Anthony Camber

@anthonycamber.com

229 Followers 80 Following

🏳️‍🌈 Writer of queer fiction 📘 BETWEEN TWO WORLDS preorder - www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0H6SL8DNY www.amazon.com/dp/B0H6SL8DNY 📘 UNSTABLE ORBITS out now - Kindle + Unlimited, Paperback, Audiobook 📘 +5 others +1 to come anthonycamber.com Cambridge, UK

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS: Secrets big as the wheel. Truths gonna tumble my life. Bad dice. For fans of All That's Left in the World and The Darkness Outside Us. Tropes: Queer cast; Coming of age; Secrets and lies; Found family; Controlling AI; Dystopian future; Generation ship; Friends to lovers; Unreliable world; Dialect ARC READERS WANTED anthonycamber.com
A stone path squeezes between the east and sove cabins of the four, winding and falling to the sixteen where four fours meet. I pass the store there, cold and dark in the early, and nother C-dog pole. And the wolf cub den, coupla cubs outside dozing in the warm breeze in blue clean tunics and shorts, beakers of some dark steaming next on a table. “Hey, Pod,” a cub says. I not know him. The path, it widens to Peba, more sixteens joining, and I gotta care I not bust a nankle in a rut carved by a million spins of carts. Other folk, they hop same ruts front and back, all dancing same dance off beat. Coupla times we step to the grass to let early farm carts by: empties heading back, and others fat full of harvest with farm boys pulling hard, red and damp even under a finger of sunstrip. I not stare.
I closed my eyes and trusted in my mental map and Preston’s hand to guide me. The fierce sunlight set the darkness on fire. The world became footsteps, and breathing, and scorching fingers interlaced, and his thumb tracing hot circles, orbits, on my palm. He was my Moon, my Charon. Another way in which the Earth-Moon and Pluto-Charon systems are similar but different: tidal locking. The Moon always shows Earth the same face, with a tiny wobble. We never see the far side of the Moon from the surface of Earth, only the familiar birthmarks and pretend seas and rayed craters, rotated according to our latitude, shaded into phases. On the surface of the Moon, astronauts could see the Earth rotate — assuming they visited for more than a flag and a salute — but it never moves far in the black sky above. With Pluto-Charon, each body is tidally locked to the other. Charon shows the same face to Pluto, and Pluto shows the same face to Charon, always and forever. Charon hangs like the big light in Pluto’s sky, apparently motionless, changing only in its phases lit by the ten-watt sun. Some parts of Pluto see Charon grazing or crossing the horizon like a distant McDonald’s. And some parts never see Charon at all.
“God, I hope you’re not gonna be a booknose swot beast all year. We already know our stuff. This is more like— like a year of revision.” “Don’t make it worse than it already is.” “Revision, but in pubs.” He nudged me. “Pub, singular. You want to revise in the Apocalypse?” “Swindon has a gay bar.” I shut my eyes for a second. “(a) That’s not revision. (b) It’s an hour on the bus. (c) I could technically drive us there but I don’t have a car so I’d have to beg my parents and I’d get the third degree and breath tests and stupid curfews and location sharing and a three hour lecture on poppers but they’d call them party poppers and I still couldn’t drink.” “And (d)?” I huffed. “Luke—” He stiffened against me, then moved apart with a hard, K-edged sigh. “So I’ll book another test. Stop making a fuss, Natty. I’ll do six months sober so you can tank up, if that’s what you’re bothered about.”
First time I see the guy who gonna tumble my life, he kicking dirt near the lock to the grey flat dome of Peba academy. He a redskin like me, or a brownskin mix. Under a thick hand shading the sunstrip, his dark big eyes scan the levels of the new block crowding tall next the dome. It like he counting rooms, or like he ent never seen a block before. Reckoned for nother dull day of same same. Nother day of sunstrip ticking across, of lux sliding round the wheel sector sector sector, glowing the grass and the towns and the lakes as stars spin. Nother day of me and the other dumb rando assholes with academy chores yawning through Systems shit til lunch. Nope.
“Good morning, Pod. Your chores today: food cycle, hygiene cycle. Ten minutes for personal growth. Education cycle at Peba academy, where today you’ll be studying: Systems. Then hygiene cycle. Food cycle. Social break, during which you and your cabinmates might like to—” “Hold it.” Not wanna hear that speech again again, from that happy voice coming outta some place no place full of shit. He looks like a sport ball built of grey dull metal, but he sounds like some teach at academy bursting words. Back fresh in cabin as a tiny, Capricorn and his zigs and shuffles got me giggling. One time he let me catch him and feel him — hard and warm, throbbing so your fingers tingle, no seams or gaps or any. Skin but not skin. Smelling dark of static. Then when my voice cracked he twisted me angry and I swung the bat to him fussing over my head. That got me happy again, swinging and grunting at him humming and hopping. Got cems away from a full hit coupla times, til Skylight warned me off. Systems got me itching for the bat again, thisdays.
A screenshot of a Physics Today article with the words “unstable orbits” highlighted, in a hilarious attempt to promote my book of that name
The bookshop door needed an extra-special shoulder barge, unlubricated by customer use. Inside, a pair of horizontal tweed legs greeted me from the carpet tiles, scuffed black soles twitching. The wedge of the counter hid all but the start of a belly arc. “Are you dead?” I called out. “Please god.” I clattered shut the door. No idea how the wobbly little square window panes hadn’t fallen out yet. “You need help getting up off the floor? I know you’re old.” “You’re still closer to nappies than I am, honey. You got my message then.”
The wheel spins. The wheel assigns chores. Pod knows what happens if he rebels – he’s seen the scars. But he doesn’t want to clear sewers or farm fields, like thousands of others: he wants purpose, and love. When a boy appears who somehow knows his name, and his best friend disappears on a mad mission to fix a breach, Pod stops following and starts leading. What’s really going on? Searching for his friend with the mysterious boy, Pod uncovers secrets as big as the wheel – and truths that reshape his life.
(Nate/Preston = neutron/proton, I spotted that super-early because SCIENCE! but it wasn’t something I talked about because SCIENCE! and because someone was bound to say Elias = electron and it would probably be Elias. Luke was our electron. Lepton? I didn’t know what that was. And what was Grant? Or Daisy? Or Frankie? Abandon metaphor!)
First time I see the guy who gonna tumble my life, he kicking dirt near the lock to the grey flat dome of Peba academy. He a redskin like me, or a brownskin mix. Under a thick hand shading the sunstrip, his dark big eyes scan the levels of the new block crowding tall next the dome. It like he counting rooms, or like he ent never seen a block before. Reckoned for nother dull day of same same. Nother day of sunstrip ticking across, of lux sliding round the wheel sector sector sector, glowing the grass and the towns and the lakes as stars spin. Nother day of me and the other dumb rando assholes with academy chores yawning through Systems shit til lunch. Nope.
As Luke and Preston spoke, my heart rate ballooned. My muscles tensed. Luke’s questioning had the cold tea aura of a bomb disposal expert narrating his progress over a radio link. His pliers dithered over a red and a blue wire, and the wrong snip would splatter the canteen with enough testosterone to open a gym. For the next random number of minutes/hours/days my world would be strewn with atomic eggshells. I’d be permanently at DEFCON 1, nerves diced, life a tiptoeing misery, coolant flow at perilous levels. Luke couldn’t accuse me of anything specifically dodgy on the basis of a hello. He knew me, though. He knew it wasn’t a hello. It was a helLO, or a HELlo. And it was a hello AGAIN, when Luke had not been given official prior notice in triplicate of the originating hello.
I shake head. “C-dog chose it. I gonna Systems til recyc, he ent gonna change it.” “You get arms like me, he gonna. Good dice, and we gonna farm same fields.” “Reckon I see enough of you in cabin,” I grumble into my mush, mouth curling up. He snorts milk, cuffs my head. Then rubs a thumb over my bicep, over the tat. “Ent so mad thisday. Lookin fine. Fits you.” “No coin, no skin.” I fake a face and push his hand off. He laughs, brows up. “I not get bestie treats?” “Gonna need double coin from you, asshole,” I grin.
The alley led from the high street down the hill towards the river. At the top, snug between two high stone walls centuries old — pub on one side, tourist tat shop on the other — you could stick your arms out and touch both sides, if you wanted to catch some novel moss-borne disease. Lower, the alley opened out and bordered the pub’s scruffy rear yard — flagstones cracked and uneven with abuse, gravel to hide most sins, and a couple of artisan benches last seen under multicoloured sheets at a local painter and decorator. Smokers weren’t allowed outside the front of the pub — the pavement was too narrow — so the yard was theirs in winter, and shared the rest of the year. The alley was the piss stop all year round, the Apocalypse toilets being self-describing. The council tried signage — the clientele pissed on it. On hot summer nights the cobbled gutters turned into a gentle golden stream, tinkling down the hill to smear across the road at the bottom and poison the hedgerow opposite. Tonight the pub was quiet, the stream dry. The alley still smelled foul. And the air became quickly fouler.
“Hey,” I say as the cool of the galley hits me. C-dog, he in his hatch, and I glad of it. “Hey-eey,” Terracotta sings like she on the lectrons, same broad teaskin smile she always got. “Lunch?” I scratch my neck. “We got red paste?” Nicer than green paste. Tastes— brighter. Too much numbs your lips and buzzes your mouth, and it good. Too too much buzzes your guts, and it ent.
His brows nudge close a milli, then relax. He holds out a hand. I stare it. A big hand, but not rough. It ent pulled any carts, and he sure ent got a best shovel. His wrist, it wrapped in bands of cloth and string, six, seven, all shades, loose and tight. He got thick arms smeared with hair and tats, designs I ent ever seen. Biceps like Skylight. He smells of work like he carried a day before breakfast.
A photo of an old ruin, with the Parthenon in Athens in the background
The day before the A-level results came out, I was not a pleasant person to be with. Before I could do irreparable damage I took myself away, walking without any destination in mind into the countryside around the town. I stood on an old stone footbridge over the river, watching the crystal waters flow through the— green stuff. Not algae. The long tendrils waving to and fro in the current, like the inflatable men flapping about outside car dealerships.
He put his hand on my arm, rubbed it gently up and down like he used to, on the good days. “You’re at the centre, Natty.” “I’m not, that’s—” “It’s true. If someone has to be piggy in the middle, then it’s you. Preston adores you, he would do anything for you. And I— you know what I think. And Grant, well, I don’t think we know his orbit very well but he’s a Virgo with Mercury rising.” The words hung in the air. “And Elias?” “Oh, he’s simply an arsehole. A big floating arsehole in space. Uranus, that’s the one.”
Preston had risked the veg something, and was dissecting its crispy embers with a nervous fork. Daisy had brought her own smug salad in a green-tinged plastic tub, which was covered in stickers of daisies with her name in thick black marker and a big red heart over the i. I wondered — or was it Luke, in my head — whether Preston owned a similar tub with a picture of the Preston bus depot. I didn’t chance my luck asking. The burger was not, in fact, good. “Try a bit of this, whatever it is.” Preston pushed his plate a centimetre towards mine. “It’s like a fossilised kyiv but missing the iv. I detect peas.” “Oh.” A comedy thought struck. I tapped his forearm. “It’s missing the ky, not the iv. It’s a pea-iv.”
Teach, he curls his lips, faking smile. He gonna verbal, he got the eyes. When I back in cabin, C-dog gonna spark me til I glow purple, sure sure. Gonna sit in stink jail til recyc. Teach says, alast, “The builders of this place, our ansters, supplied all we need to complete the mission, or the info and skills to create it.” My voice, it stronger now. “But the fires, the wars. Things got lost, forgot. We sure—” He quiets me with a chop hand, like he slicing my arm at the elbow. “We ent any to worry about,” he says, louder, holding the smile a long sec.
The Clangers on their planet, waving to the Soup Dragon flying overhead
“I’m held together with string and elastic bands, in a world full of scissors.” I lowered my head and wiped my face with my palms, then opened my eyes to face him. He was still staring into the sun. He hadn’t seen my tears. I steadied my voice. “Does that answer your question?” He sat there in silence. I thought he was going to stand up and walk away and never speak to me again, and I would turn to dust in the breeze as if Thanos had snapped his fingers. “String can be untied and retied,” he said at last. “Elastic bands can be moved and replaced. Better than everything being glued into fixed positions, isn’t it?” “Did you just therapy me again?”
Video talking about and showing the Facebook ads I’m running for Unstable Orbits