Somewhere beyond the door, his parents are fighting now.
Somewhere beyond the door, his mom is yelling and his dad is drinking, and a glass is shattering against the wall.
But Oswald Jackson Jr. is safe inside his spaceship, surrounded by stories and stars.
Chapter Three
Now
“FUCK.THIS,”JAXON MUTTERS, KICKING THE BASEof the door.
He turns, surveying a room he’s barely set foot in except to sleep, and the typewriter he’s been avoiding since he got here.
He goes to open the window, desperate to let in some air. But the rain is now a deluge, the wind blowing it sideways, the clouds gone from gray to black on the horizon. He starts to pace, but that only reminds him how small the room is, and he doesn’t want to think about that.
He looks at Fletch’s unfinished manuscript, and the stack of blank paper sitting untouched beside the typewriter—he swears, every time he looks, there seems to be more of it—then decides he needs to finish his workout instead.
Digging through his bag, he finds the black resistance band, the stiffest one he brought, wraps it around his shoulders, and starts doing push-ups, counting as the burning turns to pain and he begins to sweat. He adds in a few dozen burpees for good measure, then three sets of lunges and three sets of squats and three rounds of boxing, each exercise chipping away a little at the anxiety, the dread, the voices in his head chantingfailure, chantingweak. All with the resistance band, like a weighted albatross, making everything harder. But harder is better. If it’s hard enough, he can’t think of anything else.
An hour later he’s sprawled on the floor, breathless. Staring at the ceiling, he feels as close to calm as he ever does these days.
He rolls up to a sitting position, pulls his knees into his chest, and stares at the typewriter waiting on the desk.
“Just do it,” he mutters, sounding like the voice recording on the safe. It should be comforting, to know even a great writer like Arthur Fletch struggled to get out of his own way. It should be, but it’s not. “Just get up. And go over there. And write.”
If only it were that easy.
It was, once.
When he sold his first book, at only twenty-three, he sent his mom a check and his dad a fuck-you copy, convinced that he was just getting started.
Back then, the future was as bright as a collapsing star.
In the months before the book came out, he’d strolled through bookstores, looking for the place where his work would sit, surrounded by the likes of Asimov, and Cixin, and Le Guin. He even made a wide space among theK’s for himself.
He’d told his agent he wanted to use a pen name because theJ’s were so full, but the truth was, he refused to be immortalized as Oswald Jackson, with or without the Jr. He wouldn’t give his father any credit.
So whenThe Harkening Skyhit the shelves, his new name debuted along with it.
Jaxon Knight. Jaxon, with anX, just to set himself apart.
The first book didn’t do that well, but hey, that was to be expected, right? It took time for new authors to find their audience. He didn’t really expect his star to shoot up overnight. (Okay, maybe he did, maybe he hoped, maybe he saw his whole career unspooling like a red carpet, but didn’t everyone?) What mattered was that he kept writing, waiting for his readership to grow beyond that first shallow little splash.
But it didn’t.
Not after the second novel, or the third.
But series did better than stand-alones, didn’t they? So he came up with the Lightspeed Saga. An epic deep-space trilogy that promised to be ambitious, operatic, from the opening salvos ofThe Galactic Trialsto the crescendo ofThe Star-Born Fleetto the finale of the third, as-yet-untitled work. A chance to build something. To stake his claim.
His editor had bought all three books, albeit for a smaller sum than his debut, but his agent said that was normal, and reminded him that the most important thing was to just keep writing; you never knew which book would be the one to take off and send you stratospheric.
So that’s what Jaxon did.
He just kept writing.
Because he could. And then, because he had to.
His whole life, writing had been a lifeline, an escape.
