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Read an Excerpt From After The Fall by Edward Ashton
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Read an Excerpt From After The Fall by Edward Ashton
Humans must be silent. Humans must be obedient. Humans must be good.
By Edward Ashton
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Published on February 4, 2026
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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from After The Fall, the new novel by Edward Ashton that’s part alien invasion story, part buddy comedy, and part workplace satire—publishing with St. Martin’s Press on February 24.
All his life, John has tried to live by those rules. Most days, it’s not too difficult. A hundred and twenty years after The Fall, and a hundred years after the grays swept in to pick the last dregs of humanity out of the wreckage of a ruined world, John has found himself bonded to Martok Barden nee Black Hand, one of the “good” grays. Sure, Martok is broke, homeless, and borderline manic, but he’s always treated John like an actual person, and sometimes like a friend. It’s a better deal than most humans get.But when Martok puts John’s bond up as collateral against an abandoned house in the woods that he hopes to turn into a wilderness retreat for wealthy grays, John learns that there are limits to Martok’s friendship. Soon he finds himself caught between an underworld boss who thinks Martok is something that he very much is not, a girl who was raised by feral humans and has nothing but contempt for pets like John, and Martok himself, whose delusions of grandeur seem to be finally catching up with him.Also, not for nothing, something in the woods has been killing people.John has sixty days before Martok’s loan comes due to unravel the mystery of how humans wound up holding the wrong end of the domestication stick and find a way to turn Martok’s half-baked plans into profit enough to buy back his life, all while avoiding getting butchered by feral humans or having his head crushed by an angry gray. Easy peasy, right?
Chapter One
“John!” Martok bellows as he bursts through the door. “I have news, my friend—wondrous, wondrous news! You’ll not believe what fell to me in the markets today!”
John turns away from the window, the only one in the bare boardinghouse room he and Martok have shared for the past two months, where he’d been passing the afternoon watching the machinations of a murder of crows as they attempted to scavenge the carcass of a dead rat from beneath the wheels of the passing trundlecars in the street below, to see his patron hanging his formal sash on the hook by the door. Martok’s three-fingered hands are trembling with excitement, so much that it takes him two tries to get the sash to stay, and the crest that runs down the center of his broad bald scalp is flushed a happy pink.
“John!” Martok says again, then crouches so that his head is nearly level with John’s and spreads his arms wide. “Come to me, my friend! This has been a truly wondrous day!”
John hesitates a bare moment, then sighs, crosses the tiny room in three strides, and steps into the gray’s crushing embrace. Martok lifts him, thick hands pressing John against the hairless, wrinkled skin of his chest, spins him half-around, and sets him down again with his back to the door.
“Ask, John! You must ask!”
John takes a deep breath in and lets it out slowly, mostly to make sure Martok hasn’t cracked his ribs in his exuberance, then says, “Please tell me, Martok. What wondrous thing did you find in the markets today?”
He’s expecting to hear something about a new sash, or a refurbished handheld, or perhaps a particularly ripe piece of fruit. Consequently, he has no idea how to react when Martok says, “A home, John! I have found us a home!”
***
The intricacies of the grays’ economic system have never been remotely clear to John. What education he received in the crèche was mostly structured around learning ways to serve a future patron in practical ways. He was taught to cook, to clean, and to shoot (small-caliber weapons only, sufficient for hunting native game, but not remotely suited for penetrating the leathery, three-centimeter-thick hide of a gray). He knows there are some humans at work in the markets. He’s seen them there from time to time, has even seen Martok forced to barter with one of them on a few occasions. Whatever arcane knowledge of debit and credit that those humans have gained, however, did not come from the crèche, and Martok has never shown the slightest interest in passing along to John any small understanding of economics that he might have.
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After The Fall
Edward Ashton
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After The Fall
Edward Ashton
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John has seen enough, though, to know one thing for certain: He and Martok are poor. If he’s being honest with himself, that much was clear to him even on the day Martok took him away from the crèche. John was not one of the children who lined up eagerly to show off their skills for the grays who came by shopping for a bond. He was small for his age, with a high, piping voice and a slight stammer that came and went, with timing seemingly designed to maximize his embarrassment. Awkward with his peers and mostly terrified of the grays, John hung back as far as the nursemaids would let him when visitors came to the crèche—and as a consequence, he was passed over, time after time after time.
He still remembers the moment when he realized that he was dooming himself. He was twelve, and a girl named Tila had just aged out without a bond and been unceremoniously put down in the alley behind the crèche. As one nursemaid heaved her body into the refuse bin and two others herded the children back into the building, it struck him suddenly, with the force of a physical blow: That’ll be me someday.
By the time Martok came by, John was, strictly speaking, already past the age where he should have been declared permanently un-bonded. The only reason he was still there, the only reason that the nursemaids kept shoving him out in front of every gray who came by, was that he was still small enough to pass, and the nursemaids in his crèche, despite their general indifference and occasional cruelty, didn’t actually enjoy putting humans down. Martok has never said exactly how the two of them wound up walking out of that place together, but John strongly suspects that when the nursemaids realized that Martok was just window-shopping, that he didn’t have enough credit for the processing fee, let alone for the purchase of a bond, they offered up John for precisely what he was worth—which is to say, for nothing at all.
***
“I don’t understand,” John says. “A home? Isn’t this our home?”
“This? A home?” Martok crosses over to the pantry in two short strides, reaches inside to pull out a protein brick, and tears off a bite half the size of John’s head. “This squalid hovel?” He gestures broadly with the hand holding the brick, spraying crumbs from both his hand and his thick, wrinkled lips in an arc half the size of the room. “This cramped, wretched hole? No, John. This is no home. This is a place of bare subsistence, sufficient only to keep our heads dry and our bodies warm as we wait for the gods of fate to hand us the opportunity that we have been awaiting.” He takes another bite, chews, and swallows. “And now, my friend? Now they have.”
Martok drops onto the big bed that takes up a quarter of the room’s floor space, pops the remainder of the protein brick into his mouth, and then flops backward with his hands folded behind his head. “We leave this place tomorrow. I shall settle accounts with our twice-cursed landlord once we’ve had our breakfasts—it wouldn’t do to tell him before he’s fed us one last time, of course—and we shall be on our way. I have already secured a trundlecar to take us as far as the central terminal. From there, I’ve booked passage to the terminus at Lake Town.”
John waits a beat for him to go on, then says, “Lake Town? That’s where we’re going?” John has never seen Lake Town. He’s never seen much of anywhere, honestly, other than the bits and pieces of Farhome, the city that still houses nearly eighty percent of the grays on the planet, that Martok has seen fit to show him. He’s heard of Lake Town, though. It’s the farthest western extension of the grays’ footprint on this world, a barely populated outpost on the southern shore of a mostly frozen freshwater sea. He’s not sure what sort of home Martok might have found there, but he’s hard-pressed to imagine that it could be any better than this place.
“Oh no,” Martok says, his chest rumbling with laughter. “Lake Town is a terribly depressing place, John—a refuge for miscreants and ne’er-do-wells who have been driven from the more polite society of Farhome, mostly for perfectly good reasons. I spent two thoroughly unpleasant years there when I first made landfall on this world, and I have no interest in ever returning. Lake Town is not our destination. It is simply the farthest extent of the transport network. I intend to stay there for the shortest time that we can possibly manage.”
“Oh,” John says, then reaches up to scratch the back of his head. “I’m confused.”
Martok sits up again, and his lips fold back from his thick, square teeth and two stubby upturned tusks in a parody of a grin. “As well you might be. You would not know this from our time together, John, but I was not always the soft city dweller that you see now. Years ago, I was considered quite the adventurer, and I expect that experience will serve us well now. Upon reaching Lake Town, we shall strike out southward, away from the lakeshore. Our destination is some fifty kilometers along, over hill and bramble, across rill and stream, and through trackless wilderness.”
He leans back, and the bed groans as his weight settles onto his elbows. “As I have already implied, I had a most fortuitous meeting in the markets today. In particular, I met a worthless scion of the Greatfoots, a distant descendant of the Chief Administrator himself—Daro Lia née Greatfoot by name. It seems this wretch had acquired a great deal of property beyond the reach of polite society, south and west of Lake Town in what was once an agricultural region of sorts. He purchased this property not because he had the slightest idea what to do with it, of course, but merely as a speculative investment. Such follies are common among the more useless members of the wealthier clans, you know. They have abundant credit, but they lack the wit to imagine how to invest it usefully. It seems he had some idea that Lake Town was due to expand greatly, and that when it did, he would be in a position to profit massively.”
With that, Martok gets to his feet again and begins pacing—a singularly unsatisfying thing to do in such a tiny space, but John knows by now that when Martok is excited about something, he has a great deal of trouble holding still.
“This ignorant Greatfoot has such an impoverished imagination that he could see no use for land such as this beyond the construction of more of what we already see around us. When it became clear, as it should have been from the outset, that no expansion in the direction of Lake Town was in the offing, he had no ability to see other possible avenues of progress.”
He stops pacing then and turns to face John, arms spread wide. After a moment’s hesitation, John hazards, “But… you did see some such opportunity?”
“Yes!” Martok says, and starts pacing again. “Of course! I am no failed third nephew of a wealthy clan, John. All my life, I have had to earn my way by my wits, and as this dullard poured out his tale of woe over a half-full tankard, I could already see what he could not. I let him ramble on for an hour or more, and then, my voice dripping with sympathy and fellow-feeling, I offered, strictly as a favor to both him and his noble clan, to relieve him of the burden of his misbegotten investment.”
Martok seems about to burst with self-satisfaction. John, though, is beginning to feel a familiar, gnawing unease. This isn’t the first time that Martok has had a brilliant idea, one sure to bring him the wealth and acclaim that he clearly deserves.
A quick glance around their squalid room tells the tale of how those other opportunities ended.
“So…” John says. “This Greatfoot, he just… gave you the title to this property?”
That stops Martok’s pacing again, and when he turns to face John, his face has lost some of its smugness. The gnawing in John’s belly turns abruptly into a sharp, stabbing pain.
“Well, no. Of course not. Even a decadent Greatfoot dandy would not be foolish enough to simply hand over an opportunity like this to one he’d just met, would he?”
John closes his eyes and breathes in, then out slowly. When he opens them again, Martok’s gaze has dropped to the floor between them. “Martok?” John says. “What did you give him?”
“Well,” Martok says. “Nothing, really. A pledge, only. He was in such desperation to be rid of the property that he lent me the credit to take it from him. I had only to pledge him collateral.”
Collateral? John’s eyes sweep the room. Everything Martok owns is here. What could he have…
Oh gods.
“Martok?” John says, slowly, evenly. “Did you… no, you couldn’t have. Please tell me you didn’t pledge him my bond?”
Martok turns away, flops back onto the bed, and covers his face with his arms. “What does it matter what I pledged? I tell you truly, John. At the rate he offered me, this property will pay for itself a thousand times over.”
John drops back into his seat by the window and buries his face in his hands. His heart seems to be trying to pound its way out of his chest, and when he speaks again, his voice is trembling.
“When is the first repayment due to him, Martok?”
“Sixty days,” Martok says. “An eternity, really.”
John knows the answer to his next question, but he asks anyway. “And do you have it? Do you have enough credit even to cover the first payment?”
Martok doesn’t answer. Outside the window, the crows have given up on what remains of the carcass in the road and have fallen to fighting among themselves over a hunk of protein brick that’s been dropped by a passing gray. John closes his eyes again and breathes in, breathes out.
After the Fall. Copyright © 2026 by Edward Ashton. All rights reserved.
The post Read an Excerpt From <i>After The Fall</i> by Edward Ashton appeared first on Reactor.
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