ScreenRant Presents A Sneak Peek Of Dungeon-Crawler-Carl-Style Fantasy Heist Cello's Gate

Published Oct 30, 2026, 12:08 PM EDT

Amanda Kay Oaks is a writer and lifelong book nerd. She has been writing about books on the internet for over 10 years, with prior bylines at Book Riot and ComicBook.com. Though she reads across most genres, Amanda Kay is particularly fond of romance, cozy fantasy, and books with strong female characters. 

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If there's one thing Firefly proves, it's that people love a good heist — especially when it's infused with sci-fi vibes and a dash of found family goodness. That's what Maurice Africh's upcoming sci-fi fantasy epic Cello's Gate will offer readers when it releases on November 3.

Like Dungeon Crawler Carl before it, Cello's Gate began as a self-published venture that quickly captured the hearts of fans with its fast-paced action and charming wit. And in case that doesn't sell you on the series, the story also features sky pirates, found family, and a quest to track down mythic treasure that's not quite what it first appears. Early readers praise it as a "wild and uniquely imaginative adventure" that manages to be both playful and emotionally resonant. Blending witty and poetic prose, Africh's debut is a must-read.

Cello's Gate is the first book in the new Sky Pirates of Imperia series, which is being published by Saga Press. Today, ScreenRant is thrilled to present an exclusive early look at the book's opening chapter. In it, we meet Captain Grey Shimada, sky pilot extraordinaire, and his ragtag crew at the very beginning of a heist that just might bring more than they bargained for.

You can pre-order Cello's Gate here.

Experience Chapter One of Cello's Gate in This Exclusive Excerpt

Saga Press

CHAPTER ONE

No sky pirate dreams of crawling through a narrow tunnel above a warehouse filled with dangerous men, but let’s face it. Dreams don’t feed crews, and wishes don’t buy airship parts. So, a good captain takes what they can get.

And for Captain Grey Shimada, this is just another day in a tunnel.

Reaching out, he grasps the iron support beam with a black-gloved fist and drags himself forward on his belly like a milslug, his matte-black armor issuing a faint hiss as he slides a few centimeters across the rusted metal. His body is drenched in sweat, wet hair plastered to his forehead, arms aching. Every breath is torture, but at least the maintenance shaft hasn’t yet collapsed beneath his weight. How’s that for a positive attitude?

Grey pulls himself another few centimeters and tries to ignore the tunnel walls closing in around him. He’s not a kid anymore, so he really needs to stop volunteering himself for hunts that involve tight spaces. This one requires a long crawl through a dank, dark metal tube hovering twenty meters above the floor, connected to the rafters by thick iron bars. Everything he touches is coated in gritty dust and crawling with what can only be described as mutant insects. Lots of old buildings have places like this. It’s where electrical wiring and indoor plumbing and chrome-coated ventilation systems go to die, a terrifying liminal space hanging delicately from the ceiling of every warehouse around the world. The fact that most people avoid them makes them an easy access point if you’re trying to sneak into a building undetected. People hate small spaces, Grey included—but he hates getting caught even more.

He cocks his head and spits on a nearby pipe. The wad of saliva immediately starts to boil. Bubbles expand and pop. He makes a mental note—Don’t grab there—and pulls himself forward. There’s a hum of electrical pulses shivering through the pipes on his left, and a warm rush of foul wastewater on his right. The tunnel, back to front, smells like a chemist’s mix of piss, shit, dust, and rust. Lovely. But so be it. No hunt worth taking comes without challenges, and this specific hunt is a special sort of difficult. He and his crew have been commissioned to locate and retrieve classified tech from an off-book black-ops warehouse owned by the Crimn National Military. Surprisingly, climbing into a maintenance shaft and crawling across the ceiling is the easy part. The true challenge waits for them on the warehouse floor … but hopefully, they’ll never have to deal with that.

According to hacked intel, there are around forty-eight highly trained prism guards stationed on the warehouse floor below him, give or take a few bodies. Each guard is armed with a standard private-corps-issue Harbinger B86, a nasty, recoilless weapon with a high-capacity magazine and electromagnetic rounds that could blast a tunnel through the belly of a whale—enough to turn a person to dust. Scary stuff.

But if everything goes as planned (fingers crossed), Grey and his crewmate, Dot, won’t cross paths with any of those trigger-happy psychopaths. Their job is simple: get in, grab the battery, and get out before anyone’s the wiser. Based on what they could scrounge up about the warehouse’s systems, there’s no internal surveillance, which is good for Grey. Whatever they’re doing, they don’t want other people seeing it—and one of the easiest ways to let the world know that you’re doing something you aren’t supposed to be doing is to keep a visual record of it. Cameras get hacked, after all.

Grey drags himself a little farther and takes another precious moment to catch his breath. Heaving the musty air, he peers ahead—and immediately wishes he hadn’t.

The grooved heels of Dot’s boots are roughly five meters ahead of him, and she’s moving so quickly, it’s like she’s sprinting across the support beam, fast as a jet and thin as a blade. The woman moves like an alley cat, way nimbler than Grey can ever hope to be, but she’s a Crest knight, so—

A small burst of static in Grey’s left ear makes him flinch, and he bashes the back of his head against a rusty pipe. It creates a gong-like echo, and the whole tunnel shakes from the impact. He braces for bullets, but the fickle grace of Ghan must be with him today.

“You hear me, Boss?” Willow asks over comms. Her voice is brittle, midrange and rusty—the kind of voice ten years of ferocious burner consumption buys you.

Grey blinks away tears and pulls himself forward. Fast as molasses and just as sweet. “Willow, you almost killed me.”

She laughs, but there’s an edge to it, as if the thought of Grey dying is slightly amusing. “How so?”

“Because you scared the shit out of me.”

“Sounds messy.”

Grey’s eyes roll themselves. “Also, you sound like you’re dying,” he says with a grunt, scooting another unremarkable centimeter. “That burner’s going to kill you long before being a pirate will.”

“You don’t sound too hot yourself, fren.”

She exhales, her breath heavy, and Grey’s eyes widen. Murder comes to mind.

“Willow, tell me you aren’t smoking on deck.”

There’s a small pause. Sphincters clench.

“I’m not,” she says, in a way that means, Oh, shit.

Grey closes his eyes to stop himself from having an aneurism. “Mars, can you handle that, please?”

There’s another brush of static, and the comms are filled with a booming laugh. “I don’t think that’s possible, Captain.” Mars has a voice like a freight train siren and a penchant for talking too loud in small spaces. If a skyscraper could speak, it would sound like Mars.

Grey breathes a quiet laugh, but it comes out more like a pained bark. He continues to crawl, making a mental note to waterboard Willow at a later date. Smoking isn’t really the problem. Sure, it’s bad for you, but what isn’t? Pour a few drinks down Grey’s throat, and he’ll smoke a pack of burner cartridges without blinking. That’s fine. But smoking on the ship—on deck? That’s indefensible.

He can almost see it. Willow’s feet propped up on her flight console, vapor and nicotine slipping through the cracks between the knobs and controls, infecting the airship’s primary circuitry with sticky, mango-flavored burner stains. Willow just sitting there with her wild hair, wearing that crooked smile and puffing out rings of smoke… It’s downright sinister. The second Grey is off ship, she likes to pretend Trench is hers. She might be the best pilot Grey has ever seen behind the console, but the woman doesn’t care a lick about ruining equipment or making the flight deck smell like a fruit-flavored chimney, so long as it doesn’t come out of her cut. Well, she’s got a surprise coming if she thinks she can—

“You thinkin’ up new ways to kill me, Boss?” Willow asks, a laugh buried at the back of her throat.

“No,” Grey says, feigning innocence. “But do you have any idea if they make poisoned burner cartridges?”

Willow chuckles. “I don’t, but I like where your head’s at. It might be the scariest one so far.”

Grey laughs. Good captains find ways to discipline their crew for making mistakes that could cost them money, time, or worst case, their lives. But great captains couple that with a sense of humor. They also don’t take things that don’t matter too seriously. If you expect your crew to lie and steal, to kill if the circumstances call for it—and they often do call for it—you can’t sweat the small stuff. After all, there’s plenty of big stuff to get sweaty about.

No, Grey would never kill Willow. It’s just fun to think about, sometimes.

“Fifteen meters straight ahead, and you’re out,” Willow says, putting the captain back on track. As erratic and seemingly selfish as the woman might be, she has a habit of doing that. Keeping him level. Providing an anchor for his wayward mind. Honestly, every sky pirate captain in the world deserves their own Willow, if not the occasional migraine that comes with her. She’s currently tracking their progress via geolocating chips embedded in their armor, tucked safely aboard Trench three kilometers away, on standby, should things get messy.

“Dot looks very far ahead of you, Captain,” Mars chimes in again.

“I know.”

“Like, really far. I know it’s not a race, but if it were—”

“That’s it. I’m killing you both,” Grey says with an exaggerated sigh. “But don’t worry, I’ll make it quick. And I’ll write beautiful eulogies.”

Willow snorts.

“I’m sorry—what’s a eulogy?” Mars asks.

Don’t misunderstand this; the smartest people in the world ask questions when they don’t know something, so not knowing this doesn’t make Mars dumb. He just isn’t accustomed to religious ceremony, having spent most of his adult life in a cage. Gladiators aren’t given funerals.

Grey cracks a sad smile. “Willow, please explain.”

“It’s a speech that people give—”

“Off comms, Low,” Grey interjects.

“Oh, right. Sorry.”

The static evaporates, leaving only the hum of electrical pulses and the occasional rush of foul-smelling water. Already, he longs for another distraction, but knows that a clear mind is a focused mind, and focus keeps you alive. Grey cranes his neck to catch a glimpse of what’s to come on this seemingly infinite climb, and he realizes, with some shock, that Dot has already exited the tunnel. Logic would dictate that either she’s inhumanly fast, or he’s monstrously slow. Unfortunately, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

His entire body protests as he edges forward centimeter by painstaking centimeter. It feels like it takes a century, like he’s lived a hundred lives in the span of this slow nightmare crawl, but in actuality, it’s only been about twenty minutes. Another three minutes of crawling, and he catches a glimpse of the beam of light signifying the end of this horrible adventure.

Without warning, the tunnel begins to shake, sending low-toned vibrations up through Grey’s body. He presses his ear to the bottom of the shaft to try to hear what’s happening on the other side, but all he catches is a muffled mass of whirring and clanking rising from the warehouse floor. Nothing discernible.

From what he could glean before he agreed to take this hunt, he’s hovering over a privately owned complex leased out for off-book military ops, private corporations funded by government entities, all super top secret—the kind of stuff no self-satisfied government should ever be involved in. But this is Crimn, a nation run by hollow-minded plutocrats, where human rights tend to take a back seat to profit. Just evil doing evil’s work.

Whatever they have going on down there, it sends tectonic-level vibrations throughout the complex every so often—currently, once every ten minutes. But there was almost nothing about daily operations in the emails and schematics Bones ripped from the warehouse’s mainframe. All they could access remotely was an employee schedule, squad rosters, an internal inventory list, some basic boilerplate docs with almost no usable info, and two-year-old blueprints, which Grey used to map out this infiltration. So, whatever they’re doing down there is a mystery. And should everything go according to plan, it will remain a mystery.

Grey and Dot are going in semi-blind, which isn’t ideal, but what’s a pirate to do? They hacked as much intel as they could. Grey sent a few transmissions to trusted contacts. They weren’t caught sneaking into the complex, which is a win in itself. Now, it’s time for the scary part. The breaking and entering and stealing part, which, admittedly, is sort of Grey’s specialty.

To make matters worse, their client for this hunt isn’t exactly known for his patience. Had they any more time, maybe they could’ve learned more. But if this package isn’t delivered by sundown tomorrow, Grey will lose a lot more than pride in a job well done—more like a few appendages, a couple of crew members, and Trench’s propulsion engines. But that’s the cost of doing business with a one-eyed sewer rat with ties to The Frame. No one has ever claimed a pirate’s life is glamorous, but at least it pays well … most of the time.

Okay, some of the time.

One last bit of effort, and Grey reaches the small opening sliced into the bottom of the shaft, the edges smooth and shiny silver. The air here is dense and cold, a welcome relief after two kilometers of blinding heat. He pokes his head down, checks the coast. It’s clear.

Well, not entirely, because Dot stands at the center of the small room, her short, muscle-lean body facing the room’s only door, fingers wrapped loosely around the hilts of two longknives. The blades are single-edged and razor-thin.

It’s four meters from the ceiling to the floor. A long drop, but manageable. So, Grey, ever the showman, dives in headfirst, grabs the edge, flips his legs horizontal so they’re parallel with the ceiling, and lets himself fall. A slight twist, a quick somersault, and he lands in a crouch. His feet touch the floor without a sound, thanks to the silicon-padded sound-dampening tech in his boots, but he lands a little harder than he meant to, the impact shooting spikes up his shins. Grimacing, he stands up straight, throws his arms up like a tortured little trapeze artist, shines his pearly whites, and waits for applause.

Crickets.

Dot shoots him an expressionless glance, the definition of unimpressed.

He sighs as he brushes loose bits of rust off his shoulders. “You’re a bad sport. I get nothing for style, at least?”

She shrugs. “Mine was better.”

Dot’s hair is dusty blonde, pulled into a tight, slick bun atop her skull. She’s short enough that Grey could rest his chin on the top of her head, if he ever felt suicidal, which he hasn’t—not for a long time. Freckles are spattered across her pale face, forming dark clusters on her cheeks. She looks about as vicious as a rabbit, docile and warm, a sweet creature. Except there’s venom in those veins. She wears the same field-issue midnight body armor as her captain, with matte-black bulletproof plates as thick as tortoiseshell and flexible fabric at the joints. She tugs at the material covering her hips, her jaw pulsing with frustration. She hates the armor.

Question 1 of 3

“Shields up,” she says, turning to survey the room. Her voice is about an octave lower than you’d expect, her words clipped.

If you’re wondering why she’s barking orders at her captain, Dot has special leave to take the lead in most combat-forward situations. If a hunt requires a little slice-and-dice, Dot’s the woman for the job. She’s trained for that, and Grey trusts that she knows her stuff. He’s probably one of the few people on the whole planet who can say they know Dot pretty well. Actually, “pretty well” is a stretch; he knows her about as well as anyone could know her. Enough to know that there’s warmth under all that stone. It’s buried deep, but it’s there.

But of course, she’s a Crest knight, so the icy demeanor sort of comes with the territory.

As a child, she was taken by the Church of the Crest, sworn by blood oath, and eventually knighted under an elite elemental class, her birthright: the wind. This, coupled with her stature, predetermined her martial style. But it’s important to note that knights aren’t like normal people. They are never given surnames. They don’t have family. They belong to the Church—for life. As the state-sanctioned religion of the Incorporated Nations, the Church of the Crest is a power unto itself. It answers to no one. And to be taken by the Church, as Dot was, is a product of both terrible luck and being born into a society that has long forgotten the definition of institutional slavery.

As terrible as that is, it gets worse, because being taken doesn’t automatically make a person a knight. They aren’t just wrapped in chains and given a blade. To become a knight is a feat akin to a miracle. More than half of all initiates into the Crest Academy are killed before they reach the age of ten. Before they reach adulthood, students die by the legions in a ruthless hunt for the worthy. And those lucky and skilled enough to make it to the end of their education are rewarded with a Church-sanctioned massacre—one final culling.

The Church steals children. They torture the human out of them, rip out their empathy, and hand them a blade. They teach them how to kill without mercy, to die without complaint. And it’s all completely legal. Some even call it a divine right.

Grey calls it monstrous.

Only a fortunate few ever find a way to dial back the brainwashing and break those chains, destined to spend the rest of their lives on the run, traitors to the faith. That’s Dot’s story.

Two years ago, she showed up on Grey’s doorstep wearing bloodstained white robes. All twenty years of her life up until that point seemed etched into the scowl on her face as she damn near demanded a spot on his crew. Truth told, she barely had to ask. If a Crest knight wants to work on your ship, you say yes. There are no interview questions.

Grey clicks a button on his wrist display to activate his shield. There’s a low hum as an invisible energy field surrounds his entire body, just centimeters off the skin, generated from a shield pack at his hip. Shields are strong enough to protect from most high-velocity projectile weapons, but they usually only last long enough for you to collect your bearings, draw blades, and fight back, or gather the gumption to run. Too much damage, and shields break, like most things, and then there’s nothing protecting you from all those bullets. That’s why anyone worth their weight in steel knows how to wield a blade. Grey carries a prismblade for that reason, standard issue among all elite military personnel. Black hilt, black blade. Short, double-edged, and sharp, optimal for close combat. Chopping and stabbing.

Of course, the “shield rules” don’t apply to Dot, since her weapon of choice supersedes any other weapon or defense tech in existence. Crest knights get the proverbial shit end of the stick called life in most regards, except for one: their swords.

Crest knights wield torches. Mechanized swords custom-forged and given to them upon graduation from the Crest Academy. They range in size, but the average is a meter-long, feather-thin blade of vintexium alloy, the alien metal. It is the strongest material in existence, unbreakable, even by magic—but that’s not even the best part. There’s a trigger embedded above the grip that, when activated, sends a shiver of fire through the metal that makes it glow bright white, heating it to a degree just shy of molten lava. It’s so hot that with enough force, it can pierce steel. Torches can cut through meat and bone like passing through air. That’s why knights wear specially made gloves, so the radiant heat from their blades won’t burn their hands.

When Dot earned her knighthood, she was given two torches. Twin blades, identical down to the milky white moonstones pressed into each hilt, double-edged and half a meter in length. They are smaller than the average torch, but Dot is a lot smaller than the average knight.

Grey has never met anyone with more than one torch.

Somewhere in his periphery, Grey catches a glint of light from one of Dot’s longknives. Her torches remain sheathed, which brings him a bit of relief. They’re useful weapons, no doubt, but they scare him. Nothing should be unbreakable. It’s unnatural. He’d never say that out loud, though. Can’t admit fear, even to your crew. Especially to your crew.

Last count, Dot carries ten weapons, all blades, no firearms. “Guns are for the weak-willed and the unskilled”—her words, not his. As an expert marksman, he finds it only mildly insulting.

He draws his firearm and engages the silencer mechanism. His weapon of choice is a refurbished Class 7 Brass Point semiautomatic revolver with an extended twenty-shot cylinder, coated in bronze with a custom white marble grip. An old gun, but she shoots just fine.

He draws a slow, steady breath and quickly assesses their surroundings. They’re in a small concrete room, all four walls lined with sand-colored metal filing cabinets and industrial shelves that stop just short of the ceiling. There’s one big metal door, no windows. The concrete walls are gray, slab-thick and soundproof. The shelves are full of white cardboard file boxes.

This isn’t right.

“Willow, what am I seeing?” Grey asks into his comm.

Dot paces the room, rummaging through cabinets, pulling boxes off shelves. Something must catch her eye, because she pauses, tilts her head slightly, and reaches through a shelf to place her palm flat against the cold concrete on the other side. She closes her eyes.

Static bristles. “Based on the schematics, you’re exactly where you need to be, Boss,” Willow confirms. “What are you seeing?”

“Not the battery room,” Grey says.

Willow releases a string of colorful curses.

“Captain, do you need me?” Mars asks.

Grey casts a humorless smile at no one, trying and failing to suppress a surge of anxiety. “No, Mars. We’re okay right now.”

This isn’t good. In fact, finding out that you’ve just broken into the wrong room in a dangerous military facility is never good, but it hasn’t reached Mars-level bad just yet. With one word, that man would fall like an avalanche through the front gates, plowing through any poor soul who dared to stand in his way to pluck a reluctant Dot and an apologetic Grey from their concrete cage without injury. But the captain wants to avoid a massacre, so the big man stays. He’s taking on enough liability with Dot on his wing. She’s just as likely to cause damage as her giant red-bearded counterpart. Sometimes, you need to be subtle, and those two are anything but.

“It looks like a file room,” Grey says to Willow as he walks over to a cabinet and rifles through folders. “Personnel information, stuff like that. Hard copies. That’s weird, right?”

“Weird, yeah, but also pretty smart. These fuckers are light-years off grid. Let me check the schematics again, give me one—”

The room erupts with sound, and Grey whips around, his finger moving instinctively to the trigger of his revolver. But it’s only Dot, dragging a metal shelf away from one of the walls.

“Boss, you sturdy?” Willow asks. “What’s that noise?”

Grey opens his mouth but doesn’t answer right away, mostly because he wouldn’t be able to speak over the noise.

Dot tugs on the shelf once, twice, each pull creating an ear-splitting scraping sound loud enough to wake the recently dead. She stops when she finally creates enough space between the shelf and the wall for her to fit comfortably between them. In a blur of movement, she draws one of her torches and twists a small section of the hilt. The straight, thin blade sparks fire and begins to glow, fading from shimmering silver to blinding white, as bright as a midnight moon. With a quick pivot, she thrusts the blade hilt-deep into the concrete wall.

“Boss, what’s happening?” Willow asks. “We’re blind over here.”

“Um…” Grey swallows. “Dot just stabbed a wall.”

Excerpted from CELLO’S GATE by Maurice Africh. Copyright © 2026. Reprinted by permission of Saga Press at Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.