From the Publisher: The Ecosystem has awakened.
On the day of Miriam and Isaac’s wedding, Sarah’s village is overrun by monstrous creatures from the Ecosystem. With the community’s leaders dead and few Sensors remaining, Sarah shepherds the survivors into the deadly forest surrounding the village. Her own Sense badly damaged in an earlier attack, she must fight through a host of new threats in hopes of discovering the place where her mother was born, rumored to be home to a community of healers.
When another attack decimates her band, the survivors are rescued by a group of people under the leadership of a man named Gabriel. Taking Sarah and the remnants of her village to a sheltered city ruled by healer-women known as queens, Gabriel instructs Sarah in the Ecosystem’s origins and teaches her a new way of coexisting with its creatures. But the City of the Queens is haunted by a dark secret from the past, and Sarah will have to learn the truth of her lineage in order to save the people she loves and protect the world she knows.
The Devouring Land is the second book in a fantasy-adventure trilogy that began with Ecosystem (which you can start reading right here on Littsburgh!). Sarah’s story concludes with House of Earth, House of Stone (2019).
Don’t miss out: Bellin will be launching The Devouring Land at Riverstone Books on November 26 (signed books will be available for sale)!
About the Author: Joshua David Bellin has been writing novels since he was eight years old (though the first few were admittedly very short). A college teacher by day, he is the author of three science fiction novels: the two-part Survival Colony series (Survival Colony 9 and Scavenger of Souls) and the deep-space adventure Freefall. His fantasy novel Ecosystem released on Earth Day 2018, with the sequel, The Devouring Land, releasing on November 20 of the same year. He has also authored a collection of sci-fi and horror stories, Ten Tales of Terror and Terra (2018). Josh loves to read, watch movies, and spend time in Nature with his kids. Oh, yeah, and he likes monsters. Really scary monsters.
I’m jumpy.
Can’t sit still. I keep springing from my chair, rushing to the window, spying outside. As though I expect to see something other than the stunningly gray day smearing its light over the gray village stone.
Something. Or someone.
Lanky body, shaggy hair hanging across his forehead. Walking with a staff and a limp, byproducts of his near-miss with death three weeks ago. Soft brown eyes that make my heart dance uncontrollably in my chest. And a smile I learned to love so much, I literally ache now that it’s sequestered on the far side of the village.
Isaac.
I haven’t seen him for over a week, not since Aaron’s funeral. I studied his face across the swirling flames of my grandfather’s pyre, but he wouldn’t meet my eye, would do no more than bow stiffly when he passed me in the condolence line. Ever since, he’s been avoiding me, or I him—no easy thing in a community of fewer than two hundred souls. By unspoken consent, we’ve stationed ourselves at opposite ends of the village, he among the houses of the healers, I in my lonely cottage in the Sensors’ quarters. I can’t help thinking that though he’s where he belongs, I’m anything but.
Technically, I’m still a Sensor. But I’m a healer too, or could be. My hands hold a power I don’t understand, a power first manifested in Isaac’s presence. When I touched his face, held his hand, kissed him, it brought that power alive in me: the power to reach inside others, find what ails them, and start the process of healing. It’s a power my mother—though also a Sensor—possessed as well. The day before my grandpa’s funeral, I made the decision to explore that power, to commit myself to the healer’s path.
But my plan, like so many others, has vanished in the time since. I might train to become a healer, but it’ll be with Chief Warden Daniel or with the midwife Judith, not with Isaac. He and I might work side by side one day, but it won’t be anything other than work. We might plumb the secrets of the Ecosystem together, but we’ll never be able to speak what’s inside our own hearts.
Not after today.
I leap up once more, bypassing the window and heading out the door to the village commons. My body’s still recovering from my own near-death experiences; my shoulder is stiff and sore from the arrow our former Chief Sensor shot through it, while my legs look terrible, crisscrossed by ragged scars where the urthwyrms wolfed chunks of my flesh. I move with a lurching, unsteady gait so unlike the fluid sprinter who exists in my mind. It’s a mercy I’m not expected to do much of anything today.
The morning spreads before me, gray on gray, the somber green of the forest a backdrop to the sunless stone. Clouds swell, gravid with rain. No one is about. Far off, the chopping sound of the threshers breaks the quiet. The Sensors, the few who remain, must be in the woods by now. Chief Sensor Esther and Judah and the others. Levi, though not strictly ready, has been added to their numbers out of necessity. Jarrod will be next. Relations between Sensors and villagers have been strained since the death of Chief Sensor Nathan, but under Esther’s command, the Sensors continue to do their job, continue to risk the Ecosystem’s anger to gather the food, water, and fuel we need to survive.
And Sarah, they wonder—when will Sarah hunt again?
For a week after my return to the village, they accepted the physical excuse, my need to recuperate. Now, they look at me sidelong, with suspicion and resentment if not outright hostility. They know my part in the death of our former Chief Sensor, know that I’ve courted friendships with the healers. That they don’t know, can’t know, how I feel about one healer in particular doesn’t change the fact that they see me as a threat to the Sensor order, harbinger of a new world. A new world, they also don’t know, that even I’m uncertain I want to bring into being.
All would be forgiven if I would declare myself, return to the field. I’ve seen their eyes. We need you, Sarah, they say. Your village needs you. You’re the daughter of a Sensor, the granddaughter of a Sensor. All those years of training, Aaron would expect you to….
Enough.
Only Esther, Chief Sensor this past week, knows the truth. Only she knows I’ll never hunt again.
I stand still and silence my breath, close my eyes on the cloudy day and attempt to send tendrils of Sensation into the wide world. Truth be told, my Sense is no stronger than my legs: ever since my narrow escape from the urthwyrms’ lair, my power’s been twitchy, unable to lock onto the Ecosystem’s mind. It pulses feebly from time to time, enough to make hope rise to my throat. But it’s never more than that, a glimmer of light in a darkened cave. I was nearly eaten alive three weeks ago, and the damage I suffered seems to have forced into hibernation a gift I’ve possessed since birth.
That’s not it, Isaac would say.
My troubles, he’d say, are because I’m discovering everything anew, not only the Ecosystem but my place in it. After years of viewing the Ecosystem as my enemy, a predator that killed my mother and nearly devoured my heart, I’ve spent the past few weeks balanced on the proposition that it might be my—our—last hope. But I don’t trust that thin sliver of possibility, he’d say: I’m not willing to open myself to it. I’m afraid that if I take a step off my knife-slim perch, I’ll find myself falling into space. Afraid, as I’ve always been afraid, of surrendering my heart to something I don’t know I can trust.
You won’t be a Sensor, he’d say. But you won’t be one of us, either. When will you choose, Sarah?
“You ask too much of me,” I say aloud. “You ask for my all, yet you offer nothing in return.”
I reach into my shirt pocket and withdraw my healer’s token, the one I inherited from my mother. A serpent twining around a staff, carved of pink stone that, in sunlight, sparkles with an iridescence that makes the coils seem to come alive. Today, it’s as dull as everything else. I’ve rubbed its smooth, scaly surface a hundred times since it came to me a little more than a week ago. In the absence of its original owner, it provides some solace, if no wisdom.
“Why?” I ask the gray sky, the woods, the earth. Not expecting an answer, only hoping to trick my ears into believing I’m less alone. “Why, why, why, why, why?”
I Sense a murmur of response, then the Ecosystem falls silent again.
But the village, of all things, spits back an answer. Not the one I’m looking for—in fact, the exact opposite of the one I’m looking for—but, you could say, the one I summoned. The one who holds the other token I received from my mother: my Sensor’s token, passed from teacher to student. Even from a distance, there’s no mistaking her: frowzy hair, spastic body not so much walking as squirting across the pavilion, limbs so thin they’re little more than bone. The only feature that redeems her, physically, is too far away to discern: wide lavender eyes like night sky reflected in water. They’re beautiful, and my breath catches when I think of all he sees in them. All he’ll see in them every day for the rest of their lives.
Miriam.
She’s at my side in less time than I need to compose my heart, though I hope I succeed with my face. My mother’s Sensor token, a shard of tooth carved with a blue-branched tracery like veins, hangs on a string at her throat.
“Shouldn’t you be getting ready?” I ask.
“We have till later today,” she says. “I need to stretch my legs.”
Taking a stroll with Miriam on this day of all days is the last thing I want to do, but I feel trapped. As my ex-student, she exerts a power over me that’s a combination of guilt, responsibility, and anxiety lest anyone think I’ve failed in my duties. Not that she’s aware of any of this—nothing could be more guileless than those trusting eyes—but I feel the sting of conscience nonetheless. Maybe it’s because I was the one who dragged her into the Ecosystem before she was ready, which led to a rescue attempt, which led to me spending days on the road with Isaac, which led to….
“Where are the children?” I ask.
“They’re headachy.”
“Both of them?”
“Rebecca the more so,” she says. “She would have come, but Esau convinced her to stay home.”
This sounds familiar. The two youngest recruits to the Sensor order are mine to train, but nine-year-old Esau is adept at little but finding ways out of work. Rebecca, at seven, might be salvageable, if she can develop the courage to stand up to her older companion.
“Fine,” I say. “But if you come back stinking of dead meat, it’s on you.”
“In a manner of speaking,” she says, and we’re off.
We race across the stone terrace, aiming for the open lawn that surrounds the village. Or Miriam races: I lag several steps in her rear. Up ahead, the only signs of brightness I’ve seen this day flit across the sward, ruby-throated huntingbirds seeking poisonrose blooms to pierce with their sharp beaks. My first step onto the lawn offers the premonitory quiver I keep hoping will blossom into full Sensation, but again, I’m disappointed. My legs, however, carry me more confidently on grass and earth than on the village stone, and by the time we reach the first of the trees, I’ve nearly recovered my stride.
The forest opens its arms to admit us. A warning wind rustles the leaves, but the low-lying clouds cradle the raindrops for now. This isn’t the first time I’ve been within the forest’s embrace since my encounter with the urthwyrms. Miriam and I have gone out every day since my grandpa’s funeral. Esther’s idea, not mine. The Chief Sensor took me aside after the pyre had died to cinder and ash, asked my plans for the future. When I told her I had none, she suggested I pair with Miriam to complete her training. To the objection forming on my lips, she raised a hand, and that was that. I doubt her obsidian eyes were keen enough to see the phantom blade she’d plunged into my chest.
“Which way’s the wind?” I ask Miriam as the village vanishes behind us.
“East,” she says.
“The bloodbirds?”
“None within leagues,” she answers, and I wish I could confirm if she’s right. My Sense catches the edge of a blood-red wing before it sputters and dies.
“And what is its mind?” I ask warily, knowing I’ll not be able to certify her response.
She’s silent for a long moment. The forest flashes by, and I can almost—almost—feel the webs of thought and will radiating from the earth and trees.
“It…flutters,” she reports. “It withholds its true thought, and I—”
“Your purpose is to name its true thought,” I say. “Or should we wait for it to name ours?”
“It hides from me,” she says, concentration knotting her brow. “I Sense unrest. Division. It is…troubled today. Unwell.”
“Then by all means, let’s go easy on it,” I say. “We wouldn’t want to hurt its delicate feelings.”
She broods, or pouts, which on that baby face are much the same. I know I’m being unfair, particularly since the mind of the Ecosystem is hidden from me as well. I suspect that’s what’s making me so edgy. I’m not crazy to hear Miriam describing the interruptions in the stream very much the way they’re occurring to me.
She glances over. “Shall I try again?”
For no good reason, I soften.
“Pick up the pace,” I say. “And take care.”
We speed through the trees, and all I can think of is the companion I’d rather have at my side.
Excerpted from The Devouring Land by Joshua David Bellin. Copyright © 2018. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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