For Lachlan Smith, learning the secret of the apocalypse was the easy part.
Ever since Locksmith found the portal to the future, he has been wondering who or what was responsible for the empty, uninhabited world he found.
Now he knows—and now he has to fight them.
He thought he had fifteen years in which to prevent the extinction of the human species.
Now, he has only hours.
When the portal is stolen by a cabal of dangerous fanatics, his mother and many of his friends are trapped on the other side. Now the enemy is after him, and the only way to thwart their genocidal plan is to retake the portal and hold it—at both ends.
With very little time left, a handful of allies who don't trust each other, almost no chance of success and the survival of humanity itself at stake… Locksmith is going to war.
The story of the Locksmith Trilogy began in my mind with a fairly simple image -- a boy exploring an abandoned world, a world of wilderness and overgrown ruins. To me, there was something compelling about this image. As a child, I always liked walking in the woods -- I still do, in fact -- and there’s something weirdly attractive about the idea of exploring abandoned buildings even when you know there’s probably nothing much in them. (Maybe it’s just the fact that they’re usually off limits.)
This was an image, but it wasn’t a story, and I didn’t really feel like writing a whole story just about this one kid trying to survive in an empty world. I came up with the idea of a portal in the boy’s possession, from the everyday world to the empty world.
This was a setting, but it wasn’t a plot. But if the everyday world is the present and the empty world is the future, there’s a mystery and a plot right there. The mystery is, what happened to everybody? The plot is the boy trying to find out. At this point, it occurred to me that I had the makings of a trilogy. In Book 1, he would discover the portal and explore the future. In Book 2, he would find out where the portal came from, and eventually find out what happened to the human race. Book 3 would be the one where he actually did something about it.
And, of course, I needed characters. The boy would need to be a quiet, introverted type, the kind who could handle long stretches of time on his own -- like myself at that age, only a lot braver and more self-sufficient. He would also need to be secretive and possessive, or the first thing he’d do is hand the portal over to the nearest responsible adult and the story would be over. Oh, and he’d need a friend -- someone smarter than he is who can help him figure out the rules that govern time travel.
Once I had these elements in mind, the rest of the story just fell into place -- by which, of course, I mean that the trilogy took me upwards of ten years to complete.
EXCERPT
Then a shot rang out. Chips of wood fell around her.
Crouching lower, Erin could see where the bullet had gone through the door and the opposite wall. A few seconds ago it would have done the same thing, in spite of her torso being in the way.
And it was too late to pretend she was already dead or wounded, so it was time to get out of the way. She fired back through the door — scary how much easier it was to do that when you couldn’t see who you were shooting at — and then ran for the hall.
Erin turned… and froze in place, one foot poised a few inches above the first stair. The stairs were pieces of wood, neither soundproof nor (as she’d just seen) bulletproof. The moment she set foot on them, the guys directly underneath would know exactly where to shoot, and she would have only the vaguest idea of where to shoot back. There was no way she could make it to the top of the stairs alive.
Oh… and Luther was going to run into the same problem coming down the stairs. Or maybe not. If the portal was indestructible, he could use it as a shield — put it facedown on the stairs and sort of surf on it. On second thought, no. If they fired through the stairs and the bullet went through the portal, it might hit Lock. Luther would have to put it on the stairs face up and stand on the edges.
Either way, Erin had no idea how she was supposed to explain to Luther that his survival now depended on his ability to replicate a stunt from a Lord of the Rings movie.
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ReplyDeleteSounds like a really good story.
ReplyDeleteThe cover looks amazing
ReplyDeleteSounds like a great read. Thanks for the rec! :)
ReplyDeleteSounds really good, and love the awesome cover!
ReplyDelete