y1 by Sherrie Cronin

Part 1: Fire Dancing for Fun and Profit

Chapter 3. June 2009

Zane Zeitman had spent nine months pretty well establishing to his own satisfaction that being a lab technician sucked. At least it did here at Penthes Pharmaceuticals, a downtown Chicago-based mid-sized corporation known for its philosophy of stiff internal competition and high rewards for the golden few capable of rising above the company's other eight-hundred or so employed peons. What was worse was that Zane had understood the situation perfectly well when he took the job. So as he lurched along, holding on tightly to a pole he shared with four other commuters on the overly full El train, he figured he had only himself to blame.

Zane's slightly slender, five-eleven frame seemed to have become shorter and rounder over the last nine months of work, and his skin was pastier. His non-descript medium ash-brown hair was disarrayed as usual and the khakis he wore, one of three pairs of acceptable work pants that he now owned, had permanent coffee stains from the long hours of trying to stay awake in the lab.

Dr. Peter Hulson Sr., Penthes’ still highly involved seventy-three-year-old founder, was exceedingly proud of being a self-made multimillionaire. He catapulted in the 1970s from the middle class into significant wealth and power on the sole basis of his intellect, drive, and hard work. Or at least that is how Dr. Hulson told the story when interviewed and when addressing his employees. Zane supposed that the real story behind the myth was a bit more complicated, as real stories tended to be, but he was willing to give the old man his due as being brilliant in the field of modern drugs relating to mental health. And he fully acknowledged Dr. Hulson was entitled to shape whatever sort of corporate culture he wished in his own company.

But when one was basically on the low end of the hired help, not deemed qualified to make decisions or contribute in any fashion other than by doing exactly what one was told, Zane was discovering that life in the jungle was pretty miserable. Do well, and the competitive geniuses above you in the hierarchy just want more. They are trying to get theirs. Do poorly and you've caused them to stumble, a sin which will not soon be forgiven.

As a particularly large woman bumped against him when the train screeched to one more stop, Zane shook his head, trying to reconstruct how he had gotten himself into such a miserable position. Graduating a year ago with his shiny bachelor's degree in neuroscience from one of the nation's most prestigious universities, he and his friends had celebrated mightily with drunken relief. And when he got his diploma, his parents had literally cried with pride. Their genius son. Their firstborn.

It turned out that it was nice someone had thought he was so very special, because the job market the summer of 2009 was considerably less impressed. As his friends had scattered off into graduate schools, jobs, volunteer work and under-employment, Zane became increasingly aware that he himself had landed in a field in which a Ph.D. was a minimum requirement for responsibility and advancement. And though the workings of the human mind and how it interfaced with the body absolutely still fascinated him, the prospect of five or six years of, say, pulverizing rat brains in a blender and examining the results, did not enthuse him. He had hoped that a few years break in the working world would help.

But the working world did not have so much to offer. If he wanted to get away from academia, which he did, then he was either going to end up tending to others’ lab experiments in the private sector, or he was going to end up in something like sales or marketing in a field related to pharmaceuticals. Both sounded distasteful. But so did waiting tables.

Worse yet, entry-level jobs for those in his situation at bigger firms with reputations for caring reasonably well for their employees seemed to have gotten filled before he ever got his application in the door. Zane thought it was fairly apparent that it would have been helpful to have had an uncle or old family friend at one of these places, looking out for a suitable spot for him well before graduation. That was just the way of the world.

But after a few discouraging months of job searching, first from his campus apartment and then from back home in Texas when his money ran out, Penthes had interrupted his growing desperation with a request for a phone interview. Zane knew he was not particularly outgoing on the phone, but he had tried his very best with this one as he was frankly running out of options. And something must have impressed these folks enough, because they offered him a position in Chicago. Maybe, he thought in retrospect, they were impressed by his desperation.

There was no moving allowance offered, but yeah, his parents would help him get there. And it wasn't so much a job as it was a sort of poorly paid contract for an eighteen-month probationary period. Nine months as a lab assistant, then the same as an assistant in sales and marketing. This was unusual, but the company said that they wanted him to experience both entry-level avenues, to see what he was best at. Frankly he agreed it would be good for him to try both. Then, the contract specified that they would talk about his future.

Zane figured that the nine months in the lab would be relatively easy, mildly enjoyable, and, if he was lucky, even a bit informative. Instead, it had been hell. Driven young researchers, fighting each other to impress every boss between themselves and Dr. Hulson himself, were more than willing to use and abuse Zane with workdays that went late into the night, and weekends that almost always required his time as well. Appreciation was nil, and he figured out quickly that there was no way for him to get an "A." He was tense most of the time.

Except for Britta, a fellow graduate of his who had also landed a job in Chicago, and her housemates who had taken him in, he had no real friends in town and no time to make any. Life had gone from hard work and fun to just plain hard work. Zane was puzzled by how thoroughly this had happened. He could not believe that his life, actually anyone's life, was meant to be little more than a series of long tedious days drinking bad coffee in windowless rooms, punctuated by sleep, food, a little TV and then more of the same, with the occasional drunken partying on weekends to provide the rare moment of joy. That was just crazy.

As his mandated stint in sales and marketing approached, he realized that he had gone from dreading it, to looking forward to it. He had no illusions about being good in a field which required that he act friendly when he didn't feel like it and that he exaggerate the good points of products he did not necessarily believe in. Zane had never liked lying. But any change right now just had to be a good thing.

To make matters worse, vacation time during this probationary period was ridiculously limited. He had barely managed to get a day off to go back to Texas for a long weekend before he began his new assignment. What he really would have liked was several days in Cancun, but neither the money nor the time was there for that. So Zane figured he could settle for just some of his dad's home cooking and his mom's sympathy. Way better than nothing. And the really good news was that he left for Texas tomorrow.

His mom looked baffled when she met him at the airport, and it took Zane awhile to figure out that it was his physical appearance. Oh right. Damn.

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Genre – Speculative Fiction

Rating – PG13 (occasional crude language & main character is gay)

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Website http://ytothepowerof1.org/

Kain (Elyon’s World #1) by Brie McGill

 

Counting days is irrelevant in the life of a well-to-do man, unless he counts the days passed in total service to the Empire. Salute. Submit. Shut up and scan the wrist. Therapists armed with batons and brass knuckles guide the derelict along a well-beaten path to Glory.

When human experiment Lukian Valentin escapes the Empire to save his crumbling sanity–through a grimescape of fissured highways, collapsing factories, putrescent sewers–he realizes the fight isn’t only for his life, it’s for his mind. Torturous flashbacks from a murky past spur him on a quest for freedom, while the Empire’s elite retrievers remain at his heels, determined to bring him home for repair.

Lukian needs one doctor to remove the implanted chips from his body, and another to serve him a tall glass of answers. Lukian attempts a psychedelic salvage of his partitioned mind, gleaning fragments of the painful truth about his identity.

A scorching, clothes-ripping rendezvous with a mysterious woman offers Lukian a glimpse of his humanity, and respite from his nightmarish past. It also provides the Empire the perfect weakness to exploit for his recapture.

To rise to the challenge of protecting his new life, his freedom of thought, and his one shot at love, Lukian must reach deep into his mind to find his true identity. To defeat the Empire, he requires the deadly power of his former self–a power that threatens to consume him.

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Genre – Sci-Fi/Steamy Romance

Rating – R (18+)

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Website http://www.sexdrugsandcyberpunk.com/

Time and Space by Shireen Jeejeebhoy

Chapter 1
THE SNATCH
FORTY. Tomorrow, I will be forty. That number echoes in my footsteps as I walk the familiar beat to work.
Time.
That’s my name, and … where did the time go? When did I get to forty? What does it mean?
Beat, beat, beat: my footsteps rap along the sidewalk in time to the music pumping into my ears from my iPod touch. My footsteps distract me. But only for a moment. I think: at my age, my mother still had not had me. That’s why my mother and father had called me “Time.”
“It was about time your mother got pregnant,” my father would say often during post-Sunday-dinner coffee, as he leaned back in his worn armchair lighting his pipe.
“And it was about time you got out. You sat in there and sat in there and would not come out,” my mother would retort to me.
“So we called you ‘Time’,” Father would say. Then he would end the story with: “Seemed logical.”
“Seemed appropriate,” Mother would counter as Father finally managed to pull a draw from his pipe and emit three puffs.
What a horrid name, I think, as I turn the corner onto Queen. Today, it’s made me obsessed with time and with turning forty. I see a people-stuffed streetcar trundle by, and I sigh. It’s been awhile since I gave up trying to catch the streetcar to work and reluctantly woke up earlier to get there on foot.
Peggy and Sue have this big birthday lunch planned for me tomorrow at our favourite restaurant. And the boss has generously—I roll my eyes at “generously”—given me two hours off so we can take our time. The whole thing is surreal.
Bzzzttt.
I take my iPod touch out of my skirt pocket and look at it. The screen is dark, and I press the Home button. No notifications. I turn it this way and that to find what created that strange noise. It seems okay. I shrug, slip it back into my pocket, and continue walking along my route.
The morning sun is slanting sharply along the sidewalk in front of me, toward me, pointing at me, that old woman turning forty. I want to hide from its edgy light, but no point in crossing the street into the shadowed sidewalk. I’ll only have to cross back again. I hate walking.
Voices interrupt my thoughts, and I glance into a garishly-painted alley and think: Ford Nation has obviously missed this place. But perhaps there’s so much graffiti in Queen West alleys, it’s worn out Mayor Ford and his fans before they could erase it all. But there’s no one loitering or walking in the alley, only solitary people like me hustling along Queen Street, coffee cups in hand. Suddenly, I stop. I look at my empty hand: I forgot to get my morning café latté, no whip, soya milk, half-sweet, grandé. I think of retracing my steps, but then I’ll be late, and the boss doesn’t like tardiness. He gets in a snit if I’m even one minute late. My feet resume walking.
And my thoughts resume churning.
At my age, my parents had been married twenty years. It would be another five before I was born. They’d both died a decade ago. I have no sisters or brothers. And since both my parents were only children, I had no immediate cousins. As a child, I met these strange adults my parents called “distant cousins” on special occasions like weddings, adults who embraced me in powder and perfume, exclaimed over how much I’d grown, making me squirm. But I haven’t seen them since the funeral.
The last funeral.
I’ve been alone in the world for ten years, yet until today I hadn’t dwelled on it, hadn’t felt alone. I live in the house my parents lived in. I’ve been working at the same kind of job since I graduated from university with my English Lit degree and went right into a temping agency. Father tried to get me to think bigger, but what was I good for? I’m bad at math. Numbers confuse me. And science is gibberish. Only eggheads do science anyway. But then who’d want an English grad? I thrust away a stray memory of an interview with … I can’t even remember now. Father had said I’d sabotaged it; Mother had said never mind, I was born to type. And so type I did and have until this day. I thought it’d be temporary until I found my feet. Yet there they are, my feet, attached to the bottom of my legs, and they’re taking me to my admin assistant job as they do every weekday.
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Genre – Science Fiction / Time Travel
Rating – PG13
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Website http://jeejeebhoy.ca/

The Sea and the Silence by Peter Cunningham

A book for your head and your heart. Winner of the Prix de l’Europe 2013.

A powerful novel from one of Ireland’s best writers on the turbulent birth of a nation, and the lovers it divides

Ireland 1945. Young and beautiful, Iz begins a life on the south-east coast with her new husband. As she settles in to try and make her life by the ever restless sea, circumstances that have brought Iz to the town of Monument are shrouded in mystery. However, history, like the sea cannot stay silent for long. The war in Europe is over, and change is about to brush away the old order. Soaring across the decades that follow Ireland’s newly won independence, sweeping across the fierce class issues and battles over land ownership that once defined Irish society, The Sea and the Silence is an epic love story set inside the fading grandeur of the Anglo-Irish class.

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Genre - Historical Fiction/Historical Romance

Rating – G

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Website http://petercunninghambooks.com/

John’s Gospel: The Way It Happened by Lee Harmon

cHAPTER 1

The Preexis T en T Chris T

I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. —Revelation 21:6

Ruth reappeared from the door of the house with a writing board and quill. She produced an empty scroll from under her arm, sat down upon a wooden stool near John, and with a defiant glance toward Matthew, said one word: “Ready.”

“Thank you, Ruth! But first, Matthew, tell me what brings you back to Ephesus?”

“No, you go first, John. Why are you here at the home of Ruth’s mother? I hardly expected to find you here. You’re in no condition to travel.”

“Should I not visit my flock, so long as I live? And also, I’d heard you were arriving.”

“Me? You came to see me?”

John shrugged. “I came to see the son of Samuel.”

“Well, you may see my father as well, then.” Matthew pointed to a limestone ossuary near the gate, making no attempt to hide the scowl on his face. “I bring his bones home to where he lived, where he last found happiness. He’ll be buried here in Ephesus.”

“Your father died?” John rolled onto a shoulder to stare across the courtyard at the modest, undecorated box. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” “I’m not surprised. You keep yourself quite separated here, John.” John made a face. “These are my people. My sheep.” He waved a hand at the expanse of Asia Minor.

“Yes. Well.” Matthew still scowled, wondering if this were a good time to make his exit. But where would he go? To John, he replied as politely as he could manage, “I know how close you were to my father, but his spirit left months ago.”

“It’s good that he died in Judea. To be buried in Jerusalem is like being buried under the altar, right? Why did you move his bones from there?”

Matthew’s scowl turned into a sneer. “Oh, we didn’t last long in Jerusalem. It remains a sorry excuse for God’s city, still in shambles from the war. You may remember, John—we left Ephesus heading for Jerusalem just shortly after your vision, because my father could no longer support us with his bricklaying business. He broke ties with the trade guild, you know, at the temple of Artemis.”

“Yes, I know,” John said simply.

Matthew’s eyes flashed bitterness before he continued. “They called us heathen here, John! Heathen! Because my father believed in Christ rather than their deified caesars! Christians are hated here in Ephesus.” Because you taught us to deny the gods and customs of this land, Matthew avoided saying aloud. “My father could no longer find work, except among your Christians, who could not support us. So we left.”

“Samuel always wanted to return to Jerusalem.”

“Yes, he did. He spoke of it often to me. ‘God’s city,’ he called it. ‘The Holy City’! ‘The bride of Christ’! A miserable joke. We did not stay there long but returned to Syria and settled in Antioch.”

Ruth spoke now, her voice taking on a milder tone. Matthew’s apparent pain had chased the tease away. “You know, John, they have additional gospels in Syria now. Two more works of God, two more anonymous gifts—tributes to the life of our Christ.”1

“Yes, I am aware,” John nodded, glancing at Matthew. He clearly knew Matthew to be the origin of one of the two, though he gave no indication of approval or disapproval. Steering the conversation back on track, he asked Matthew, “How are the Christians in Antioch?” “They struggle, like here. Christians are no longer welcome in the

synagogues. I went to a service with my father a few days before he died. He wished to experience one last Sabbath, sharing the rituals of our God in the synagogue, so we endured the stares and joined the congregation. The president noted our arrival and asked me to lead us in the Amidah, the common prayer.”

“And you did?”

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Genre – Religion / Christianity

Rating – G

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Website http://www.dubiousdisciple.com/

#AmReading - (Servants of Time, #1) Serving Time by Nadine Ducca

Serving Time by Nadine Ducca
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reviewer's Note - None of us at the Quality Reads UK Book Club has finished reading or discussing Serving Time by Nadine Ducca. We have been asked to post our reviews early. This review is based on the first 70% of the book and may change at a later date once we finish reading and discussing the book.

Did the plot pull you in or did you feel you had to force yourself to read the book? This was definitely not a forced read. I did feel that some sections were redundant or that she took you all around the world before getting to the point but overall, I like this book very much and depending on how it ends, will definitely be recommending this book to other book club members in my district.

How realistic was the characterization? The actions of each character was plausible and the reader is able to connect with how they feel, what they have done and the decisions that they are about to make. Time was probably the most emotional, Tristan the most confused (or the one with the most decisions to make) and Eneld was the one who was hardened to change.

Did you feel you were experiencing the time and place in which the book was set? Most of the time, yes. There were times when I became so immersed in the setting, the dialogue seemed to pass me by. But I think this was more of a reader issue and wasn't entirely a reflection on how the author had written the story.

Disclosure - As a Quality Reads Book Club member, I received a free copy of this book from the author via Orangeberry Book Tours in exchange for my honest review.


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The Druid Legacy by Mark Miller

Chapter 1                            Footprints

It was a warm day, and sweat ran down the small of my back as I walked the familiar game trail.  I crinkled my nose and smelled my own armpits.  Admittedly, I have not been as good about bathing since my parents were taken, but I wasn’t sure if the smell was me or the bag of dead rabbits I was carrying.  I was really good at laying traps and usually came home with a full load.  The last time out, I carried home so many I had enough to smoke and store three rabbits for the winter.  It was easy to catch rabbits now, but I would need enough food to make it through the winter when there would be no vegetables from the garden and game would become scarce.  Any animals I would catch then would be leaner with less meat on their bones.  I didn’t think I would have too much of a problem though, since game was always plentiful and I seemed to have a gift for trapping.  I don’t know why, but I seemed to know where the animals would go.  My dad said it was uncanny how I could trap.  He use to hunt deer and an occasional boar, but at 12 years old I knew I couldn’t pull his bow or hold the boar spear.  I wasn’t a large boy, so I focused instead on what I could do: pull carrots and trap small game.  Some days I would go down to the creek and fish, but I really didn’t like the taste of fish.  Since no one made me eat it any more, I didn’t do it often.

As I walked along the trail, I stared down at my boots and I thought about what my mother would say about my appearance.  My big toe stuck out of the top of my right boot and the sock had given out before the boot.  I grinned to myself as I thought about my mother chastising me for my dirty toenails and my long hair. She would put her hands on her hips or point a finger at me and say, “Wesslayn Grace, just because we live in the woods now, doesn’t mean we live like animals!”  I knew my mother was mad when she called me by my full name.  Everyone else called me Wess.  I hated it, as I knew it meant I was likely to be punished for something I had done, but now I missed it and would give anything to hear her call me by my full name.

I had done a good job keeping the cabin repaired, chopping wood, and keeping up with the garden, but I naturally leaned towards the work my father use to do.  Staring at the hole in my boot, I knew I was going to have to learn how to do something or I was going to have a really miserable winter.  My feet were growing and my pants were a bit short as well.  The idea of me trying to sew my own pants out of dead rabbit fur had me giggling to myself as I came to my last trap.  I stared down at it more than a little confused.  The bait was gone, and the trap had been destroyed. 

As I tried to puzzle out what had happened, I noticed that there were strange footprints all around the area.  I crouched down next to one to study it closer.  The track was about the size of my foot, but there were three toes that each ended in a point.  My stomach sank; I had seen these tracks before.  They were all around our cabin the day my parents disappeared. As I crouched there, I thought back to that day. I had come home from trading with the Millen’s farm.  The Millen’s live about a half day’s walk to the west of our cabin, so when I go to trade there I normally sleep over.  I liked going there because I got to play with my friend Myka.  We had been friends since we moved here and built the cabin almost six years ago.  She is almost as good outdoors as I am, even though she is just a girl.  Working on the farm long hours has made her strong and tougher than most girls.  Whenever I went to visit, her dad would let her take off from her chores so we could go play. If she had too much to do I would jump in and help. Her mom died when she was young, so Myka is an only child like me.  With no brothers around to help with the chores, her dad counted on her to work on the farm, so I wasn’t allowed to stay more than one day.

That particular day I was carrying my pack full of hard cheese, eggs, and flour when I returned home.  At first I didn’t think anything was wrong, it was a pretty spring day and the door was open.  My mom often aired out the cabin as she cleaned or cooked if the weather was mild.  As I slipped my pack off my shoulders, the first thing I noticed was there was no fire in the hearth.  This was a rare thing as there was usually water to boil, food to cook, clothes to clean, or something else requiring a fire.  If a fire wasn’t burning, there were usually coals still present.  On that day the hearth was cold and the coals weren’t banked, so I knew right away the fire had burned out on its own the night before. 

PI looked around the cabin.  The blankets were gone, as well as the food crates and jarred vegetables.  I climbed up to the loft were I slept and my blankets were gone too.  I looked down from the ladder and froze, with a lump in my throat.  I hadn’t noticed before that my father’s great sword was gone from the mantle.  My dad hadn’t touched that sword since we came here.  Whenever I asked him about it I would get a cryptic answer like, “Maybe one day you will need to know how to use that thing.  When you are ready I will teach you, but hopefully that day will never come.” 

I climbed down and walked back out the door and really looked around the clearing in front of our home.  The three-toed footprints were everywhere.  I had never seen these before and I didn’t know what could have made them.  I walked around the back of the cabin towards the garden and there was blood splattered on most of the trees.  As I turned around, I noticed the walls were stained with dark red streaks.  I had gutted and cleaned plenty of animals out here so I knew how much blood could come from one animal, but this was more blood than I had ever seen.  This might be an odd thing to say, but the huge amounts of blood gave me hope. My dad was the toughest guy I knew and I pictured him swinging his sword in massive circles to protect my mother, killing evil goblin things by the dozens.  Despite the blood, there was no sign of them anywhere.  I searched the woods, but I am no tracker.  After searching every day for months, I gave up hope that I would ever find my parents or the creatures that took them from me.

Looking down at that track now I had a dreadful feeling.  Whatever these creatures were, they were still here.  I looked up from the track and knew I had to try to follow them.  I glanced up at the sky to check the time.  It was about two hours until sun down.  I would definitely not be able to track them in the dark.  I dropped my hand to my belt and tested the edge on my small hatchet.  It was a little duller than I would have liked, and I cursed myself for not sharpening it this morning.  My skinning knife was razor sharp, but the blade was short and would barely help as a weapon.  With grim determination, I dropped the dead rabbits and set out down the path to follow the prints.

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Genre – Young Adult Fantasy

Rating – PG

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Website http://www.thedruidlegacy.com/