COVER REVEAL
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Cover Artist: Christine
Griffin
Pre-order Release Date:
6/17/2016
Official Release Date:
7/18/2016
Genre: MM Science Fiction
Length: 288 Pages/110k
Rating: Adult/Mature
Buy Links:
Blurb:
Their journey will span the universe and back, but there’s
no guarantee they’ll make it together.
Though Nick and Fieo are drawn to each other, their
relationship has never been easy. Their differences go beyond their races, but
they’ve managed to work together to prevent the spread of corruption, growing
closer along the way. Nick still battles the effects of years of loneliness,
fear, and pain but surprises everyone when he refuses to stay behind when Fieo
is sent on a vital mission to find the Collectors. Fieo objects, but there’s no
stopping Nick when he sets his mind to something. Over the course of their
mission, it becomes clear Nick is more than anyone ever imagined, but the
mystery of his past threatens to derail his future.
The search for the truth will take Fieo and Nick far from
Caeorleia, to worlds both familiar and completely alien, and put stress on
their already tenuous relationship. It’s a journey that will either tear them
apart or finally bring them together.
Excerpt:
Chapter One
“Look at you.” The humid warmth of the garden enveloped and
welcomed me. I stroked one finger across the fluffy yellow pod of a waist-high
flower. The small strands curled in and then opened back into a wider puff,
sending out a glowing powder that drifted high into the night sky. I chuckled.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say the small flower was ticklish. I rubbed the
pollen off against my shorts, glad I hadn’t tried to smell it. “You haven’t
told me about these yet, Jirulm.”
The elderly Caeorleian was mumbling as he plucked clusters
of hard orange buds off spindly stalks. I’d picked up the habit of talking to
the plants from him, and it wasn’t hard to see why. They were so alive.
I had flowers, and fruit, and vegetables. Never in my
wildest dreams did I think I’d get to live on a planet with wild flora. My
schooling and job training had focused on creating new strains of food crops
that were grown in chemical vats in the midst of a planet covered in metal and
concrete.
Not exactly natural. Or very appetizing, if you knew where
they got the basic building blocks for the food. No one had ever questioned
it—I hadn’t either, until I’d taken the job with the Federal Food Service Corp
after I couldn’t find a job anywhere else. Horrified when I learned the truth,
I’d spent a few days unable to choke more than few mouthfuls down at a time,
and they rarely stayed down. My mistake had been telling a coworker my plans to
reveal everything to the public.
Of course when you’re a prisoner and starving, you tend to
ignore the fact your food was grown from cells harvested from composted humans,
and you ate it anyway. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.
And I’d begged. A lot. At least five years spent on a
spaceship as the experiment of scientists had sucked all hope from me. But then
the military scientists’ plans had gone wrong. Ryker and Seral had been sent to
the planet in a bid for more information. The doctors assumed the Caeorleians
would blame Ryker, one of the hated nelho scum they named the human
soldiers waging war on their planet. Instead, something completely unexpected
happened. Seral joined in besedad with Ryker, bonding them together.
In a daring attack against the human military, using the
nanos they filled Ryker with to spy on the Caeorleians, Seral had brought down
the scientists’ enormous ship and spread the reengieeered nanos like a plague
to the rest of the fleet. Along they way, they also rescued Dade and me, the
only other two survivors of the scientists’ experiments.
And once again, I was wide awake in the middle of the night.
The memory of the moments right before rescue came, when I was forced to watch
as the human scientists cut the alien woman open, and listen as the sadistic
doctors planned to cut my belly open to compare organs, disturbed my sleep
almost nightly and left me sweating and shuddering in my bed.
I didn’t mind being awake in the early morning hours all
that much. Some of the flowers in my garden only bloomed at night. Besides, I
didn’t have much to do, so I could nap during the heat of the day. With a
planet this tropical, it made sense for Caeorleians to be seminocturnal. Night
was the only time I could count on finding Jirulm, the gardener who taught me
about the plants in my garden. Ovrumi suggested I would enjoy gardening when he
caught me wandering in the corridors, flinching away from the others passing
by.
“It’ll be time to prune those soon, Nicklaus,” Jirulm said.
The hum of his voice was low, nearly indistinguishable from the light wind
rustling through the plants.
“But they’re just barely blooming.” Sure, flowers indoors
brightened up the rather plain walls of the Residence, but all the ones in my
suite were potted. I didn’t like to snuff out their already brief lives.
“Good thing, too.” He examined the flowers, pulling at one
of the fluffy heads. “When agvarali have absorbed enough energy to glow,
the heads detach during the final bloom and migrate along the breeze.”
“Oh, I bet that’s beautiful.” I could just imagine the small
glowing fluff balls floating along a soft night wind, though I wasn’t sure if
I’d get to see it. Fieo, the stubborn ass, refused to believe I’d be going to
find the Collectors with his team, so I had no idea when the departure was
planned. I’d assumed sooner rather than later, but maybe I’d still get to see
the final bloom—some of the heads were already glowing a faint yellow.
Jirulm snorted. “Beautiful… and dangerous.”
I cocked my head sideways. “What do you mean?” Sometimes
getting information out of the old alien was like pulling teeth. But when he
did speak, he knew basically everything there was to know about plants on
Caeorleia.
“They gather energy, like sampanga trees, but so much
in such a small sphere means when they touch something—or something touches
them, like a careless finger—they explode.”
I snatched my hand back. “Explode?”
His lips twitched at the corners. It was probably the
closest I’d come to seeing a smile on his face. “Oh, not enough to kill you,
but you could easily lose a finger in the energy jolt that spreads the seeds.
Luckily, these blooms are harmless.”
“That doesn’t sound harmless! Why plant these in a garden if
they’re so dangerous?” I couldn’t believe they were actually cultivating the
damn things.
“They attract insects to pollinate the other plants.” Jirulm
tapped one long stem, and one of the creepy flying bugs crawled out of a waving
puffball and flew to another vine a few beds over. “See.”
That was one aspect of gardening I could do without. I did
not like bugs. I had nightmares of them crawling inside my ears and laying eggs
that would hatch into little buggy babies just dying to burrow into my brain. I
backed away from the agvarali. “Well, feel free to prune these while I’m
gone.”
Thoughts of going into space again on the mission kept
crowding into my mind, disturbing the peace I usually found in my garden. I
tried pushing them away and succeeded for a while as Jirulm rambled on. After checking
the natural spring fountain in the center of the garden that fed the irrigation
lines, he left me alone. There was a small carpet of grass around it, the
blades a dull gray in the silver light of the moons. Nighttime lent a certain
somber feel to the garden, muting the usually vibrant displays; I sighed as I
settled on the grass to stare up at the stars twinkling.
There was a lot of beauty in the darkness.
Alicia Nordwell is one
of those not so rare creatures, a reader turned writer. Striving to find
something interesting to read one day, she decided to write what she wanted
instead. Then the voices started ... Yep, not only does she talk about herself
in the third person for bios, she has voices in her head constantly clamoring to
get out.
Fortunately for
readers, with the encouragement of her family and friends, she decided for her
own sanity to keep writing. Now you can find her stories both free and
e-published!She can be found quite often at her blog, where she has a lot of free
fiction for readers to enjoy or working hard, or maybe hardly working, as an
admin on GayAuthors.org under her online nickname, Cia.
Oh yeah, she's a wife,
mom of two, and lives in the dreary, yet ideal for her redhead complexion,
Pacific Northwest. Except for when she disappears into one of the many worlds
in her head, of course!
Find her at:
Cia’s Stories: http://www.ciasstories.blogspot.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alicia.nordwell
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AliciaNordwell
