Page 1 of Quake
1
Juliette
There wassomething romantic about new beginnings.
Not the kind of beginning where you moved house or took a new job, but the one where you completely reinvented yourself from head to toe.
A new wardrobe and hairstyle were like bulletproof armor, giving you confidence you never knew you had. A change of scenery was like a holiday you hadn’t realized you needed. A complete and total reinvention was like a breath of fresh air that dislodged the cobwebs and stagnation you’d been wading through your entire life.
Or it could be a mediocre Band-Aid covering a festering wound that could pop at any moment, but life was like that, I suppose. Unpredictable. Violent. Or just completely fucking bonkers for no reason at all.
My name was Juliette Spicer, and I’d gone through a metamorphosis. It was well overdue considering the shit my existence had become—bottoming out to the fifth layer of Hell and all that. I reckon subbasement five was pretty damn deep considering I didn’t know how many layers of Hell there actually were. I could only go up from there.
So where was I? That was right.Metamorphosis.
Juliette Spicer, currently stationed in Melbourne, Australia, after exiting her cocoon, much to her family’s shock and horror. I was now on the other side of the country, leaving my depressing and complicated past behind—along with the empty box that used to contain the hair dye I’d slathered on my sun-kissed, salty,beachified, super chic, blonde hair, turning it into the yang to my previous yin. White to black. Light to dark. I now looked like Morticia Adams, but that was the point. I didn’t look a thing like how Juliette Spicer used to. I looked like Juliette Spicer badass, who could cut you with a single look and all round superhero of her own destiny.
New life, new job, new city, new look.Metamorphosis.
A week into my new job and things were going amazing. Better than I’d expected, to be honest. I’d never moved cities before, let alone worked in an office that housed my dream career. As an assistant to Jade Forsyth, the head of marketing for Slattery Press—only thebestpublishing house for genre fiction in the country—I was only a few years of hard, backbreaking work away from landing the crème de la crème of my professional dreams. Senior Acquisitions Editor. That was where the magic happened.
I just had to keep doing what I was doing, and I would get there, no matter my age, background, or past experiences. I had to. Mel would’ve wanted it.
“Juliette,” came the airy voice of my boss. “Hold my calls for the next hour and a half. I’ve got a lunch meeting with Alexis.”
“Alexis Storm?” I asked, my eyes almost popping out of my head. “The romance author?”
Jade smiled and shook her head in amusement, her immaculately styled ginger curls bobbing as she moved. “For twenty-eight, you sure do have stars in your eyes.”
“What can I say?” I replied, bouncing up and down in my chair. “I’m a late bloomer.”
It was an odd thing, being an assistant to a woman who was almost a year younger than I was, but Jade had landed a job just like mine right out of University and had skyrocketed to the top in record time. She was the kind of woman journalists wrote inspirational articles about in Cosmopolitan magazine, then did a six-page editorial on the power clothes they wore to the office. Her style was straight off the runway, and I swore the emerald linen dress that currently hung off her willowy frame was vintage Dior. Then there were her shoes…black strappy heels. Were they Manolo’s? It wouldn’t surprise me since her fiancé was loaded.
In comparison, I picked my outfit off the sales rack in the basement of a building on Swanston Street that sold cheap knockoffs shipped in from China. I still had a way to go if I wanted to power dress for success.
“You know, Jules, career changes are not a bad thing,” Jade said, beginning to deliver her particular brand of motivational speech, “but when you get to our age, you have to work twice as hard to get ahead. You have to find your edge, and hone it like a fucking samurai.”
I almost choked on my own spit, hearing such a foul word come out of her mouth, but no one even batted an eyelid.
“I can see one there, and that’s why I hired you over some twenty-year-old fresh out of the nappies University swaddles kids in these days.” She patted me on the head and twirled away, declaring, “Find your edge, Spicer.”
My edge? What was that supposed to mean? Was that code for ‘be a hard-ass?’ I snorted and turned back to my computer. With one eye following her as she flounced across the office, I scrolled through the list of inane tasks Jade had left for me to complete by the end of the day—get coffee at two p.m.?, schedule a Skype call with a new author, pick up dry-cleaning, take back the Marc Jacobs bag to David Jones and demand a refund, and pick up sample posters from the printer. What I wouldn’t give to work alongside one of Australia’s best-selling romance authors of all time. One day soon, that would be me in a silk Dior dress off to a fancy lunch with a multimillion-dollar client at one of Melbourne’s top restaurants.????
In the next five years. Tops.
Once the elevator doors slid shut and Jade was out of sight and definitely not coming back anytime soon, I opened my desk drawer and pulled out the pile of bound A4 pages I’d hidden away that morning. Clutching them to my chest, I rolled my chair away from my desk and slunk through the office, but no one was watching the slightly shifty progress of an insignificant assistant.
Weaving through the haphazard arrangement of desks, I shimmied through a door at the rear, disappearing into the dark room. The blinds were drawn, though light filtered in around the edges giving the space a murky hue. Outside, I could hear the muffled humming of the city beyond, and I smiled at the furious dinging of a tram at the stop on the street below.
In the digital age, I was amazed to find a physical pile of bound printouts tucked away in a corner office used mainly for storage. It was like a big bad dungeon for neglected authors, their dreams lying on a dusty table covered in cobwebs. Their agents had shopped them around to all the major houses, and here was where the editors had flung them when they didn’t get past the first chapter, and none of them were willing to read any further or invest in a little developmental editing.
I didn’t know if it was my naivety or the stars in my eyes, but I imagined there was a rough diamond in there somewhere just waiting to be cut, polished, and packaged into the next big franchise…complete with a deal for a set of feature films—aka,The Hunger Games.
I wanted to get ahead, and if it meant sifting through the slush pile and overdosing on overwritten manuscripts bursting with purple prose, then I’d gladly OD. If I managed to discover the next Sylvia Day or J.K. Rowling, it would propel me forward in one giant leap. Besides, imagine how much my vocabulary would grow in the meantime.
Placing the manuscript back onto the pile, I picked up another that caught my eye.The Fighter. Considering Slattery published a vast catalogue of genre fiction, I wondered if this one was a sports romance or a thriller. I guess I’d find out.
Darting back to my desk, I opened the bottom drawer and slipped the manuscript into my bag, hoping no one had caught me pilfering company property. I wasn’t meant to take them home, but I had, and it was only a week in. I was setting quite the precedent.
