THESE DEATHLESS SHORES by P. H. Low (COVER REVEAL & EXCERPT)
Today, we’re thrilled to be taking part in the cover reveal for P. H. Low’s Peter Pan inspired novel THESE DEATHLESS SHORES, and we’re even treating you to an excerpt!
So, what’s it about? Well…
Inspired by J.M. Barrie’s beloved children story Peter Pan and focusing on family, freedom and choice, These Deathless Shores is an exciting genderbent origin story told from the perspective Captain Hook, perfect for fans of Jade City by Fonda Lee.
Jordan was once a Lost Boy, convinced she would never grow up. Now, she’s twenty-two and exiled to the real world, still suffering withdrawal from the magic Dust of her childhood – and the drug she’s using to medicate that withdrawal is wreaking its final, fatal effects. With nothing left to lose, Jordan returns to the Island and its stories – of pirates and war and the cruelty of youth – intent on facing Peter one last time, on her own terms.But Peter isn’t the only malevolent force moving against her. As Jordan confronts the nature of Dust, first love, and the violent legacy carved into the land itself, she realizes the Island may have plans of its own. *** Published with permission from Great Ormond Street Hospital
These Deathless Shores is due for release 9th July 2024 from Angry Robot Books. You can pre-order your copy HERE
And now, for the cover itself:
Cover artist: Alice Coleman
Chapter One
Nine years after leaving the Island, Jordan still hated the city heat.
She shoved her duffel bag back behind her hip, breathed through the soup of air that stuck her shirt to her skin. Sweating spectators jostled and leaned toward the ring below, where two fighters in similar gear jabbed and blocked and danced.
An otherwise even match, except one of them was going through karsa withdrawal. Even from up here, Jordan could see him shaking.
“Are you really the Silver Fist?”
She looked down. A boy of about ten stared up at her, grubby fingers clenched around a fried dough stick. No parents or siblings that she could see—and he was thin and tired-looking in a way that reminded her of Peter, of the Island, of worming into bed next to Baron with her stomach a shriveled knot of Pretend supper.
An aspiring fighter, then. Or perhaps one already.
She wondered if he’d ever dreamed of the Island. If he’d ever read the Sir Franklin novel or watched the many movie adaptations and thought it, for a moment, real.
“No,” she said, serious. “It’s just a costume.”
The kid cast a long look at her hands. She spread them: the prosth on her right a glove of metal, the click of uncurling fingers masked by the crowd. “Pretty convincing, huh?”
“Sure,” said the boy, but he did not shuffle away to his seat. Jordan turned back to the match, but he hovered on her periphery, gnawing his lower lip, and she couldn’t focus.
“You should get out,” she said finally. Smiled with all her teeth. “While you still can. Don’t let them use you.”
He backed away then, the stick of fried dough in his hand untouched.
The match below was not going well. Third rounds in general tended to be where the most bones broke, fighters both exhausted and amped on their drug of choice, but the karsa addict had fallen to his knees. When his opponent kicked him in the shoulder, he crashed backward and lay twitching on the sand.
As the referee raised his arms, a roar went up through the stadium, half triumph, half protest. This late at night, after the rookie matches and the polite international ones, the spectators hungered for fast punches and faster bets, snapped wrists and broken backs.
This late at night, they wanted a show.
And the addict had failed to provide.
As the medical team—not all of them certified—carried him out, Jordan caught a couple men in suits moving through the audience, Bluetooth headsets hooked around their ears: syndicate muscle, most likely, deployed to ensure a quick disposal of the man’s body. The karsa had rendered him useless as a fighter, but they couldn’t have him shouting valuable information in dark alleys, no matter how much it came off as an addict’s ravings.
“Pity,” the man standing beside Jordan muttered to his friend. A dragon tattoo snaked down his shoulder, wrapped his wrist in flames. “I’ve been watching Gao Leng since I was in primary school.”
“Happens to all of them. They’re uneducated, desperate—” The friend’s gaze flicked to Jordan. “Hey, isn’t that—”
Jordan ducked toward the aisle, their eyes pressing into her shoulder blades.
Two purple cubes of karsa burned in her own pocket. She had deliberately kept her doses as low as she could stand, these past nine years, and not just because Obalang was a stingy arse who would withhold her next canister the moment she missed a rent payment. Karsa tore up your nerves and digestive system; spend too much time in its grip, and withdrawal would have you vomiting and convulsing until you regretted the day you were born.
But she could not regret the choice she’d made, nine years ago. Not when the alternative, withdrawal from the Island’s Dust, would have killed her.
Not when it might still.
As she shoved into the locker room below the ring, a hand clamped onto her shoulder.
From anyone else, it might have been a gesture of encouragement. From Obalang, it was anything but. Jordan rested her right palm casually on top of his tobacco-stained fingers; felt them quivering there, hot and trapped. In a single twitch she could crush his bones so finely he would need a prosth to match hers, and for a moment she reveled in that, even if he held sway over the rest of her pathetic little life.
“You owe me.”
Jordan’s eyes narrowed. Her landlord-dealer’s black eyes were jittering, thin lips parted in suppression of ecstasy. The eejit was sharp on his own drug.
“I said I’d run your errand in the morning.”
“What, and count that as payment for a four-ounce can? It’s a small deal. Weak stuff. I’ll barely get enough to cover the cost of transport.” His grip tightened; she shifted back.
“Then why didn’t you ask Alya to do it?”
Obalang scowled. His breath smelled of scorpion curry and the rotted sweetness that came with karsa chewing. A hint of the same, she knew, tinged her breath as well. “You’re replaceable, girl. I can find a dozen kids on the street quicker and hungrier than you. Don’t forget that.”
Jordan nodded at the stadium above. Ads for energy drinks and foreign cars blazed across the walls, but beneath, the chant had gone up, faint but unmistakable: Silver Fist. Silver Fist. “Tell it to them.”
Obalang’s mouth twisted. It was his word that opened the Underground doors to her every Fifthday night, his karsa that kept her from melting into a drool-mouthed wreck.
Even so, it was not every day that one of his tenants made him big among the ringside betting circles.
“Make sure you win all three tonight,” he said as she shrugged off his grip and made for the locker room. “Or I’ll give that job to Alya after all.”
As the door swung closed, she flipped him a two-fingered salute.
The locker room was, if possible, even hotter. She shoved her bag in the graffiti-encrusted locker as fast as she could get it off her; fished out a near-empty tube of ointment, which she smeared over her arms and face to keep her skin from breaking. Then she downed the two karsa cubes dry, and the world sharpened, sweet and slow: the bone-rattling thump of eedro music, the shift of a thousand sweat-slicked bodies, the gleam of her opponent’s smile as he prepared himself in an identical room on the opposite side of the ring. Shitty karsa, this—withdrawal would leave her slow and achy in thirty minutes, dry heaving a couple hours after that—but she’d run out of the stronger stuff she’d nicked off errands, and she would ride this high for as long as she could.
And if her right arm prickled a warning beneath the prosth, if the very weight of her bones and blood simmered with the echo of pain—
Through the walls, a chime sounded. Jordan rolled her shoulders, shoved in her mouthguard, and pushed open the door.
The sound almost blasted her back into the room. She’d hovered at the outer edges of this crowd all night, but here at its center, the spectators’ fury washed over her like a tide. Her heart was an adrenaline pump, her body electric. As she raised her arms—at once a V for victory and a giant up yours to Obalang, who stood, arms crossed, in the front row—the screams swept her up, drowned her, coated her veins in titanium and glowing ore. Two words, pounded into the rusted benches.
Silver Fist. Silver Fist.
She fought to pay for the karsa, yes, and for a rat-infested closet Obalang called a room. Fought to keep her other addiction, her Dust addiction, at bay. But as she rolled onto the balls of her feet, felt the slow hard stretch of muscle and joint, she also felt alive.
She was a burning star, hungry and inexorable, and she would not be broken.
These Deathless Shores is due for release 9th July 2024 from Angry Robot Books. You can pre-order your copy HERE
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