Unstable Orbits: scene 1

Advance Review Copies of Unstable Orbits will be squishing through the cables to their recipients in a day or two. Just 15 days until release!

If you missed out on an ARC copy, then here’s the first scene of chapter 1 as a teaser. To read the full chapter 1, subscribe to the blog. New subscribers receive a super-secret link with access to the first chapters for all my books.

Chapter 1: Inertia

Number one: the Big Bang, obviously.

Numbers two to I’m going to say seven? Mergers of supermassive black holes, sending gravity waves rippling across the universe.

Number eight: our A-levels, first time around.

Luke and I both had short fuses. We were Nate and Luke, and we were Nuke. And also sometimes Late. In that first final term of school our fuses never received enough oxygen and sunlight to regrow or whatever, trapped in the suffocating darkness of revision and pressure and mocks and pressure and think-about-uni and pressure and parents and pressure and exams and exams and don’t-go-down-the-pub and exams and exams and—

Things turned fiery. Explosive, repeatedly. A cluster of hydrogen bombs dropped and exam season became a nuclear winter, a radioactive shitshow, with the effects localised to my house and his house and the streets between. And the school gym and car park. And maybe a couple of other places.

Neither of us had a moment to calm down, to breathe. We pinballed from exam to argument to exam to argument. We broke up not in a snap but in a crumble, smeared across four hectic endless weeks. Three-hour exams taken in a volcanic mist or drowning in tears or in a black, airless tomb where I could barely scrawl my name at the top of the paper.

And afterwards, when we got back together, there were secondary explosions. “Look,” I’d said to my parents, “we patched up our differences like in a real relationship,” and for some reason a plate smashed against a wall. For days after that Dad barely talked to me. Mum didn’t talk, she shouted. Luke’s mum turned old-lady polite and I sniffed her biscuits for arsenic.

The emotional weather drifted away, a cold front from the arctic nudging the poisonous air south. But the particles lingered in the fields, the places, the glances. We couldn’t go back. We couldn’t try again.

Unless we could.