Rules of Crane: Gravity Shattered

By V.R. Friesen

How do you stop a dangerous outsider when the rules say you can't kill him?

 

Crane likes rules almost as much as she likes her knives.  Rules give structure to her world.  She can depend on rules to provide firm footing.  Unlike, say, gravity. 

It takes a grav-walker like Crane to navigate the treacherous, unpredictable gravity zones that fill the city.  Outsiders to the zones—the downies who think "down" means the ground—are all too likely to get themselves killed.  Crane has been assigned the mission of escorting a downie to the mysterious Tower, and the mission rules give her regrettably little wiggle room to use her knives on him.  Even though no one—especially not a downie—should get their hands on the secrets in the Tower. 

 

Crane always obeys the rules.  But in the zones, rules are like gravity—all a matter of perspective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dimmare Press
• Release date: Mar 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781777406202

V.R. Friesen

V.R. Friesen has been writing stories since shortly after she learned the alphabet. She grew up on the beautiful East Coast of Canada and now lives on the equally beautiful (but in a different way) West Coast, in Vancouver, BC, with one of her many siblings and a cat. She can usually be found drinking chai lattes, cheering on her favourite basketball team, or reading voraciously in science fiction, fantasy, young adult and dystopian fiction. Gravity Shattered is her first series.

Book preview

Part 1

Aknife in each hand, Crane climbed the toppled, rusting semi-trailer truck—for practice. She tried to do everything with her knives—eating, fighting, gravving, brushing her teeth. The brown skin of her hands was marred by a network of nicks and scratches from handling her blades constantly, along with calluses from climbing and gravving. There were also a few very old puckered scars she tried not to think about because her mind went bright and blank if she did.

The truck lay on its side across the weed-covered highway. It had been looted long ago and was surrounded by scattered, empty crates. Crane reached the top and tipped into a handstand, kicking her skinny legs with their heavy boots into the blue sky. She was wearing her favourite red jeans with yellow patches sewn all over them.

Your mission is to guide the downie to the Tower, Zenobia said to her from below, as if continuing a conversation they’d definitely not been having.

Still upside down, Crane peered down at her ganglord. With her cool white skin and severely coiled hair, Zenobia Allan sat perfectly straight as always, even though she was perched on a fallen concrete road divider, catching her breath instead of presiding over the trading post she and her Azuros gang controlled. She’d folded her narrow, elegant hands neatly over the top of her cane. Her weak legs, stretched out in front of her, were the reason for their rest stop.

What kinda mission’s that? It’s maken no sense, Crane said. The Tower’s surrounded by foam zones. Everyone’s knowen that. Unlike Zenobia, who spoke using crisp pre-Shattering grammar and diction, Crane spoke the packspeak patois more common to the younger generation of zoners. She liked its subtle mockery of adults and their pathetic determination to cling to a reality that had irreversibly changed.

He doesn’t believe me that there’s no way in, Zenobia said, her voice neutral. It was rarely anything else. You’re going to bring him to the Tower and convince him it’s true.

Crane flipped herself back upright and smoothed a hand—still holding a knife—over her irrepressible afro. She walked the knife over her knuckles as she surveyed her surroundings.

Quarantine walls towered into the sky on one side. On the other side lay the warped and twisted landscape of a gravity-shattered city. She and Zenobia had been walking the buffer zone between the two in down-gee—ground-draw gravity, once considered the only kind.

These were the laws of physics as Crane understood them:

One: Gravity is the force that makes you fall.

Two: Down means the ground. Or rather, it should.

On most of the planet, in the ordinary, boring downieland outside the quarantine walls, gravity still obeyed these rules. People never had to wonder if their next step would send them falling into the sky or toward the horizon.

But zoners—quarantined for the past fifteen years for the sheer bad luck of being caught within the radius of the Shattering—couldn’t take down for granted. In the heart of their broken city, in the wild zones, gravity could pull in any direction. There, gravity obeyed no laws.

The downie Zenobia was talking about was Ryan Latrans, the first person to enter the city in a decade. The quarantine walls kept the Shattering survivors trapped in their inexplicable, physics-defying city, but the rest of the world—the downies in their law-abiding downieland—had also been kept out. Most of them were ignorant of the true nature of the Shattering and didn’t even know there had been survivors. A trickle of trade had developed through the gates—trade that Zenobia’s Azuros exclusively controlled—but no human had passed through those gates in either direction in a very long time.

Until Ryan had strolled in a few days ago and started making demands of Zenobia. And Zenobia had let him.

This mystified and infuriated Crane. Stupid downie, making the ground feel uneasy beneath her feet.

Making her wonder if, somehow, he wielded some power over Zenobia.

Intolerable.

Crane planted her fists, curled around her knives, on her hips in her most defiant pose.