The Fifth · Book One

Don't Stare at the Moon

Name: Don't Stare at the Moon
Author: Ugar Shabli

Ugar Shabli

They count who stares.

A delivery app that fines you for looking at the sky. A golden seam across the Moon. A cat who tells you to stop.

Kindle · $4.99 Paperback · $14.99

Free to read with Kindle Unlimited

About the book

There was no Moon. Then somebody broke a world.

Gus Fifer is thirty-four, a food-delivery courier for Gulp, an app that fines him for pausing, for his tone, and for looking at the sky. His Courier Score is sinking, his debts are not, and Metro Seven, the city everyone calls Sodium City, glows like the inside of a mouth with a cigarette in it. People answer in slogans. The cameras blink hello. The banner on the Hollis Tower says YOU'RE DOING GREAT.

Then, one night at high tide, on a canal footbridge, Gus looks up and sees it: a hair-thin golden seam running across the Moon. It hums. His fillings hum back. And a heavyset ginger cat on the fence beside him says, very clearly, “Don't stare. They count who stares.”

Twelve thousand years ago the year had 360 days, there were no tides, and nine worlds shared a single mind, a Song that needed no voice at all. The fifth of those worlds, Phaeton, was its heart. Somebody wanted that heart broken. The few who still remember are hiding in plain sight: a prickly shapeshifter who prefers to be a cat, two ancient bickering twins in matching beige anoraks, and the secret of what really hangs in our night sky.

Now a very polite inspector in a very good suit is running a census, the lampposts are listening, and Gus, who has slept through his whole life, is the only one who can't stop hearing the hum.

Alternating between a neon dystopia that feels about ten minutes from now and a mythic lost age told from every one of the nine planets, Don't Stare at the Moon is funny, filthy and quietly furious: a story about a numbed city, a hidden people, and one man too tired to keep looking away.

Contains strong language.

Series: The Fifth, Book One
Genre: Dystopian science fiction · satire · myth
Length: 253 pages (paperback)
Also in: Spanish: No te quedes mirando la Luna

Read the first pages

Three short cuts from Chapter One.

Ten past midnight

Ten past midnight and the bag on my back smells like a dead man's armpit wrapped in pad thai.

Order four-hundred-and-something of the month. Gulp says it's four-hundred-and-eighteen. Gulp knows everything. Gulp knows I've had three cans of Volt Mammoth since nine and that my heart is doing a wee drum solo against my ribs, because the watch on my wrist tells Gulp, and Gulp tells whoever Gulp tells, and somewhere a server farm the size of Fife has a tiny wee opinion about my arteries.

"Courier Gus," says the voice in my ear. Lovely voice. Like a flight attendant who's been told you're about to die and is trying to be professional about it. "You are four minutes behind optimal. Please increase your effort."

"I'm on a fucking bike, hen."

"Your tone has been noted. Thank you for your feedback."

…

A line on the Moon

And there's a line on it.

I stop.

A line. Thin as a hair. Running across the face of it from about ten o'clock to about four, slightly curved, like the edge of a smile. And it's glowing. Not reflecting — the Moon reflects, I know that much, I'm not a total fucking ignoramus — this is something else. This is coming from inside. A thin seam of light, pale gold, nearly green at the edges, like somebody took the Moon apart once a long time ago and stitched it back together, and the stitches are shining through.

I blink. Rub my eyes with the back of my glove. Still there.

…

Don't stare

"Don't stare."

I nearly come off the bridge.

And on top of the fence there's a cat.

Not at me the way cats look at you, like you're furniture that occasionally produces ham. Looking at me like it's read my file.

"At the Moon," the cat says. "When there are cameras. Don't stare at the Moon, son."

"They count who stares," it says. "Every lamppost. Every phone. Every wee wristwatch. You think they give a shit about your route? They don't care about your noodles. They're counting who looks up. And you just looked up for one minute and fifty-two seconds with your gob open, under a camera, at high tide." The cat's eyes go to the lamppost, then back to me. Green eyes. Green like the edge of the seam. "That's a lot of looking."

…

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