Sophie Littlefield - Horizon

One building in the clearing was nearly complete, a long wide dormitory with windows set high in the walls and a roof framed out and nearly finished. The first-wave settlers had outfitted the building with bedding and a few personal items: photos tacked to walls, rolled-up socks and clothing stacked on the floor. They gathered these and stored them at one end, before getting the children settled for the night. Pink insulation lined the walls and roof of the structure; already, the heat of their bodies was warming the interior.

Everyone was silent. The latest losses had stunned them, the terrible memories of the attackers falling into the gorge, the bodies of the four who’d been shot while trying to cross. The daunting tasks that lay ahead of them. All of this was too much to bear at the end of this long and cursed day. Tomorrow they would take up the yoke of their futures yet again, but for now they were spent, and before long everyone went to bed.

Cass waited until Dor’s breathing became deep and even beside her, and then she got up as carefully as she could. Her body ached from her scrapes and bruises, and she limped painfully out into the night.

The moon lit her path back to the gorge, glinting off bits of mica in the earth, souvenirs from a volcanic eruption aeons ago. She shivered in the cold, but she would not be out here long.

At the edge she looked out over the river and the land beyond, the sloping trail that led back down to the camp and finally the road back to civilization. Here on this side, they were safe-for a night, a month, a season-no one could say. The future was unknowable, but she knew some other things.

She knew the sound of her daughter’s voice.

The touch of a strong man.

The friendship of people who were no longer strangers.

The love of her father.

She did not yet know the limits of her strength, but she was ready to be tested, and tested again. She would be tempted and discouraged and broken, but she would come back each time, into this world that had been bequeathed to them, into the dangers that threatened them and the joys that waited, buried but not impossible, for them to unearth and cherish.

“Thank You,” she whispered into the wind, praying to a God she was not sure existed, whose purpose she did not yet know.

Her words were plucked from her lips and carried into the night, no one to hear them but the spirits of the dead. After a moment she turned and started back to the settlement. Tomorrow she would work alongside the other survivors. Her family. Her lover. Her friends. She would do the next right thing and the next. In small and humble ways, she would begin to live again.

The Aftertime series marks a turning point in my life as a writer. Because of the efforts of my agent and editor-Barbara Poelle and Adam Wilson-I was able to take on a challenge that was far more rewarding than it ever was daunting-and it was plenty daunting.

Thank you, thank you, Harlequin team! I keep wanting to pinch myself. Every writer should be so lucky.