SHENLIGHT is a story about four kids who discover that their home, Sandshadow City, is in extreme danger and it's up to them to learn how to use their special powers in order to protect the innocent people from the Peaceguards--a ruthless robot police force that patrol's the alleys of the desert city.
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The floor of the old warehouse was buried in at least six inches of sand in the area around the hole in the wall, and the walls and ceiling looked covered in dust as well. It made the whole thing look like it had been built a hundred years ago. It could have been, for all I knew-the building looked pretty old.
I listened and heard muffled, but audible sounds one story above me. I rolled my eyes. These runners were so sloppy. I knew they were thieves and everything, and you couldn't really expect finesse from them, but couldn't they at least try? Who knew where Bones got these guys.
The bandit made enough noise that I was able to follow him easily from a floor below. I looked around at the chairs and tables and other things strewn across the floor. There was sand piled up against everything. It was obvious no one had been in here for a long time. Even though anyone could have wandered in the warehouse from the broken-in wall like I had just done, most people would stay far away from the I-Sector.
For most people, the punishment wouldn't be worth any scavenging that could be done in other places that were safer and further away from all the guards.
I glanced around at the dark, quiet ruins of the warehouse and shrugged at the noisy bandit upstairs.
I guess it didn't make too much sense to waste a lot of time being stealthy when it wasn't needed.
I tracked the bandit by his sand trail, always staying a floor beneath him. He made his way up to the higher levels of the building where there were more desks and chairs and skeletons of old machines. I found doors with cut or broken locks on them as we went. Apparently the crew didn't really worry too much about leaving an obvious trail either. I guess it made sense so far out into the I-Sector and in an abandoned building like this one. For other jobs in more occupied places in the city, they were more careful. But out here the idea was to get in, get the prize and get out as fast as possible.
Finally, I heard the thief stop and begin to work on some machinery above me. There were sounds of scraping, shifting pieces, something breaking, someone cursing, and eventually silence. I paused where I was, listening to him work on the floor above me and sifting out the sounds from the drowning of the sandstorm outside. The prize today was a complex part that had somehow escaped all previous thieves and scavengers. Apparently Bones had bought the location off of some other ringlord who had lost some guys and didn't have the resources to pull of this job. The plan was to send a handful of runners to rob a steel plant-or at least pretend to-on the other end of the city. That would draw all available guards and the rest of the units would shift their zones toward the location, thinning the ranks over here in the I-Sector. Then we could work unsuspected in the old warehouse.
He sent only one runner to break in and fetch the piece, and me as the cover. I had decided Bones was trusting in my abilities more and more.
And I didn't really know yet how I felt about that.
I had heard the distant sound of an alarm through the storm as we neared the warehouse. It meant the distraction was working and we had a good half-hour to work while any unoccupied Peaceguards nearby responded to the alarm. The thief upstairs kept working on the machinery while I huddled behind some old boxes and wooden chairs, waiting. There was a window across the room and through it I saw only orange. The storm raged on. For once, I actually hoped the storm would stay strong so we'd have the cover we needed to get out with the prize. A few weeks ago, during a job, the storm-
A sound.
I froze, and pushed harder by reflex, making sure I was shaded, and hiding behind something. I waited a few seconds and peered around the boxes, my heart pounding in my chest. The thief kept making noises upstairs, but I swore I had heard something on my floor, across the room, like someone quietly sliding a desk a few inches to the side. I crouched motionless for a few more moments, craning my ears, trying to listen for anything. Convinced that I had imagined the sound, I stood and slowly scanned the room.
Nothing.
Feeling only slightly better, I moved toward the staircase and heard the thief coming back down. I stepped behind some old panels that looked like movable walls for separating space in the old office, and crouched there. The runner wouldn't see me as he came down the stairs but I shaded myself anyway and listened as he quietly passed my hiding spot. He didn't know who I was, or even that I was hiding there just feet away, and I preferred it like that.
At my request, Bones told his runners very little. All they knew was that they could expect to be a hair harder to catch, even in daylight conditions, because of the "luck" he hired. Most of the bandits were superstitious and believed that kind of garbage all the time, but I still wanted to make sure that no runner ever saw me on any job. The less they knew about the "good luck" the easier it was for me to disappear if I ever had to one day. Bones himself didn't even know exactly what I did. For all I knew, he believed in the luck as well.
I smiled to myself and stepped around the movable walls to follow the thief back down through the building. I descended one flight of stairs and stopped at the bottom. There was the door with the cut padlock, still hanging open. I stepped through, onto what should have been the third floor, if I had counted correctly.
I froze in my tracks.
Something had shined through a window on the far wall.
I stood there, mid-stride, and listened. Nothing. The building had shuddered slightly in the strong winds and something had caught my eye. Or the doorknob had reflected light, I told myself.
But no.
I stepped backwards into the doorway and positioned myself exactly where I had been when I stepped through a moment before. As I made the same movements to walk through the doorway, I saw it again.
Something shiny, maybe metallic, placed on a desk in a backroom. I could see it across the entire room and through a vertical window built into the door. I glanced again toward the staircase the thief had just taken and clenched my jaw.
I could lose him.
If something happened, Bones would never give me my portion. He probably wouldn't ever let me work with his crews ever again.
A painful, quiet moment passed.
But something was off. Everything, and I mean everything inside that building was covered in dirt, dust, or on the lower floors, red sand. Could someone have followed us and been sloppy, leaving a trail? I had to check it out. I was the good luck. I needed to be sure we weren't followed or I might never get another job.
I carefully made my way toward the backroom and peered through the window. The room was dark, and even up close I couldn't see exactly what the object was-it sat on a desk at the end of the room. I tried the doorknob, and… it opened. My pulse sped up again and I was suddenly, strangely aware that I was thirsty. I stepped through the room and looked around. It looked like some kind of command room. There were panels with all kinds of dials, switches and levers covering the walls. There were desks and tables in the center with old documents and folders strewn across them like the workers had left it all to grab lunch and meant to come back in an hour. Everything was covered in dust, as it should have been.
Everything except a small black sphere sitting on the far shelf, exactly at eye-level. I carefully approached the shelf to get a better look, aware of the dead silence in the room. Shouldn't the storm be making more noise? The orb, or sphere, or whatever, was jet black in color… except a small pinprick on its surface where it seemed to be reflecting light from some other object in the room-which object, I couldn't immediately tell. The sphere sat motionless on a stack of books that had fallen over.
And sure enough, while every other object in the room was frosted with a layer of dust, it was clean. It looked like it was made of a very fine, dyed glass or something like that. Or maybe it was a gemstone of some kind, though I had thought that gemstones worth anything were usually brightly colored. I hadn't ever seen a real gemstone, but Bones' crew had stolen one from a sort-of-wealthy family that lived near the city square and I remembered hearing him talk about it.
I picked up the sphere and held it in my hand, realizing that the speck of reflected light I thought I had seen was actually more like a tiny, discolored, spot on the surface of the ball that reflected light the way a random grain of sand would catch light and sparkle more than the grains surrounding it.
I rotated the sphere in my hand to examine it closer. I wondered if Bones had known anything about a gemstone in this old warehouse. If it was worth something-
And then I heard the sound of a robo fire his shooter outside. The thief must have been spotted by the storm patrol. And I wasn't there to shade him.
Oh good, I thought.
Bones would kill me.
I cursed loudly and took off sprinting toward the staircase, my heart racing.
Crashing down the stairs with no effort to be stealthy, I reached the hole in the wall, pulled the cloth over my mouth and goggles over my face, stepped back into the blowing sand, and took off across the rubble-strewn square as fast as I could. Turning down a few alleys and seeing nothing I started to worry. Could I have fallen that far behind in such a short time?
But thankfully, I turned a corner and found the thief, crouching against a wall, looking around the corner unsure of what to do. I instantly mind-pushed on him and on myself and we both became invisible as I began to scale the wall to my left.
As I climbed, I felt like an open target, even though I was invisible.
This was why I hated the ground level! It was never good for me to be on ground level. I needed to be up on the rooftops, completely out of sight and in control of the situation.
Nearly out of breath, I found the top of the roof and pulled myself over. The bandit hadn't moved much. It looked like he had noticed that his good luck had temporarily disappeared, and hunkered down until it returned.
I cursed again. What would I tell Bones?
Then suddenly the runner took off in a direction that wasn't according to the plan. I followed him from the rooftops and my heart jumped as a Peaceguard came barreling out of an alleyway in pursuit of the thief.
But thinking quickly, I jumped down from the roof and hid in an alley. The thief passed the opening without noticing me. I counted slowly to three, then jumped out.
And slammed my body into the running guard.
It was just enough to throw it off balance for a split second, and I went careening off to the side. I slid across the sand-covered stone, pain screaming from my shoulder. The massive metal soldier was as hefty as I had guessed. I got up as quickly as I could and took off running, holding my shoulder.
Then the robo fired two shots at me, the pulses crashing into the ground at my feet, splintering the stone and blasting clouds of sand all around me. If I had been visible, the guard wouldn't have missed.
After a few seconds of sprinting, my heart pounding louder than my feet on the sand-covered stone, I slowed and looked around me.
Had it worked?
I waited another second, hearing nothing but the slow wind howling through the streets. Amazingly, it looked like I had got away. Since I was invisible, the Peaceguard would have turned and seen no one, and even if it had thought to thermal-scan me, I had run just quick enough to round the corner by then. His scan would have come up empty.
I kept running through the storm and thought about the blasts destroying the stone at my feet.
They had seemed too strong.
The guards' shooters were supposed to stun only, but those pulses completely shattered some of the cobblestone. I had seen people stunned by shooters, and it wasn't that loud.
Of course, I had never been shot at. Or been so close to the impact, for that matter. I shook it off. I would worry about it later.
After climbing back onto the rooftops, my heartbeat finally slowed and I stopped worrying. Though we were off track, I was pretty sure I had given the runner just enough time with my distraction.
Finally, I reached the pre-designated area close to the crew's base where I had been told to let the runner go. I didn't see him anywhere, but I was sure he got away and the robo hadn't found him. He would find his way back to Bones and they would sell the part and store the cash. I was to return to Bones after a day for my share. All that was left for me today, was to go home. Hopefully I could make it in before the storm ended and mother wouldn't ask where I had been.
Though, after weeks of doing jobs with the crew, she hadn't asked yet. And as long as I kept slipping some of the cash I brought home into her store, I was sure she wouldn't.
I jumped alleys and crossed buildings. The sand kept falling, but much slower now. The storm was finally beginning to ease.
Soon, the wind became a slow breeze and only a little sand kept falling. Women in aprons and dirty dresses emerged on their rooftops to hang up the wet clothes again and I had to scan the way ahead of me to avoid running right into someone and startling them. I kept running and jumping until I came close to the district where I lived, and finally slowed. I was completely exhausted. I was pretty sure my legs only a handful of jumps left in them. This job had been farther away than most.
But it would pay well.
Finally, the buildings and rooftops became very familiar, and I fell into my memorized route, knowing I was only minutes away. Jumping the tiny street gaps with less enthusiasm than before, I lowered the cloth from my face and let the goggles hang around my neck as the final winds died down. My leg still throbbed.
I jumped one final roof and as I landed I saw something I had never seen before.
I was so tired, I had to double-take, to make sure I wasn't seeing things.
Someone else, a kid about my age in a black shirt and black pants, jumped across a street gap and landed on the rooftop smoothly.
I couldn't quite process it.
Someone else with the nerve to run the rooftops in a storm.
I had been on the rooftops for as long as I could remember. No one did what I did-running and jumping from roof to roof. And especially not during a storm.
The kid in black ran across a roof, ducking under a clothesline strung between two thin wooden poles, and jumped to another. He wasn't quite as natural at it as I had become, but he didn't seem to fear falling or getting caught.
I stopped and stepped behind the wooden wall of a rickety extra room someone had built on the roof of the building I was on. Black-clothes looked to his left and right as he jumped a final gap, but didn't see me. He vanished in the trailing remains of the sandstorm. I worried for a second that he could have been following me.
But no, there wasn't any way he could have followed me through the winds while I had been shading myself almost the entire time… right? Everything had gone to plan today. Then I remembered the one little wrinkle in the mission.
I put my hand in my pocket and felt something round and smooth that fit inside my curled fist.
Great.
Without thinking, I had taken the gemstone-sphere thing. Had Black-clothes seen me take it? Maybe he had planted it and meant me to steal it. It had seemed so out of place in that strange room in the warehouse.
But, then again, he wouldn't have been so careless as to let me see him jump away just now.
Right?
I stood slowly and crossed the last few roofs, eventually hopping down to street level to ascend the dirt hill to my house.
I climbed the hill, approaching the dark silhouette of our home and saw my mother's shadow inside, moving around the rooms on the lower level. As I walked, I fingered the sphere in my pocket and ran through possible hiding places in my head. I knew I should just try to sell the gemstone, and forget about the kid in black clothes, if I wanted to stay out of trouble.
I climbed the wall to my bedroom window and started climbing in.
But as much as I tried to convince myself otherwise, I wasn't very good at staying out of trouble.
THOUGHTS ON CHAPTER 2
So for the opening sequence of the book, I wanted to do a really exciting scene. Something that would pull the reader in (and this is typical for opening chapters--most writers know that you'll win them or lose them right in the first few pages of your book). So I decided to show Ket, our protagonist, in the act of doing a job with Bones' thieving crew. In chapter one, the reader is thrown into the middle of the action: Ket is running through a big sandstorm, and apparently he's on the rooftops--hopping from building to building--and he's trying to follow somebody in the streets below without being seen. I reveal that Ket has the ability to 'shade' the thief in the streets below, which is his power to turn things invisible.
In Chapter 2, the reader follows Ket as he tails the thief into an abandon warehouse. I reveal what they're hunting for on this particular job, and then do a couple of fun things:
One, Ket discovers a mysterious orb or gemstone or jewel. This is exciting because it automatically adds intrigue and mystery to the plot sequence. Is someone watching Ket? Has Ket stumbled into something he shouldn't have? These questions are raised, and with them the promise of their answers. Writing good fiction is about making exciting promises to the reader, and then answering them in the right way at the right time.
Two, we see some action with a Peaceguard, and the aggressive, heavily armed, metallic and mechanic robot guard is introduced (we'll see a lot of them in the book). The promise is made that Ket will have to deal with these guys, and they're a bit nasty.
Three, Ket sees another kid running around in the sandstorm, which is odd. The reader sees that while Ket is special, (he has the power to make things invisible, and and runs around in a sandstorm using it) there might be others like him. It's clear that most people stay inside during the storms, so the reader can already start to wonder if there are other kids with powers out there in Sandshadow City (spoiler, there are).
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Read Chapter 1