse start to race and my mind speed up. It didn’t matter that I’d tried to play it cool, someone else had already seduced Keeley with the promise of danger and excitement, and now she was trying to do the same to me—same plan, different tactic. She hadn’t come here in the middle of the night out of loneliness, out of physical need. No, she came here to play on my needs, to use my weakness against me, to entice me into letting Joe use my brother, and maybe her sister, to infiltrate the Gliesian school.

            Disgusted, I wrapped my hand around her wrist and squeezed. Getting the message, she curled her fingers into a ball. I rolled across the bed and reached behind Keeley and yanked my shorts out from beneath her foot. I pulled them on and stood up. I needed to find the rest of my clothes. Lying here like this made me vulnerable, and I wasn’t going to let Keelely have that, or any other advantage over me.

            “It’s almost light out,” I said, just before pulling a worn t-shirt over my head. It was blue, a v-neck with dark swirls at the top. Keeley liked me to wear blue. It made my eyes look more blue than green. Thinking about her and what she was planning to do to our family made me want to rip the thing off and set it on fire. But it was dark and my clothes were all heaped into piles in the corner of my room. My main goal right now was getting Keeley out of the house. I left the shirt on.

            “Everyone will be up soon, and I don’t think you should be here when they are.”

            Some girls might cry, or at least show some sign of being hurt when their quasi-boyfriend, or whatever we were, tried to kick them out of the house. They might even argue; show some sign that they cared. Not Keeley. That’s because she doesn’t. Not about me anyway. I have always just been a means to an end, which worked fine until now. We were both getting something out this relationship. But not this time.

            She rolled off the bed. She was wearing a tank top with thin spaghetti straps. Her long dark hair fell in waves over her bare shoulders. Ignoring my body language, she came over to me and put her hand back on my chest, and while playing with the hem, dipping her finger between the neckline and my skin, she said, “I think I’ll stick around. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the rest of the family—yours, mine, ours. It’d be nice to, you know, catch up. See what everyone else has to say about the school. See if Mac and Emmett might be interested in going.”

            I was at war with myself. My skin tingled just being this close to her, remembering how her warm body had felt, pressed against my own with nothing between us. But my head couldn’t forget what she wanted from me—my brother, her sister who I loved as if she were my own—two kids I’d sworn to protect and take care of.

            I wrapped my hands around both of Keeley’s wrists and pinned her hands to her sides. “If you go. If you promise me that you will leave now, quietly, without talking to anyone, not even Mac, I will be there this afternoon. You have my word.”

            Her full lips spread into a grin. “You won’t regret this, I promise,” she said before leaning into me and pressing her lips against my own. I didn’t pull away, but I didn’t deepen the kiss the way I had hours before when she’d first climbed in through my window.

            Shortly thereafter, she broke the kiss and headed back towards the window. It was still open. I’d been so eager to see her, I’d completely forgotten to maneuver the bars back into the place. I could see that the once dark sky was now a muted gray. Sunrise was only moments away.

            She swung one leg over the ledge and paused, straddling the window. I watched as she gathered her dark hair in her hands and secured it with a rubber band, pulling it into a high ponytail on the top of her head.

            “You won’t regret this, Jace. I promise. Joe is amazing. And he has connections. He can do things for us that we can’t do for ourselves. You’ll see. You help him out a little, and things are going to change for you, for all of us. Finally, for the better.

“See you around noon. You know where to go, right?”

            I nodded my head. I knew exactly where Keeley’s friends kept house. Back before any of this had started between us, back when she was just like Mac, a neighbor girl who, because of our new reality, had become family, I’d followed her.

            That day she’d left, headed into the city to find their mother, a mother who’d abandoned them soon after the blackout. Mrs. Davenport, Keeley and Mac’s mom, had lost a son to a Centaurian mauling. She’d never been able to get over it. She’d gotten really depressed, something that could have been fixed with medicine and doctors if we’d still had any of that. We didn’t. So, one night, when everyone was sleeping, Mrs. Davenport left. Months later Keeley had tried to follow. I don’t know if she ever found her mother or not. She refused to talk about it. But she did find Joe and started to work for him.

            She’d come back to visit us every few months. One month I followed her back. I needed to make sure that she was okay. I thought that if I saw where she was living, maybe I’d worry less about her. I should have worried more.

            “Super,” she said with a smile. “You’ll see, Jace. Good things are in store for us.”

            I forced the corners of my lip to turn up in an attempt to return her smile. My face felt all wrong—too heavy, too stiff, but I had to keep up appearances. I had to make her think that she’d done her job, that she’d convinced me of the rightness of this plan.

            Too caught up in her own vision for our future she didn’t notice my forced joviality. Without giving me a second thought, sure she’d done her part, she drew her other leg through the window and jumped to the ground.

Normally, although it wasn’t cool, I would have made my way to the window and stood there, with my back pressed against the wall, peeking around the corner, and watched her figure retreat until the tall grass and the horizon had swallowed her whole. Not this time. I needed to think and fast. As the oldest member of both our families, and obviously the only sane adult between the two us, it was up to me to keep Emmett and Mac safe—Keeley wasn’t up for the task. In the next few hours I needed to come up with a way to keep Joe from sending Emmett and Mac to that school, and a plan B. A way to keep them safe inside those walls if he couldn’t be reasoned with.