Beyond Our Stars (Excerpt)

Chapter One

Note from the author:

Hi there! Beyond Our Stars is my debut novel, recently published with Bloomsbury Spark.  I'm excited to introduce you to the story, and over the next few weeks I'll post the first six chapters so you can take a look. The novel is available in full wherever eBooks are sold.

Thank you so much for reading!

Sincerely,

Marie

Chapter One 

I knew that we were all feeling the same thing, a communal cold sweat.

“You know what I’d really like right now?” Weeks asked me with a lazy drawl. He sidled up next to me, his bulky arm brushing against mine.

Not to be headed into a session there’s no escape from, where your worst nightmares come to life? “No, what?” I asked.

“A little tap on my tight buttocks for luck?” He winked at me. “You know you want to.”

I sighed. Then I swatted him on his ass as hard as I could.

He hollered and jumped up and down with glee. “Oh baby, that was just what I needed!”

I let him walk ahead of me to prevent him from returning the favor and kept my head down as he let out exaggerated moans of gratification. Weeks got his name from parents who’d given in to the doomsday thinking on Earth, near the end. Some of the kids had names like his now. Days, Weeks, Hours. People named their kid after the amount of time they thought they had left. Instead of turning out gloomy and depressed the way his parents must have been, Weeks chose to be ridiculously, incontrovertibly optimistic.

His stupid jokes helped the mood of the group sometimes, but I didn’t want to encourage him. No sense in utterly denying the truth. You could only pretend so much.

I slowed my pace so I could be the last one to walk into our Stack. The Local waited next to the entrance until we all walked inside.

They’d chosen ten from each age group. Ten children, ten teenagers, ten adults, and ten elderly. We were specimens, hence the name Specs.

The sessions in the Stacks were anything but pretend. We’d tried to see them that way, at first. We would tell ourselves it wasn’t real, it was a holographic simulation that couldn’t hurt us. Except it could.

They’d sucked all the air out of the room once. Let us slowly choke for oxygen. We survived but the memory of that slow choke stayed with you. It changed you. It was always in my mind now, this is what it feels like to die this way.

Running was pointless. Their technology was more advanced and the few attempts made in the beginning were laughable.

The Local remained standing at the slick white doors. I walked in and they sealed airtight behind me with a vacuum sucking sound and left us in blackness.

When we’d landed what was left of our fleet of ships after a five-year-long trek across the galaxy to our new home, the Stacks were our first greeting. Walls rising hundreds of feet made of huge metal cylinders, one on top of the other, spreading out like a puzzle and deeply disturbing us all with their sudden appearance from thin air.

The space inside a Stack was the size of a small stadium. Plenty of room for us to run from whatever was coming but never any escape. We’d figured out that they must have force fields that moved with us while we were inside. Whatever the environment was, I was carried with it. I tried not to picture myself floating in mid-air, suspended by a force field, as a session tossed me around in a tornado.