SHATTERED ROADS - The Skyfire Saga Book 1 by Alice Henderson Book Tour and Giveaway :)
SHATTERED ROADS
The Skyfire Saga
Book 1
by Alice
Henderson
Genre: Science Fiction/Dystopian
In a future laid
waste by environmental catastrophe, one woman in a shielded megacity
discovers a secret hidden within—and the nightmare of what lies
beyond.
Her designation is H124—a menial
worker in a city safeguarded against the devastating storms of the
outer world. In a community where consumerism has dulled the senses,
where apathy is the norm and education is a thing of the past, H124
has one job: remove the bodies of citizens when they pass away in
their living pods.
Then one night, H124’s routine leads
her into the underground ruins of an ancient university. Buried
within it is a prescient alarm set up generations ago: an
extinction-level asteroid is hurtling toward Earth.
When her warning is seen as an attempt
to topple the government with her knowledge of science, H124 is
hunted—and sent fleeing for her life beyond the shield of her
walled metropolis. In a weather-ravaged unknown, her only hope lies
with the Rovers, the most dangerous faction on Earth. For they have
continued to learn. And they have survived to help avert a terrifying
threat: the end of the world is near.
H124 waited outside the door, closing
her eyes and concentrating on the theta wave receiver by the door
lock. She mentally sent the message “unlock,” and the door hissed
open. Quietly she stepped inside with her gear, then stopped as she
heard noise coming from the main room. Someone still lived in this
pod. Her employers had told her that the only way to access the
corpse was through the neighboring pod. Weird, but she didn’t ask
questions. Maybe the deceased’s lock was broken. Still, she’d
never been inside someone’s place while they still occupied it, and
she felt uncomfortable, a stranger in someone’s home.
She crept into the main room. Her
instructions told her they’d created a hole in the wall there. A
light flickered on the wall as she moved forward. Not wanting to
disturb the occupant, she stepped lightly in her work boots. She knew
she’d get in trouble if she interrupted him. She stepped around the
corner and saw him, seated before his display, his button pad
shimmering in midair just below his hands. The light from his display
hovered in the air before him.
She knew about these display setups
and button pads that most people were equipped with. But she’d only
been in these living pods to clean out the previous tenants after
they’d passed on, so she’d never seen the equipment turned on
before.
Just ahead, she could see the ragged,
dark hole in the wall, but her eyes returned to the floating display.
She’d never seen anything so
beautiful. She knew she wasn’t supposed to, but she stopped before
stepping through the hole. Unable to help herself, she stared at the
display. Six windows filled the screen, and the man’s eyes darted
from one to the other. Both hands fluttered over the button pad,
fingers pressing down in such a rapid sequence, she didn’t know how
he could possibly make sense of what he was doing. In one window he
controlled an image of a little man who moved through different rooms
of a building, pulling levers and pressing buttons on walls. In
another flashed a sequence of unintelligible numbers. Another window
held an animated avatar of someone else, a woman, with text flying
across the screen just beneath her face. Every few seconds, his hands
would stream over the buttons and more text would fly by. A group of
people talked in yet another window, sitting around a table
chattering about someone named Phil, and how they couldn’t believe
that he had opted for the small swimming pool when he could have had
the bigger one. Along the bottom of the screen scrolled more text:
THIS YEAR’S MOST IMPORTANT DECISION! Pick the right candidate!
Vote wisely! Watch the candidates’ videos! Yes! Vote for your
favorite reality TV star in this all-important election to determine
which show will be renewed!
In yet another window a little graph
fluctuated up and down, beeping out sounds every now and then.
Whenever it beeped, the man entered text in the window, pressing some
more buttons until it stopped beeping. His eyes never left the
display, and his fingers never stopped working at the keypad. It
fascinated her that he could attend to so many things at once. What
was he even doing in each of the windows? She had no idea.
He stood up suddenly, and she leaped
back into the shadows. He walked to his wall slot as a delivery drone
clattered in the vent and came through. The display followed in front
of the man, while his fingers kept typing away. The drone hovered
briefly, laid down the man’s new food tray with the food cubes,
then took away his empty tray from earlier that day. It buzzed and
vanished back into the vents. Rapidly the man reached out, grabbed
the squares, and shoved them into his mouth. Then he returned to his
seat, his attention on the display not once faltering.
Her face burning, H124 realized she’d
been standing there far too long. If her employers found out, she’d
be ticketed. Or worse. They could assign her even more extra duties.
She was lucky the man hadn’t noticed her. She stepped forward
quietly and reached the hole in the wall. Without a sound, she
stepped through it into the dead man’s apartment.
Alice Henderson is a writer of fiction,
comics, and video game material. She was selected to attend
Launchpad, a NASA-funded writing workshop aimed at bringing accurate
science to fiction. Her love of wild places inspired her novel
Voracious, which pits a lone hiker against a shapeshifting creature
in the wilderness of Glacier National Park. Her novel Fresh Meat
is set in the world of the hit TV series Supernatural. She
also wrote the Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels Night
Terrors and Portal Through Time. She has written short
stories for numerous anthologies including Body Horror, Werewolves &
Shapeshifters, and Mystery Date. While working at LucasArts, she
wrote material for several Star Wars video games, including Star
Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds and Star Wars: Battle for Naboo.
She holds an interdisciplinary master's degree in folklore and
geography, and is a wildlife researcher and rehabilitator. Her novel
Portal Through Time won the Scribe Award for Best Novel.
Follow
the tour HERE
for exclusive excerpts and a giveaway!
Congrats on the tour and I appreciate the excerpt and the great giveaway as well. Love the tours, I get to find books and share with my sisters the ones I know they would enjoy reading and they both love to read. Thank you!
ReplyDelete