Impact Velocity
Book 3 of The Physics of Falling
nby Leah Peterson
M/M Sci-fi/Fantasy
Available from Amazon | BN | Indigo
Book Description:
Jake has finally found peace and a family with the man he loves. But when the unimaginable happens, Jake finds himself on the run with his greatest enemy and the man who betrayed them both. If he can't find a way to bring down the man who now wields the power of an emperor, he'll lose not just his own life, but his daughter’s as well.
Praise for Fighting Gravity and Cascade Effect
“Fighting Gravity is like if Ursula K. Le Guin and Orson Scott Card could co-author a book without exploding. On the one hand you have the liberal and social science aspects of Ursula K. Le Guin, and on the other hand you have a character-driven story that isn’t afraid to be entertaining.”
– author Bryan Thomas Schmidt
“Ms. Petersen has penned a riveting story that will take you on an emotional roller coaster ride and leave you breathless at the end.”
– Readers Roundtable (recommended read)
“IMPACT VELOCITY lives up to its title in the best way possible...turning what you think you knew from the previous books on edge before giving the characters a spin.”
– K.D. McEntire, author of Lightbringer
***
Excerpt:
6 December 303, 5:30 Imperial Standard Time, 7 lbs 9 oz, Marquilla Sophie Cho Ayana Helen Dawes-Killearn
Ummm, yes. I was there.
I know. I was just looking at the record again.
You’re such a sap.
So are you.
Me?
You don’t hide it as well as you think you do.
***
I always was better at math than I was at life.
Yet, somewhere in the year or two following Blaine’s conviction and “execution,” for all he had done to Pete and me, I found a peace with my life that I’d never expected. A lot of that time fogs and runs together in my brain, but I have a vague sense of how it happened. Not just one moment or choice, but a cascade of the events of my life, toppling to their inevitable conclusion. Chance, circumstance, choice, and just plain dumb luck, good and bad. I might have understood it better if there were a formula I could have used to confirm the results.
She came to us on a crisp winter morning. For the empire, a princess had been born, an imperial heir, a figurehead and symbol, a future sovereign. But, cocooned in the nursery, Pete and I met our daughter for the first time. The empire knew her as Princess Marquilla Sophie Cho Ayana Helen Dawes-Killearn, Heir to the Imperial Throne. We called her Molly.
We’d had a year of practice at parenting. Owen Blaine was two years old when he became my ward and moved into the Family rooms. Two was not an easy age, and I’d thought I was prepared for Molly, but the reality of parenting a newborn made my head spin.
She was tired, yet she didn’t sleep, she wanted to eat, then she didn’t, instead she threw up, and pooped more than should be possible for such a tiny body. Then she did it all again. Those days hazed into long hours of sleeplessness and confusion, the keen edge of despair when you realized you were powerless to make her happy, the utter frustration of matching wits or engaging in a battle of wills with someone who was three days old, and losing.
But there was something magical in her tiny perfection, the astonishing phenomenon of her contented little sighs, the way her mouth screwed up and then opened in a wide yawn from that little mouth. The utter bliss of realizing you’d figured it out, or just gotten lucky, and she was sleeping in your arms, a tiny bundle of the most important atoms in the universe.
I remember Owen, sitting in Pete’s lap, his chubby little arms still dimpled at the elbows, cradling “his baby.” He would stare at her so seriously sometimes, as if trying to puzzle out this mystery the universe had thrown into his family.
There were nights I was beyond exhausted but sat up long after it was my turn to sleep, just to watch the way Pete would look at her as he held her, brushing a worshipful finger over her chin and nose, smoothing her little eyebrows when she’d scrunch up her face in sleep. I knew I made Pete happy, that he treasured our marriage. But Pete with his daughter was another thing entirely. I couldn’t have been jealous if I tried.
And thus for a while I had a family, and happiness, and peace. I tried to remember the last time I’d felt so content, so hopeful. Besides snatches of time in between the crises that defined our lives, I could only compare it to the three years Pete and I had been together when we were teenagers. So stupidly confident, so invincible, before the disaster that was my treason and the years we both paid for it afterward. For those first years, though, Pete had been quietly happy, and I had too.
I had also been determinedly blind to anything I didn’t want to see, believing that was the same as Pete’s clean, uncomplicated optimism and hope.
I was no longer a child to believe something simply because I wanted it to be true. I had children of my own, and I had to be better than that for them.
I tried.
***
Visit the author at http://www.leahpetersen.com/
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