The Sisterhood: Season One: The Sisterhood (Seasons), #1

By Tali Inlow

◆BEGIN THE JOURNEY WITH THE FIRST THREE EPISODES TODAY...FOR FREE!◆

 

Boarding school girls, now grown and formidable women, navigate a post-apocalyptic landscape and their odds-defying love for one another.

 

Follow the Sisterhood before and after the end of the world in this split timeline, serialized adventure!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Two Is Enough Publishing, LLC
• Release date: Nov 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393725947

Tali Inlow

Tali Inlow is an up-and-coming author of queer speculative fiction. 

Book preview

THE JOURNEY OF THE SISTERHOOD

THIS IS A SERIALIZED saga—be sure to check the links at the back of the book to continue the journey!

EPISODE ONE

The Shepherd

AUTUMN HOPE PARISH is awake well before the sun has shone down on the desolate bit of earth where she’s spent the night. She’s been staring at the makeshift ceiling for some time, taking in every gap in the wood, every haphazard tin patch. Luckily for the woman who lives here, they’re still in the mildest part of the year. But if she doesn’t seal up those cracks within the next few months, the midyear acid rain baths will be a real problem.

Thinking of the woman who had shared her home, her meager food and supplies, and her bed, Autumn glances to her side. The woman’s complexion is pale but streaked with the sort of grime none of them out here in the desert can seem to rid themselves of over time. Her skin is pockmarked and scarred like so many of them have become over the years since the End. The blanket they’ve shared in the night—so threadbare as to be more a suggestion of warmth than a practical way of achieving it—is down below both of their bellybuttons, giving Autumn an unobstructed view of the woman’s naked chest. The woman’s hair, unlike Autumn’s, is in a wild mess around her shoulders, cascading across her breasts. Autumn left hers piled in a messy tie-up atop her head, all the better to partake of their after supper activities the night before. It is too dark now to see the difference in the hues of their skin, but Autumn remembers how they had slept together the night before—like water, her own brown skin against the other woman’s pale tones in the shadowed dark, somehow becoming alike, becoming one being effortlessly. Where the woman’s skin ended and Autumn’s began and vice versa, neither could have been sure.

This time of the morning, when the world is silent and still, Autumn can almost fool herself into believing that it is the world of Before, rather than the world of Now. That planes could be flying thirty thousand feet overhead, red eyes connecting people the world across—for business, for pleasure, for any little whim or desire. Paper boys and girls on delivery routes with news, news of politics, and sports, and weather, and showtimes. Headlines from across the world traveling on waves of electricity and light, from one place as it prepares to sleep to another as it is waking.

A single tear drops from the corner of Autumn’s eye as she imagines many other things from Before. She refuses to stop remembering, because to stop would mean to give up on the notion that Before could come again, that Now is only temporary, that After holds the possibility of renewal and promise.

She really isn’t one to reminisce or needlessly think of what tomorrow may bring when so many tomorrows have been disappointments for so very long. She brushes the tear away roughly, her eyes dry once again.

Autumn unfolds herself from the blanket silently, hardly disturbing the pallet she’s shared with the other woman. She pads across the old linoleum floor and picks up her clothes from the pile where she’d left them. Still being as quiet as she can be, she steps into her pants and buttons up her shirt. Her boots get laced as silently still as the rest of this exercise in stealth. Several weapons get strapped to various body parts, because Autumn is nothing if not a woman prepared for the End of the world.

With a shrug of shoulders into her long leather coat, red as the dawn of the Last Day and worn from years of harsh travel conditions, Autumn grabs her pack by the top handle, making her way to the door. As she moves to exit the shack and head into the dark beyond, she turns back and looks at the woman, still sleeping, having clearly been sated by last night’s activities. Autumn gives her wordless thanks with a bowed head and closed eyes, then latches the door securely behind her.

Locating the north star—one of the indications that the world only ended here, and not elsewhere in the universe all those years ago—Autumn begins to walk out of the small outcropping of ramshackle homes and to the west. She sees a window or two flare up into candlelight as she’s officially leaving their domain, a sign that life never stops completely, has not even stopped here, in this bit of nowhere, all these years after the End. This is just another day for most.