Authors

 Sitrep: So, Goodlifeguide is a bit saturated at the moment so no garuntees that we'll see the manuscript back before the upcoming holiday.

In other news, I noticed some blog posts complaining about my covers. So, I spent the week poking around at 8 of them. I tried a few before with mixed results. This time I took a piecemeal approach with many. Some are enhanced with AI some like Regeneration have no AI enhancements, I just shifted the point of view.

To be clear: Same book, just new cover.

 

I will be replacing the old covers with these in the coming days.

Crime scene investigator Pamela Kinney hears the bad guys outside her house and smells smoke, but only realizes the next morning the crime they committed—burning the flag that had covered her daughter’s casket.

Her police colleagues call it a small crime, but she disagrees. She must solve it, and she must solve it now.

Chosen as one of the best mystery stories of the year, “Patriotic Gestures” explores the fine lines that run through American culture, and sometimes through Americans themselves.

“Patriotic Gestures“ is available for one week on this site. The ebook is available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

Patriotic Gestures By Kristine Kathryn Rusch  

Pamela Kinney heard the noise in her sleep—giggles, followed by the crunching of leaves. Later, she smelled smoke, faint and acrid, and realized that her neighbors were burning garbage in their fireplace again. She got up long enough to close the window and silently curse them; she hated it when they did illegal burning.

She forgot about it until the next morning. She stepped out her back door into the crisp fall morning, and found charred remains of her flag in the middle of her driveway. There’d been no wind during the night, fortunately, or all the evidence would have been gone.

Instead, there was a pile of burned fabric and a burn stain on the pavement. There were even footprints outlined in leaves.

She noted all of that with a professional’s detachment—she’d eyeballed more than a thousand crime scenes—before the fabric itself caught her attention. Then the pain was sudden and swift, right above her heart, echoing through the breastbone and down her back.

Anyone else would have thought she was having a heart attack. But she wasn’t, and she knew it. She’d had this feeling twice before, first when the officers came to her house and then when the chaplain handed her the folded flag which just a moment before had draped over her daughter’s coffin.

Pamela had clung to that flag like she’d seen so many other military mothers do, and she suspected she had looked as lost as they had. Then, when she stood, that pain ran through her, dropping her back to the chair.

Her sons took her arms, and when she mentioned the pain, they dragged her to the emergency room. She had been late for her own daughter’s wake, her chest sticky with adhesive from the cardiac machines and her hair smelling faintly of disinfectant.

And the feeling came back now, as she stared at the massacre before her. The flag, Jenny’s flag, had been ripped from the front door and burned in her driveway.

Pamela made herself breathe. Then she rubbed that spot above her left breast, felt the pain spread throughout her body, burning her eyes and forming a lump in the back of her throat. But she held the tears back. She wouldn’t give whoever had done this awful thing the satisfaction.

Finally she reached inside her purse for her cell, called Neil—she had trouble thinking of him as the sheriff after all the years she’d known him— and then she protected the scene until he arrived.

***

It only took him five minutes. Halleysburg was still a small town, no matter how many Portlanders sprawled into the community, willing to make the one and a half hour one-way daily commute to the city’s edge. Pamela had told the dispatch to make sure that Neil parked across the street so that any wind from his vehicle wouldn’t move the leaves.

And she had asked for a second scene-of-the-crime kit because she didn’t want to go inside and get hers. She didn’t want to risk losing the crime scene with a moment of inattention.

Neil pulled onto the street. His car was an unwieldy Olds with a souped up engine and a reinforced frame. It could take a lot of punishment, and often did.

As a result, the paint covering the car’s sides was fresh and clean, while the hood, roof and trunk looked like they were covered in dirt.

The sheriff was the same. Neil Karlyn was in his late fifties, balding, with a face that had seen too much sun. But his uniform was always new, always pristine, and never wrinkled. He’d been that way since college, a precise man with precise opinions about a difficult world.

He got out of the Olds and did not reach around back for a scene-of-the-crime kit. Annoyance threaded through her.

“Where’s my kit?” she asked.

“Pam,” he said gently, “it’s a low-level property crime. It’ll never go to trial and you know it.”

“It’s arson with malicious intent,” she snapped. “That’s a felony.”

He sighed and studied her for a moment. He clearly recognized her tone. She’d used it often enough on him when they were students at the University of Oregon. When they were lovers on different sides of the political fence, and constantly on the verge of splitting up.

When they finally did, it had taken years for them to settle into a friendship. But settle they did. They hardly even fought any more.

He went back to the car, opened the back seat and removed the kit she’d requested. She crossed her arms, waiting as he walked toward her. He stopped at the edge of the curb, holding the kit tight against his leg.

“Even if you somehow get the D.A. to agree that this is a cockamamie felony, you know that processing the scene yourself taints the evidence.”

“Why do you care so much?” she asked, hearing an edge in her voice that usually wasn’t there. The challenge, unspoken: It’s my daughter’s flag. It’s like murdering her all over again.

To his credit, Neil didn’t try to soothe her with a platitude.

“It’s the eighth flag this morning,” he said. “It’s not personal, Pam.”

Her chin jutted out. “It is to me.”

Neil looked down, his cheek moving. He was clenching his jaw, trying not to speak.

He didn’t have to.

She understood the irony of the statement. Somewhere in her pile of college paraphernalia was a badly framed newspaper clipping that had once been the front page of the Portland Oregonian. She’d framed the clipping so that a photo dominated, a photo of a much-younger Pamela with long hair and a tie-dye t-shirt, front and center in a group of students, holding an American flag by a stick, watching as it burned.

God, she could still remember how that felt, to hold a flag up so that the wind caught it. How fabric had its own acrid odor, and how frightened she’d been at the desecration, even though she’d been the one to light the flag on fire.

She had been protesting the Vietnam War. It was that photo and the resulting brouhaha it caused, both on campus and in the State of Oregon itself, that had led to the final break-up with Neil.

He couldn’t believe what she had done. Sometimes she couldn’t either. But she felt her country was worth fighting for. So had he. He joined up not two months later.

To his credit, Neil didn’t say anything about her own flag-burning as he handed her the kit. Instead he watched as she took photographs of the scene, scooped up the charred bits of fabric, and made a sketch of the footprint she found in the leaves.

She found another print in the yard, and that one she made a cast of. Then she dusted her front door for prints, trying not to cry as she did so.

“A flag is a flag is a flag,” she used to say.

Until it draped over her daughter’s coffin.

Until it became all she had left.

***

“I called the local VFW, Mom,” her son Stephen said over dinner that night. Stephen was her oldest and had been her support for thirty years, since the day his father walked out, never to return. “They’re bringing another flag.”

She stirred the mashed potatoes into the creamed corn on her plate. The meal had come from KFC: her sons had brought a bucket with her favorite sides, and told her not to argue with them about the fast food meal.

She wasn’t arguing, but she didn’t have much of an appetite.

They sat in the dining room, at the table that had once held four of them. Pamela had slid the fake rose centerpiece in front of Jenny’s place, so she wouldn’t have to think about her daughter.

It wasn’t working.

“Another flag isn’t the same, dumbass,” Travis said. At thirty, he was the youngest, unmarried, still finding himself, a phrase she had come to hate.

The hell of it was, Travis was right. It wasn’t the same. That flag these people had burned, that flag had comforted her. She had clung to it on the worst afternoon of her life, her fingers holding it tight, even at the emergency room, when the doctors wanted to pry it from her hands.

It had taken almost a week for her to let it go. Stephen had come over, Stephen and his pretty wife Elaine and their teenage daughters, Mandy and Liv. They’d brought KFC then, too, and talked about everything but the war.

Until it came time to take the flag away from Pamela.

Stephen had talked to her like she was a five-year-old who wanted to take her blankie to kindergarten. In the end, she’d handed the flag over. He’d been the one to find the old flagpole, the one she’d taken down when she bought the house, and he’d been the one to place the pole in the hanger outside the front door.

“The VFW says they replace flags all the time,” Stephen said to his brother.

“Because some idiot burned one?” Travis asked.

Pamela’s cheeks flushed.

“Because people lose them. Or moths eat them. Or sometimes, they get stolen,” Stephen said.

“But not burned,” Travis persisted.

Pamela swallowed. Travis didn’t remember the newspaper photo, but Stephen probably did. It had hung over the console stereo she had gotten when her mother died, and it had been a teacher—Neil’s first grade teacher? Pamela couldn’t remember—who had seen it at a party and asked if she really wanted her children to see that before they could understand what it meant.

“I don’t want another one,” Pamela said.

“Mom….” Stephen started in his most reasonable voice.

She shook her head. “It’s been a year. I need to move on.”

“You don’t move on from that kind of loss,” Travis said, and she wondered how he knew. He didn’t have children.

Then she looked at him, a large broad-shouldered man with tears in his eyes, and remembered that Jenny had been the one who walked him to school, who bathed him at night, who usually tucked him in. Jenny had done all that because Stephen at thirteen was already working to help his mom make ends meet, and Pamela was working two jobs herself, as well as attending community college to get her degree in forensic science and criminology. A pseudoscience degree, one of her almost-boyfriends had said. But it wasn’t. She used science every day. She needed science like she needed air.

Like she needed to find out who had destroyed her daughter’s flag.

“You don’t move on,” Pamela said.

Her boys watched her. Sometimes she could see the babies they had been in the lines of their mouths and the shape of their eyes. She still marveled at the way they had grown into men, large men who could carry her the way she used to carry them.

“But,” she added, “you don’t have to dwell on it, every moment of every day.”

And yet she was dwelling. She couldn’t stop. She never told her sons or anyone else, not even Neil who had become a closer friend in the year since Jenny had died. Neil, a widower now, a man who understood death the way that Pamela did. Neil, whose grandson had enlisted after 9/11 and had somehow made it back.

She was dwelling and there was only one way to stop. She had to use science to solve this. She couldn’t think about it emotionally. She had to think about it clinically.

She had her evidence and she needed even more.

The next morning, the local paper ran an article on the burnings, and listed the addresses in the police log section. So Pamela visited the other crime scenes with her kit and her camera, identifying herself as an employee of the State Crime Lab.

Since CSI debuted on television, that identification opened doors for her. She didn’t have to tell the other victims that she had been a victim too.

She took pictures of scorch marks on pavement and flag holders wrenched loose of their sockets. She removed flag bits from garbage cans, and studied footprints in the leaf-covered grass to see if they looked similar to the ones on her lawn.

And late that afternoon, as she stepped back to photograph yet another twisted flag holder beside a front door, she saw the glint of a camera hiding in a cobwebby corner of the door frame. The house was a starter, maybe 1200 square feet total. She wouldn’t have expected a camera here.

“Do you have a security system?” she asked the homeowner, a woman Travis’s age who looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks. Her name was Becky something. Pamela hadn’t really heard her last name in the introduction.

“My husband put it up,” Becky said, her voice shaking a little. “I have no idea how it works.”

“When will he be back?” Pamela asked.

Becky shrugged. “When they cancel stop-loss, I guess.”

Pamela felt her breath slide out of her body. “He’s in Iraq?”

Becky nodded. “I put the flag up for him, you know? And I haven’t told him what happened to it. I’ve gotta find someone to fix the holder, and I have to get another flag.”

Pamela looked at the house more closely. It needed paint. The bushes in front were overgrown. There were cobwebs all over the windows, and dry rot on the sills. Obviously the couple had purchased it expecting someone to work on it.

Either the money wasn’t there, or the husband had planned to do the work himself.

“I can fix the holder,” Pamela said. “If you have a few tools.”

“My husband does,” Becky said. “I can show them to you.”

“I have a few things to finish, and then you can show me,” Pamela said.

She dusted for prints, and then, for comparison, took Becky’s and some off the husband’s comb, which hadn’t been touched since he left. Then Pamela went into his workroom, which also hadn’t been touched, and took a hammer, some screws, and a screwdriver.

It took only ten minutes to repair the flag holder. But in that time, she’d made a friend.

“How’d you learn how to do that?” Becky asked.

“Raised three kids alone,” Pamela said. “You realize there’s not much you can’t do, if you just try.”

Becky nodded.

Pamela glanced at the camera. Untended since the husband left. It was probably in the same state of disrepair as the rest of the house.

“Can I see the security system?” she asked.

“It’s not really a system,” Becky said. “Just the cameras, and some motion sensors that’re supposed to alert us when someone’s on the property. But they clearly don’t work any more.”

“Let me see anyway,” Pamela said.

Becky took her past the workroom, into a small closet filled with electronics. The closet was warm from the heat the panels gave off. Lights still blinked.

Pamela stared at it all, then touched the rewind button on the digital recorder. On the television monitor, she watched an image of herself fixing the flag holder.

“It looks like the camera’s still working,” she said. “Mind if I rewind farther?”

“Go ahead.”

Backwards, she watched darkness turn to day. Saw Neil inspect the hanger. Saw Becky crying, then the tears evaporate into a stare of disbelief before she backed off the porch and away from the scene.

Back to the previous night. No porch light. Just images blurred in the darkness. Faces, not quite real, mostly turned away from the camera.

“Got a recordable DVD?” Pamela asked.

“Somewhere.” Becky vanished into the house. Pamela studied the system, hoping that she wouldn’t erase the information as she tried to record it.

She rewound again. Studied the faces, the half turned heads. She saw crew cuts and piercings and hoodies. Slouchy clothes worn by half the young people in Halleysburg.

Nothing to identify them. Nothing to separate them from everyone else in their age group.

Like her, her hair long, her jeans torn, as she stood front and center at the U of O, a burning flag before her.

She made herself study the machine, and figured out how to save the images to the disk’s hard drive so that they wouldn’t be erased. Then she inspected the buttons near the machine’s DVD slot.

“Here,” Becky said, thrusting a packet at her.

DVD-Rs, unopened, dust-covered. Pamela used a fingernail to break the seal, then pulled one out, and inserted it in the slot. She managed to record, but had no way to test. So she made a few more copies, feeling somewhat reassured that she could come back and try to download the images from the hard drive again.

“Will this catch them?” Becky asked while she watched the process.

“I don’t know,” Pamela said. “I hope so.”

“It’s just, they got so close, you know.” Becky’s voice shook. “I didn’t know anyone could get that close.”

It took Pamela a moment to understand what she meant. Becky meant that they had gotten close to the house. Close to her. The burning hadn’t just upset her, it had frightened her, and made her feel vulnerable.

Odd. All it had done to Pamela was make her angry.

“Just lock up at night,” Pamela said after a minute. “Locks deter ninety-percent of all thieves.”

“And the remaining ten percent?”

They get in, Pamela almost said, but thought the better of it.

“They don’t usually come to places like Halleysburg,” she said. “Why would they? We all know each other here.”

Becky nodded, seemingly reassured. Or maybe she just wanted to abandon an uncomfortable topic.

Pamela certainly did. She wanted to play with the images, see what she could find.

She wanted a solid image of the culprits, one that she could bring to Neil.

Maybe then, he would stop complaining that this was a petty property crime. Maybe then he might understand how important this really was.

***

But it was her own words that replayed in her head later that night as she sat in front of her computer.

They don’t usually come to places like Halleysburg…. We all know each other here.

She had lied to make Becky feel better, but the words hadn’t felt like a lie. Thieves really didn’t come here. There was no need. There was richer pickings in Portland or Salem or the nearby bedroom communities.

Besides, it was hard to commit a crime here without someone seeing you.

Except under cover of darkness.

Her home office was quiet. It overlooked the back yard, and she had never installed curtains on the window, preferring the view of the year-round flower garden she had planted. At the moment, her garden was full of browns and oranges, fall plants blooming despite the winter ahead. She had little lights beneath the plants, lights she usually kept off because they spiked her energy bill.

But she had them on now. She would probably have them on for some time to come.

Maybe Becky wasn’t the only one who felt vulnerable.

Pamela put one of the DVDs in her computer, and opened the images. They played, much to her relief, so she copied the images to her hard drive and removed the DVD.

Her computer at home wasn’t as good as her computer at work. But it would have to do.

She didn’t want to do any work on this case at the State Crime Lab if she could help it. The lab was so understaffed and so overworked that it usually took four months to get something tested. When she last checked, more than 600 cases were backlogged, some of them dating back more than nine months.

Those cases were bigger than hers. The backlogs were semen samples from possible rapists and blood droplets from the scene of a multiple murder case.

She couldn’t, in good conscience, bring something personal and private to the lab. She would work here as long as she could. Then if she couldn’t finish here, she might be able to convince herself that the time she took at the lab would go toward an arson case—a serious one, not a petty property crime, as Neil had called it.

Petty property crime.

Funny that they would be on opposite sides of this issue too.

Pamela went through the images frame by frame, looking for clear faces. Her computer didn’t have the face recognition software that one of the computers at the lab had, but she had installed a home version of image sharpening software. She used it to clean out the fuzz and to lighten the darkness, trying to find more than a chin or the corner of an ear.

Finally she got a small face just behind the flag, a serious white face with a frown—of disapproval? She couldn’t tell—and a bit of an elongated chin. Enough to see the wisp of a beard—a boy’s beard, more a wish of a beard than the real thing—and a tattooed hand coming up to catch the flag as the person almost blocking the camera yanked the pole out of the holder.

She blew up the image, softened it, fixed it, and then felt tears prick her eyes.

They don’t usually come to places like Halleysburg.

No. They grew up here. And worked at the grocery store down the street to pay for their football uniforms at the underfunded high school. They collected coins in a can on Sunday afternoons for Boosters, and they smiled when they saw her and respectfully called her Mrs. Kinney and asked, with a little too much interest, how her granddaughters were doing.

“Jeremy Stallings,” she whispered. “What the hell were you thinking?”

And she hoped she knew.

***

Neil wouldn’t let her sit in while he questioned Jeremy Stallings. He was appalled she’d even asked.

“That sort of thing belongs on TV and you know it,” he’d said.

But she also knew he probably wouldn’t do much more than slap the boy on the wrist, so what would be the harm? She hadn’t made that argument, though.

Instead, she waited on the bench chair outside the sheriff’s office conference room, which doubled as an interview room on days like this, and watched the parade of parents and lawyers as they trooped past.

No one acknowledged her. No one so much as looked at her. Not Reg Stallings, whose brother had sold her the house, or his wife June, who had taken over the PTA just before Travis got out of high school. No one mentioned the friendly exchanges at the high school football games or the hellos at the diner behind the movie theater. It was easier to forget all that and pretend they weren’t neighbors than it was to acknowledge what was going on inside that room.

Then, finally, Jeremy came out. He was wearing his baggy pants with a Halo t-shirt hanging nearly to his knees. He wore that same frown he’d had as he took the flag off from Becky’s front door.

He glanced at Pamela, then looked away, a blush working its way up the spider tattoo on his neck into his crew cut.

His parents and the lawyers led him away, as Neil reminded all of them to be in court the following morning.

Neil waited until they went through the front doors before coming over to Pamela.

She stood, her knees creaky from sitting so long. “He confess?”

Neil nodded. “And gave me the names of his buddies.”

Pamela bit her lower lip. “Funny,” she said, “he didn’t strike me as the type to be a war protestor.”

Neil rubbed his hands on his pristine shirt. “Is that what you thought?”

“Of course,” Pamela said. “Every house he hit, we’re all military families.”

“Who happened to be flying flags, even at night.” There was a bit of judgment in Neil’s voice.

She knew what he was thinking. People who knew how to handle flags took them down at dusk. But she couldn’t bear to touch hers. She hadn’t asked Becky why hers remained up, but she would wager the reason was similar.

And it probably was for every other family Jeremy and his friends had targeted.

“That’s the important factor?” she asked. “Night?”

“And beer,” Neil said. “They lost a football game, went out and drank, and that fueled their anger. So they decided to act out.”

“By burning flags?” Her voice rose.

“A few weeks before, they knocked down mailboxes. I’m going to hate to charge them. There won’t be much left of the football team.”

“That’s all right,” Pamela said bitterly. “Petty property crimes shouldn’t take them off the roster long.”

“It’s going to be more than that,” Neil said. “They’re showing a destructive pattern. This one isn’t going to be fun.”

“For any of us,” Pamela said.

***

Her hands were shaking as she left. She had wanted the crime to mean something. The flag had meant something to her. It should have meant something to them too.

God, Mom, for an old hippie, you’re such a prude. Jenny’s voice, so close that Pamela actually looked around, expecting to see her daughter’s face.

“I’m not a prude,” she whispered, and then realized she was reliving an old argument between them.

Sure you are. Judgmental and dried up. I thought you protested so that people could do what they wanted.

Pamela sat in the car, her creaky knees no longer holding her.

No, I protested so that people wouldn’t have to die in another senseless war, she had said to her daughter on that May afternoon.

What year was that?

It had to be 1990, just before Jenny graduated from high school.

I’m not going to die in a stupid war, Jenny had said with such conviction that Pamela almost believed her. We don’t do wars any more. I’m going to get an education. That way, you don’t have to struggle to pay for Travis. I know how hard it’s been with Steve.

Jenny, taking care of things. Jenny, who wasn’t going to let her cash-strapped mother pay for her education. Jenny, being so sure of herself, so sure that the peace she’d known most of her life would continue.

To Jenny, going into the military to get a free education hadn’t been a gamble at all.

Things’ll change, honey, Pamela had said. They always do.

And by then I’ll be out. I’ll be educated, and moving on with my life.

Only Jenny hadn’t moved on. She’d liked the military. After the First Gulf War, she’d gone to officer training, one of the first women to do it.

I’m a feminist, Mom, just like you, she’d said when she told Pamela.

Pamela had smiled, keeping her response to herself. She hadn’t been that kind of feminist. She wouldn’t have stayed in the military. She wasn’t sure she believed in the military—not then.

And now? She wasn’t sure what she believed. All she knew was that she had become a military mother, one who cried when a flag was burned.

Not just a flag.

Jenny’s flag.

And that’s when Pamela knew.

She wanted the crime to mean something, so she would make sure that it did.

***

She brought her memories to court. Not just the scrapbooks she’d kept for Jenny, like she had for all three kids, but the pictures from her own past, including the badly framed front page of the Oregonian.

Five burly boys had destroyed Jenny’s flag. They stood in a row, their lawyers beside them, and pled to misdemeanors. Their parents sat on the blond bench seats in the 1970s courtroom. A reporter from the local paper took notes in the back. The judge listened to the pleadings.

Otherwise, the room was empty. No one cheered when the judge gave the boys six months of counseling. No one complained at the nine months of community service and even though a few of them winced when the judge announced the huge fines that they (and not their parents) had to pay, no one said a word.

Until Pamela asked if she could speak.

The judge—primed by Neil—let her.

Only she really didn’t speak. She showed them Jenny. From the baby pictures to the dress uniform. From the brave eleven-year-old walking her brother to school to the dust-covered woman who had smiled with some Iraqi children in Baghdad.

Then Pamela showed them her Oregonian cover.

“I thought you were protesting,” she said to the boys. “I thought you trying to let someone know that you don’t approve of what your country is doing.”

Her voice was shaking.

“I thought you were being patriotic.” She shook her head. “And instead you were just being stupid.”

To their credit, they watched her. They listened. She couldn’t tell if they understood. If they knew how her heart ached—not that sharp pain she’d felt when she found the flag, but just an ache for everything she’d lost.

Including the idealism of the girl in the picture. And the idealism of the girl she’d raised.

When she finished, she sat down. And she didn’t move as the judge gaveled the session closed. She didn’t look up as some of the boys tried to apologize. And she didn’t watch as their parents hustled them out of court.

Finally, Neil sat beside her. He picked up the framed Oregonian photograph in his big, scarred hands.

“Do you regret it?” he asked.

She touched the edge of the frame.

“No,” she said.

“Because it was a protest?”

She shook her head. She couldn’t articulate it. The anger, the rage, the fear she had felt then. Which had been nothing like the fear she had felt every day her daughter had been overseas.

The fear she felt now when she looked at Stephen’s daughters and wondered what they’d chose in this never-ending war.

“If I hadn’t burned that flag,” she said, “I wouldn’t have had Jenny.”

Because she might have married Neil. And even if they had made babies, none of those babies would have been Jenny or Stephen or Travis. There would have been other babies who would have grown into other people.

Neil wasn’t insulted. They had known each other too long for insults. Instead, he put his hand over hers. It felt warm and good and familiar. She put her head on his shoulder.

And they sat like that, until the court reconvened an hour later, for another crime, another upset family, and another broken heart.

___________________________________________

“Patriotic Gestures“ is available for one week on this site. The ebook is available on all retail stores, as well as here.

Patriotic Gestures

Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published published in Scene of The Crime, edited by Dana Stabenow, Running Press, 2008
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2016 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Americanspirit/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Bonus points for correctly identifying the popular culture reference.

Drishya Chandran blinked her big brown eyes. On paper, she was twenty-one. To Elias, she looked about fifteen at most. 

It’s not that the kids are getting younger; it’s that I’m getting older.

“I’m sorry,” Drishya said. “I honestly didn’t see anything.”

They had commandeered the Elmwood Public Library and through the glass window of the conference room Elias could see the gate looming like a dark hungry mouth, bathed in the glow of the floodlights. No matter how many lives they threw into it, it would never be enough. It was past one in the morning, and he was out of coffee.

“Walk me through it one more time,” he said.

“The drill head jammed,” Drishya said. “I showed it to Melissa. She said to go get the new one from the cart in the tunnel. I went to get it. The next thing I know Wagner is running out of the tunnel, and Melissa is behind him, and her face doesn’t look right. I’m like okay, I guess we are doing that now, so I turned around and ran to the gate. I heard an explosion behind us, so I didn’t look back. I didn’t even know London made it until I was out.”

“Why was the cart in the tunnel and not at the site?” Elias asked.

“It didn’t fit. The site slopes to the stream and there wasn’t a lot of flat ground, so we could only get three of the four carts in.” Drishya counted off on her fingers. “Cart One had the generator, lights, and first aid, so it had to come in. Carts Two and Three were for the ore. Adamantite is heavy, so we didn’t want to carry it too far. Cart Four with the spare parts had to live outside.”

“So there was adamantite at the site?” He’d read Leo’s notes of Melissa’s interview, but it seemed almost unbelievable that so much adamantite could exist in one place.

“Oh yes. That’s how my drill broke. Chipped off a chunk this big.” Drishya held her hands out as if lifting an invisible basketball.

“Was the adamantite in plain view?”

The miner shook her head. “No. Buried, and half of it underwater. It took the DeBRA about 10 minutes to find it. She had to mark it with paint for us.”

Was this why they were attacked? Was something protecting the ore?

Drishya sighed. “It’s awful, isn’t it? Everyone is dead.”

“It is, and they are,” Elias confirmed.

“I knew we would get a big bonus when we found the gold, and then the DeBRA came up with adamantite. I was so excited. I thought I could finally put a deposit on the house. My mom isn’t doing so well. I’ve got to get us out of the apartment, and I’m the only one working.”

Gold? What gold? “I’m sorry your mother is in bad health, and that you had to go through this trauma. You may want to see Dr. Park. He has a room set up downstairs.”

“I’m okay. I didn’t see any of it,” Drishya said. “I’ve only been working for 6 months. I didn’t even know people that well…”

He’d seen this before. Some people grieved when faced with death, others got angry, and some tried to disconnect themselves from what happened.

“I understand,” he said. “Still, it might be a good idea. You’ve lost colleagues in a sudden traumatic way. Things like that can fester.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

“So how much gold was there?”

“A lot. It was everywhere in the water, like rocks. We weren’t even drilling; we were pulling it out by hand. Nuggets the size of an apple. We ended up dumping like fifty pounds of it to make room for the adamantite, and we’d been only gathering it for about five minutes.”

“I see. I appreciate your help, Ms. Chandran. The guild is grateful for your assistance. Please get some rest.”

She got up and paused. “You are a lot less scary than I thought you would be.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“Just so you know, Wagner told me not to talk to you.”

Elias raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”

“He said that miners don’t go into the breaches with guildmasters. They go with escort captains. He said it was something to keep in mind.”

“Thank you for your honesty.”

She nodded and walked out.

Elias pulled up the interview notes on his tablet. Neither Melissa nor London said anything about the gold. Malcolm wouldn’t have seen the adamantite, but gold was an entirely different beast.

Was it just gold? Was that it? He’d been wracking his brain, trying to find the reason for the lapse in procedure, having this back and forth with Leo, wondering what he was missing, and all this time, the answer was depressingly simple. Well, no shit, Sherlock, here it is. Greed.

He had put so many regulations and checks in place, and somehow greed always won. He was so fucking tired. Things were much simpler in the breach. The enemy was in front, the support was behind, and he didn’t have to wade through the swamp of human failings. He couldn’t wait to get out of this conference room and into his armor. He had a powerful urge to slice something with his sword.

Leo appeared in the open doorway like a wraith manifesting, met his gaze, and stepped back.

“Come inside and shut the door,” Elias growled.

Leo came in and closed the door behind him.

“Sit.”

Leo sat.

“Why do baby miners think I’m scary?”

“Because you are, sir. Most people find a man who can cut a car in a half with a single strike and then throw the pieces at you frightening.”

“Hmm.”

“Also we offer the highest pay and the best benefits among the top tier guilds, and you are their boss who holds their livelihood in his gauntleted fingers…”

Elias raised his hand. “Did you know there was gold at the mining site?”

Leo’s eyes flashed with white. “I did not.”

“Apparently it was in the water. Nuggets the size of apples. Finally, I know something before you do.”

“Congratulations, sir.”

Elias let that go, pulled up the map of the site on his tablet, and pointed at the three tunnels, each carrying a current of water that merged into a single stream. “Gold washes downstream.”

“Malcolm left the tunnels open because he wanted to maximize the profit from the site.”  Leo’s face snapped into a hard flat mask. “He must’ve expected that once they cleared the site, they would gather more gold upstream.

“Remind me, how much did Malcolm make last year?”

“Seven million.”

“I want to know why gold got him so excited that he risked nineteen lives by leaving the tunnels unsecured.”

“Nineteen?” Leo frowned. “The mining crew, the escort, the DeBRA…”

“And the dog.”

“Oh.”

“Malcolm took a significant risk. That’s not just greed. That’s desperation. How are his finances?”

“Squeaky clean as of the last audit, which was two months ago. Credit score of 810, low debt to assets, less than 10K owed on credit cards. I’m following up on a couple of things. We should know more in a few hours. Do you want me to get Wagner in to talk to you?”

“He won’t tell me anything. Wagner is forty-nine years old. He was a coal miner before the gates appeared, and we are his third guild. He’s used to getting screwed over by his bosses.”

“So, he developed an adversarial relationship with us despite fair treatment,” Leo said.  “Seems counterintuitive.”

“It doesn’t matter what kind of treatment he gets. He’s cooked. He doesn’t trust us, he will never trust us, and he will always resent us no matter how many benefits he gets.”

“That’s not even logical.”

“It isn’t. It’s an ingrained emotional response. Trust me, we won’t get anything out of him. I’d like you to reinterview Melissa instead. As you said, I’m scary, so she may do better with you. Don’t be confrontational. Be sympathetic and understanding. Make it us against the government: we need to tell the DDC something and we need her help to make them go away. Imply that her cooperation will be remembered and appreciated.”

Leo nodded. “Should I bring up the families?”

Elias shook his head. “Normally the foreman would be the last to get out, just before the escorts. She was at the head of the pack. Either she was incredibly lucky, or she abandoned her crew and ran for her life. Either way, there is guilt there. If you lean too hard on it, she might shut down. Go with ‘you were just doing your job, and we don’t blame you for surviving’ instead. Get her a coffee, get some cookies, interview her in a comfortable setting, and see if she thaws and starts talking. If she goes off on a tangent, let her. Don’t rush. You are her friend; you are there to listen.”

Leo nodded. “Will do.”

“Did Haze get the children?”

“Yes. They’ve just arrived at HQ. I still don’t think this is wise.”

Twenty-eight people died in the breach. Fourteen members of the assault crew, nine miners, four escorts, and Adaline Moore. Twelve of the deceased left behind minor children. Of all of them, only Adaline Moore’s kids had no immediate family to take care of them.

The media devoured any news related to the guilds and gates, and the death of a prominent DeBRA would set off fireworks. Once the news broke, Adaline’s children would become the center of a news cycle. They would be overwhelmed, used, wrung dry for the sake of the cheap emotional punch, and then abandoned to their grief. If they were lucky, the country would forget they existed. If they were unlucky, someone would take note of two vulnerable orphans with a million-dollar life insurance payout.

“I will not allow Adaline’s children to be fed to the media circus,” Elias said. “They are safer at the Guild HQ. DDC hasn’t made any notifications yet, but we both know it will get out. I don’t need some asshole showing up at their door, sticking a microphone into their faces, and asking how they feel about their mother dying. All Haze told them was that Adaline is missing in the breach. They will find out what happened from me, personally.”

He would take care of that in the morning.

“Adaline Moore would have made provisions,” Leo said.

“I’m sure she did. Until we know what they are, we will take care of it.”

“This will be seen as Cold Chaos controlling access to the children because we have something to hide. We are trying to minimize the media’s attention, but they love conspiracies. In an effort to keep the story small, we may end up making it bigger.”

“That’s fine. If they want to paint us as the villain of that story, let them. We will survive. We are the third largest guild in the country.”

Leo sighed quietly.

“I called Felicia,” Elias told him.

Felicia Terrell was a powerhouse attorney, and she specialized in guild-related litigation. He spoke to her two hours ago. She called him a marshmallow and promised to show up first thing in the morning. The children would be well protected from everyone, including Cold Chaos.

Elias leaned back. He was so over it. As soon as he hammered the assault team together, he would enter the gate. He couldn’t wait to get out of this conference room. There was no politics in the breach.

Leo was still sitting in the chair. Some other problem must’ve reared its ugly head.

“Lay it on me,” Elias said.

“We can’t find Jackson.”

“What do you mean, you can’t find him?”

“He was supposed to fly out of Tokyo twenty minutes ago. He didn’t make it to the plane, and he isn’t answering his phone. I’m on it.”

Jackson was arguably the best healer in the US. He didn’t drink, he didn’t do drugs, and his biggest vice was collecting expensive bonsai. The man did not go AWOL. Jackson was always where he was supposed to be. He was calm, competent, powerful, and respected wherever he went, because he did things like walk into other guilds’ gates and rescue their assault teams from disaster when asked. Nothing could happen to Jackson.

“Do whatever you have to do, but find him, Leo.”

The XO nodded. “I will.”

The post The Inheritance: Chapter 6 Part 1 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

This has not been the best year, and I feel that I’ve been under water for most of 2025. But this morning it occurred to me that I’ve never posted the cover for The Wild Road here, so first things first.   Cover art by Jody Lee. The Wild Road is the second book in the series; it follows Hunter’s Redoubt. I have been working on the third book, but ‘working’ means starting it over and over again. But this morning when I woke up, I had that flash of insight that meant I’d been starting from the wrong place. Again. All West novels do this. To be fair to me, much of April was taxes and house repairs and copy edits (Cast … Continue reading →

One of these things is not like the others

One of these things just isn’t the same

One of these things is not like the others

One of these things just doesn’t belong

Can you guess which one before we finish this song?

 Sitrep:

I sent MV8 off to Rea on Monday. She got it back to me yesterday, and I did the edits and then sent it off to Goodlifeguide for final formatting. There are... 5 stories? Two new original science fiction, 2 Federation stories, and 1 PRI story.

We'll see if I get it back before Memorial Day. Fingers crossed.

In other news, I've spent the past week running 8 of my old covers through SeaArt to enhance them. I am wrapping up the last one but I'm torn. I'm not sure if I should go with the enhanced original design or one of Bast.

I'll post the new covers in a later post.

Anyway, on to the snippet!

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Invasion

 

Yep, another alien invasion story. But this one has been kicking around for a while. I think it came up after seeing some of the invasion stories where humanity looses initially? Like Falling Skies and such. Of course, I have to put my own twist on things. :)

Glen Aurellius was out hunting but aware it wasn’t a good time for it. Most of the animals were active at dawn and dusk. But he had to hunt; he only had so much food on him. His backpack was filled with odds and ends to help him survive but was light on fresh food.

He really needed to stop for a while and try to smoke whatever he caught so it would last longer. Either that or trade the excess again or give it up rather than have another survivor try to rob him of it. It wasn’t worth the fight.

He heard some motion in the ferns up ahead and paused. He knelt slowly, feeling the ache in his knees from the motion, but he ignored it as he pulled his bow up and notched an arrow.

The animal that came out of the bush was a feral pig, maybe six months to a year old. It wasn’t very bright; it went for the pile of nuts and berries he’d left out as bait.

He lined up his hunting arrow and made certain he had a solid shot before he let loose. The arrow swished and hit the pig in the shoulder. It squealed in surprise and tried to run but stumbled.

He snapped another arrow up and shot the beast before it got too far. He wasn’t in the mood to chase it. That arrow hit the head though and had a point not a broad head. It didn’t have the power to penetrate the skull. It stuck out like one of those spears used to torment fighting bulls.

He didn’t think of that much as he pulled a third arrow and shot it. That caught the pig in the ass. It stumbled and then fell as its movements and the broad head arrow tore something vital within it. It finally fell gasping into the ferns and dirt.

Glen went over and used his bowie knife to slit the throat as the pig twitched. He didn’t want it to come back to life. He knew he was being stupid; you were supposed to wait until the kill was dead but he didn’t feel safe.

He watched the blood flow as he pulled his arrows and examined them. He flicked a bit of gore off one and frowned at the tip of the second arrow. The metal was okay but the arrow wood behind it had a slight crack. That’s what he got for using a point and not using composite arrows.

He shook his head and cleaned the tip on the bristle hide of the fallen beast. He was going to eat well tonight even though he wasn’t too fond of pork. Oh, bacon was fine, but ham was a bit greasy.

Still, food was food.

He put the arrows in the quiver and set it on top of his pack and the bow and then got to work. He pulled a camping rope out and tossed one end over the tree limb above. He knotted the other around a rear leg and then yanked it up. Once the pig was jacked up, he tied off the rope and gutted it.

He was working fast and dirty, there was no telling what was in the area. A bear, wolverine, big cat, or anything else. The smell of blood would attract other predators soon enough. The flies would get fierce too in the early summer heat.

He flicked a fly away and then began to portion the pig up. It was only eighty pounds or so, sixty with the offal unloaded. He left the head and some of the bones behind. He wrapped the rest in a piece of plastic and then tested it as he got up.

At forty-two he thought he could handle the pack and meat but it was not going to be a pleasant haul. He was going to need to find shelter soon as well as some firewood. Once he was somewhere dependable, he could break the meat down further.

Scavengers were welcome to the leftovers or ex-wives, whichever came first he thought in amusement.

He had been married and divorced twice. He’d been something of a JOAT, bouncing around with careers. He’d never really found his calling. His dreams of being in the military had died when he’d been injured in a football game. From there he’d moved on to a few other career paths. He had loved science fiction though, which was why he’d ended up on the west coast.

Now he was trying to make it back to the east coast to the old family farm, if it even existed. Picking his way on foot was a bitch though. There were no vehicles running; anyone stupid enough to get one going usually ended up as target practice for the bastards in orbit.

Involuntarily, he glanced to the sky. It was not quite noon; he had plenty of time to find shelter.

He heard a commotion ahead of him and instinctively paused and then turned. He wasn’t certain what it was but he didn’t want to encounter it with so much weight and his primary weapons locked down behind him. At the moment, he had his machete and knife available.

He walked around a big tree but then paused and slowly put his hands up at the sight of an alien Centaur standing there holding a rifle. A human in camo was standing next to him.

“Well, what do we have here?” the guy said. “I didn’t know we ordered take out, but I think we’ll take it to go,” the guy said.

Glen had a sinking heart. The sounds of something moving in the brush intensified. He turned his head slightly and saw another Centaur charge up and then stop. It snorted at him. It was holding a rifle in its arms casually.

“Um, hi, guys?” Glen said.

The other human snorted. “I believe lunch is served,” he said as he indicated that Glen should unload.

Glen sighed and hoped it was just a robbery.

~~~*~~~

The rollercoaster note is still in effect: this will be a scary ride, but it will arrive safely. Ada is not a pushover.

Something was wrong with Bear.

We had cut our way through the stalker tunnels. Our trail was littered with corpses, and we had just killed our fifteenth beast. It hadn’t gotten easier, not at all. I was so worn down, I could barely move. My body hurt, the ache spreading through the muscles like a disease, sapping my new strength and making me slow.

Bear stumbled again. I thought it was fatigue at first, but we had rested for a few minutes before this last fight, and it hadn’t helped at all. I had kept her from serious injury. She’d been clawed and bitten once, but the bite had been shallow, so it likely wasn’t the blood loss.

Bear whined and fell.

Oh god.

I dropped on my knees by her. “What is it?”

The shepherd looked up at me, her eyes puzzled and trusting.

I flexed, focusing on her body, concentrating all of my power on her. What was it? Blood loss, infection…

The faint outline of Bear’s body glowed with pale green, which told me nothing. I had to push deeper. I focused my power into a thin scalpel and used it to slice through the surface glow.

It resisted.

I sliced harder.

Harder!

It  broke, splintering vertically into layers, and I punched through it. It was almost like falling through the floor to a lower level.

Bear’s body lit up with pale blue, the glow tracing her nerves, her blood vessels, and her organs. I had never before been able to do that, but that didn’t matter now.

Toxin. She was filled with it. I saw it, tiny flecks glowing brighter as they coursed through her like some deadly glitter. I had to find the origin of it. Was it from a stalker bite? No, the concentration of poison wasn’t dense there. Then what was it? Where was it the highest?

Her lungs. That fucking glitter saturated her lungs, slipping into her bloodstream with every breath. I had to go deeper. I pushed with my power. Before, it was like trying to slice through glass. Now it felt like punching through solid rock, and I hammered at it.

The top layer of the blue glow cracked, revealing a slightly different shade of blue underneath. I hit it again and again, locked onto the glitter with every drop of willpower I had.

The tiny specks expanded into spheres. What the hell was that?

I pounded on the glow, trying to enlarge it. The spheres came into greater focus. They weren’t uniformly round; they had four lobes clumped together and studded with spikes.

What are you? Where did you come from?

A flash of white cut my vision. I went blind. It lasted only a moment, but I knew I hit a wall. I wasn’t going any deeper. I would have to work at this level.

I blinked, trying to reacquire my vision.

My thighs were glowing with blue.

I jerked my hands up. Pale glitter swirling through my arms and fingers. This dust, this thing was inside me too, and I couldn’t identify it.

We were both infected, and it was killing us.

Panic drenched me in icy sweat. I wanted to rip a hole in my legs and just force the glitter out.

Bear whined softly like a puppy.

I was losing her. She trusted me, she followed me, and she fought with me, and now she was dying.

“You can’t die, Bear. Hold on. Please hold on for me.”

Bear licked my hand.

The urge to scream my head off gripped me. Wailing wouldn’t help. If only I could identify the poison.

Why couldn’t I identify it? Was it because it was inside us and it had become part of us? Or was I just not strong enough to differentiate it from our blood? It had started in the lungs, so we must have inhaled it.

I took a deep breath and exhaled on my hands.

There it was! A trace of the lethal glitter. I focused on it. The four-lobes spiked clumps, swirling, swirling… Something inside me connected, and I saw a faint image in my mind. The mauve flowers. We had been poisoned by their pollen.

I flexed harder, stabbing at the pollen with my talent. The tiny flecks opened up into a layered picture in my mind, and the top layer showed how toxic it was…

Oh god.

We were almost out of time. We needed an antidote. Now.

I strained, trying to access whatever power lay inside me, the same one that showed me the Grasping Hand and gave me the stalkers’ name. It didn’t answer.

Please. Please help me.

Nothing.

We would die right here, in this tunnel. I knew it, I could picture it, me wrapped around Bear, hugging her as we both grew cold…

No. There had to be an answer. We hadn’t come all this way to lay down and die. We did not kill and fight all these damn stalkers –

The stalkers. The stalkers went to the lake to drink. The flowers were all over the shore, but the stalkers had died because the lake dragon had torn them apart. The flowers didn’t poison them.

I jumped to my feet and ran to the nearest corpse. My talent reached out and grasped the body. There was pollen on the fur and on the muzzle and a faint smudge in the lungs, but none anywhere else. Not a trace in the blood. They were immune.

The poison had to be eliminated in the bloodstream. If it was purged in the liver or any other organ, there would’ve been traces of it in the blood vessels but there were none.

I flipped the stalker on its back, shaped my sword into a knife, and stabbed the corpse, slicing it from the neck to the groin. Bloody wet innards spilled out. I dug in the mush, pushing slippery tissue aside until I found the hard sack of the heart. I carved it out and pulled the bloody clump free.

Flex.

The heart glowed with blue. Toxic. It would poison us, too, but there was a slim chance we could make it. It was the difference of might-be-dead from the stalker heart or definitely-dead from the pollen. We didn’t have hours, we had minutes. The heart had to be the answer.

I put it on a flat rock and minced the tough muscle into near mush. I scooped a handful of the bloody mess and staggered over to Bear.

She was still breathing. There was still a chance.

I pried her jaws open and shoved a clump of the stalker mince into her throat. She gulped and gagged. I held her mouth closed.

“Swallow, please swallow…”

Bear gulped again. Yes. It went down.

“What a good girl. The best girl. One more time. Let’s get a little more in there.”

I forced two more handfuls into her and flexed. The concentration of pollen in her stomach dimmed. I had no idea if the immune agent in the stalker blood would spread or if it would be broken down by stomach acid. It didn’t matter. We were all out of choices.

Bear let out a soft, weak howl, almost a gasp. It must have hurt.

“I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t hurt you if there was any other way.”

If I ate the heart now, there was no telling what it would do to me. I could pass out right here, and we would both become stalker dinner.

About twenty minutes ago we had walked by a narrow stone bridge that spanned a deep cavern. There had been a depression at the other end, a little cave within the cave. I’d thought it would be a good place to rest, because the stalkers could only come at us one by one, but I had wanted to get out of the tunnels. At the time, it seemed better to just keep moving. It seemed like forever ago, but it had just happened. We had to find a place to hide, and that was the closest safe spot I could think.

I should be able to find the bridge again. I just had to follow the trail of bodies and make it there before the poison got me.

I picked Bear up. She felt so heavy, impossibly heavy.

I spun around and trudged back the way we came.

The post The Inheritance: Chapter 5 Part 3 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

I have a weird feeling this week. It’s like I overlooked something or forgot some bill, and I keep checking to see what I missed and can’t find it. And it’s Thursday already. How? How?

Gordon’s surgery is next week. They will clean the scar tissue from his shoulder, and he will have to immediately go into physical therapy. If we miss an Inheritance installment, that’s probably why. Hopefully we will stay on track. I am going to try to get the next three posts lined up so Mod R can just click Publish and then do the hard work of moderating.

To people asking about craft projects: I haven’t been able to knit or crochet because the hands are not cooperating. Especially the wrist rotation with the hook is a no go. I haven’t been able to see a neurologist either. I can’t even get on the schedule. It is a bit frustrating. Okay, it’s very frustrating.

I need to get back to workouts. I chickened out this week because we are having a heat wave. It’s overcast today and it cooled off to 96, wooo! We were at 101F (38C) yesterday. It’s hot and humid. I think lifting weights was helping a little or maybe it’s my imagination.

Since I can’t knit or crochet, I’ve been trying to play a little bit of computer games, although I have to limit that, too. Both Planet Crafter and the Enshrouded are releasing updates: the Enshrouded one already came out, and the Planet Crafter is coming on 16 or 19th.

I have been playing the Humble expansion in Planet Crafter in preparation for the expansion. It’s a neat game where you are a convict dropped off on a barren rock of a planet, and the only way to escape is to terraform it into a garden planet.

Right now I’m breeding butterflies in different colors. The game is pretty, although Humble isn’t my favorite. I like a lot of water at my base locations, and the centrally located lake is more like a puddle.

My butterflies! My bees! Zeolite crystal mining site Cool Sinkhole. There is a cave behind the large waterfall.

The new update is supposed to let you terraform more moons in this alien solar system. I’m excite!

Finally, we have gotten a couple of puzzled comments – mostly from international readers – regarding the widespread use of dishwashers in US. About 75% of US households have them. They are convenient, and we are encouraged to purchase them because they use less water. A typical modern dishwasher will use 3-4 gallons for a load of dishes, while washing the same load by hand uses 15-27 gallons. It also saves energy, because most people wash their dishes in hot water and heating that water adds up. To that one commenter who wondered why an off-the-grid home in the Southwest would need one – their water is likely limited. They are trying to conserve their resources. A small dishwasher can ran off solar, and washing dishes is not optional.

To the person who is now vigorously typing how their handwashing never uses that much water: Having a dishwasher doesn’t make you lazy, not having one doesn’t make you a dirty planet polluter. It’s a convenient appliance. Some people have space for it, some don’t, and there is no reason to have a moral superiority battle over it.

I’m trying to figure out what to read next. LitRPG is my new military SF. I usually read outside of the genre I’m working on and I’m unlikely to ever write a strict LitRPG. I am sadly out of the Azarinth Healer. I have Bushido Online in my library for some reason. Maybe I will try that one next.

The post Life and Other Dishes first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Magic Triumphs, the final novel in the Kate Daniels main series, will be available in full dramatized audio from Graphic Audio on the 20th of May.

That’s eleven instalments (including Magic Gifts) of determination, heykittykittyness, blood, grit, immortal apple pie, and Atlanta mayhem, each one adapted with a full cast, original score, immersive sound effects, and enough snark to satisfy even Kate herself.

If you’ve never listened to a Graphic Audio adaptation before, it’s a full production, a “movie in your mind,” with actors voicing every character. Michael Glenn sacrificed vocal chords to roar like Curran. Nora Achrati basically became Kate, and adapted and directed every book with the same love we have for our favorite gal. KenYatta Rogers would get even Jim’s seal of approval. And the fights? You hear every bone crunch and magic burst.

Next Tuesday, the series will be complete, after a journey that became in 2023. Small Magics will be released with all the KD extras as well as original works like Retribution Clause, Grace of Small Magics, Of Swine and Roses on June 12th.

But wait … completed series doesn’t mean it’s OVER! Kate would never!

Exciting Announcement

The Wilmington Years series AND Blood Heir will both be getting the GA treatment, with Nora at the helm, in the first half of 2026!

Thank you to everyone who chalantly pressured fluffily suggested to GA that they continue adaptations in the Kate world and helped to make them audio cult classics.

The Horde is powerful, the Horde is mighty. The Horde, as usual, gets things done.

Until then, we’re celebrating with SIX exclusive audio clips from Magic Triumphs, more sample extravaganza than we’ve ever been able to share before!

A rude awakening:

Fear the Greeks, especially when they’re at your door in a panic:

I love him, you love him, but especially I love him, the best Dark Volhv of all:

Dum-dum-dum-DUUUUUUUMMM! The entrance, the drama, the llama!

It’s an impossible choice, but one of the best scenes of the series, I think. GO, DADDY!

Nobody likes nonconsensual dragons, dude!

Now it’s your turn: tell me which moment you’re most looking forward to from the dramatized Magic Triumphs?

The post Magic Triumphs Sample Bonanza first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

My dearest BDH,

I come to this keyboard today to write to you that we are well. It has been 8 days without a working dishwasher. It is but by the grace of the higher power that we are surviving this crisis. Hope alone sustains us through these dark times, hope that a new dishwasher shall arrive today between the hours of 01:00 PM and 05:00 PM from Wilson Appliances.

Forever yours and deep in dishes,

Ilona, Your Loving Author.

The trouble with the dishwasher started as soon as we came back from vacation. After we got home, I marinated some chicken, and ended up with a load of dishes that had a big glass marinading dish in it.

I start the dishwasher. It gets through part of the cycle. I come back to the kitchen.

DRAIN.

Okay. I have done this song and dance before. I open the dishwasher full of nasty chicken water. Ugh. I get gloves, scoop the water out, take out the filter, clean it out – it’s clean, put it back in, hit the rinse and hold cycle.

DRAIN.

Grrr. I opened the dishwasher, scoop the nasty water out for the second time, remove filter, undo the plastic doohicky that protects a little fan. Sometimes stuff gets stuck under there, preventing the fan from rotating. The fan is clear. Nothing is stuck. Rinse and hold.

DRAIN.

*$##$%%^%$%^.

At that point it was late at night and I didn’t want to wrestle with the chicken water again, so I gave up.

Morning found Gordon messing with the dishwasher. He scooped the chicken water out, checked the filter, checked the fan.

DRAIN.

Maybe there was some grease accumulated somewhere and now things are clogged. We boil water, pour it into the dishwasher. The dishwasher drains. YES! Start the rinse and hold.

DRAIN.

More boiling water.

DRAIN.

DRAIN.

We hoped to have the dishwasher repaired, but nobody works on this brand. We did have a plumber out to check is the hose had clogged.

Plumber: It seems like the motor. How old is this dishwasher?

Gordon: 27 years.

Plumber: This might have something to do with your current problem.

So we bought a new dishwasher. In other news, I have finally finished the nobody knows how old bottle of Dawn’s dishwashing liquid that had been living alone in the dark under the sink.

The house is coming up on 30 years, and so far in the last 18 months the range quit, the fridge bit the dust, and now the dishwasher died.

::eyes the dual ovens::

Between you and me, if they die, I wouldn’t mind, because they are old and the temperature control is questionable. I’m pretty sure 375 is no longer 375. But we are keeping them until they die. They have got to hold on till the mid-fall at least. The Inheritance Buys New Ovens royalties should come in then.

Our smart thermostat quit, but we fixed it and Kid 1’s microwave gave up the ghost, so that concludes the trilogy of appliance breaking. These repairs usually come in threes, so let’s hope this cluster is behind us.

Here is hoping your appliances work well and last way past the manufacturer’s suggested lifecycle.

The post Dishhhwashhher first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Graduation Day at Barack Obama High School. The day the Red Letters arrive. The day that students get a glimpse into their own future.

But a handful never get a letter, and no one knows why. One teacher comes up with an idea though: a teacher who never got a Red Letter herself, a teacher finally finds the answers to her own fate.

Called “a fresh, solid, entertaining take on time travel” by Tangent Online, “Red Letter Day” was chosen as the best short story by the readers of Analog Magazine.

“Red Letter Day“ is available for one week on this site. The ebook is available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

Red Letter Day By Kristine Kathryn Rusch  

Graduation rehearsal—middle of the afternoon on the final Monday of the final week of school. The graduating seniors at Barack Obama High School gather in the gymnasium, get the wrapped packages with their robes (ordered long ago), their mortarboards, and their blue and white tassels. The tassels attract the most attention—everyone wants to know which side of the mortarboard to wear it on, and which side to move it to.

The future hovers, less than a week away, filled with possibilities.

Possibilities about to be limited, because it’s also Red Letter Day.

I stand on the platform, near the steps, not too far from the exit. I’m wearing my best business casual skirt today and a blouse that I no longer care about. I learned to wear something I didn’t like years ago; too many kids will cry on me by the end of the day, covering the blouse with slobber and makeup and aftershave.

My heart pounds. I’m a slender woman, although I’m told I’m formidable. Coaches need to be formidable. And while I still coach the basketball teams, I no longer teach gym classes because the folks in charge decided I’d be a better counselor than gym teacher. They made that decision on my first Red Letter Day at BOHS, more than twenty years ago.

I’m the only adult in this school who truly understands how horrible Red Letter Day can be. I think it’s cruel that Red Letter Day happens at all, but I think the cruelty gets compounded by the fact that it’s held in school.

Red Letter Day should be a holiday, so that kids are at home with their parents when the letters arrive.

Or don’t arrive, as the case may be.

And the problem is that we can’t even properly prepare for Red Letter Day. We can’t read the letters ahead of time: privacy laws prevent it.

So do the strict time travel rules. One contact—only one—through an emissary, who arrives shortly before rehearsal, stashes the envelopes in the practice binders, and then disappears again. The emissary carries actual letters from the future. The letters themselves are the old-fashioned paper kind, the kind people wrote 150 years ago, but write rarely now. Only the real letters, handwritten, on special paper get through. Real letters, so that the signatures can be verified, the paper guaranteed, the envelopes certified.

Apparently, even in the future, no one wants to make a mistake.

The binders have names written across them so the letter doesn’t go to the wrong person. And the letters are supposed to be deliberately vague.

I don’t deal with the kids who get letters. Others are here for that, some professional bullshitters—at least in my opinion. For a small fee, they’ll examine the writing, the signature, and try to clear up the letter’s deliberate vagueness, make a guess at the socio-economic status of the writer, the writer’s health, or mood.

I think that part of Red Letter Day makes it all a scam. But the schools go along with it, because the counselors (read: me) are busy with the kids who get no letter at all.

And we can’t predict whose letter won’t arrive. We don’t know until the kid stops mid-stride, opens the binder, and looks up with complete and utter shock.

Either there’s a red envelope inside or there’s nothing.

And we don’t even have time to check which binder is which.

***

I had my Red Letter Day thirty-two years ago, in the chapel of Sister Mary of Mercy High School in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Sister Mary of Mercy was a small co-ed Catholic High School, closed now, but very influential in its day. The best private school in Ohio according to some polls—controversial only because of its conservative politics and its willingness to indoctrinate its students.

I never noticed the indoctrination. I played basketball so well that I already had three full-ride scholarship offers from UCLA, UNLV, and Ohio State (home of the Buckeyes!). A pro scout promised I’d be a fifth round draft choice if only I went pro straight out of high school, but I wanted an education.

“You can get an education later,” he told me. “Any good school will let you in after you’ve made your money and had your fame.”

But I was brainy. I had studied athletes who went to the Bigs straight out of high school. Often they got injured, lost their contracts and their money, and never played again. Usually they had to take some crap job to pay for their college education—if, indeed, they went to college at all, which most of them never did.

Those who survived lost most of their earnings to managers, agents, and other hangers’ on. I knew what I didn’t know. I knew I was an ignorant kid with some great ball-handling ability. I knew that I was trusting and naïve and undereducated. And I knew that life extended well beyond thirty-five, when even the most gifted female athletes lost some of their edge.

I thought a lot about my future. I wondered about life past thirty-five. My future self, I knew, would write me a letter fifteen years after thirty-five. My future self, I believed, would tell me which path to follow, what decision to make.

I thought it all boiled down to college or the pros.

I had no idea there would be—there could be—anything else.

You see, anyone who wants to—anyone who feels so inclined—can write one single letter to their former self. The letter gets delivered just before high school graduation, when most teenagers are (theoretically) adults, but still under the protection of a school.

The recommendations on writing are that the letter should be inspiring. Or it should warn that former self away from a single person, a single event, or a one single choice.

Just one.

The statistics say that most folks don’t warn. They like their lives as lived. The folks motivated to write the letters wouldn’t change much, if anything.

It’s only those who’ve made a tragic mistake—one drunken night that led to a catastrophic accident, one bad decision that cost a best friend a life, one horrible sexual encounter that led to a lifetime of heartache—who write the explicit letter.

And the explicit letter leads to alternate universes. Lives veer off in all kinds of different paths. The adult who sends the letter hopes their former self will take their advice. If the former self does take the advice, then the kid who receives the letter from an adult they will never be. The kid, if smart, will become a different adult, the adult who somehow avoided that drunken night. That new adult will write a different letter to their former self, warning about another possibility or committing bland, vague prose about a glorious future.

There’re all kinds of scientific studies about this, all manner of debate about the consequences. All types of mandates, all sorts of rules.

And all of them lead back to that moment, that heart stopping moment that I experienced in the chapel of Sister Mary of Mercy High School, all those years ago.

We weren’t practicing graduation like the kids at Barack Obama High School. I don’t recall when we practiced graduation, although I’m sure we had a practice later in the week.

At Sister Mary of Mercy High School, we spent our Red Letter Day in prayer. All the students started their school days with Mass. But on Red Letter Day, the graduating seniors had to stay for a special service, marked by requests for God’s forgiveness and exhortations about the unnaturalness of what the law required Sister Mary of Mercy to do.

Sister Mary of Mercy High School loathed Red Letter Day. In fact, Sister Mary of Mercy High School, as an offshoot of the Catholic Church, opposed time travel altogether. Back in the dark ages (in other words, decades before I was born), the Catholic Church declared time travel an abomination, antithetical to God’s will.

You know the arguments: If God had wanted us to travel through time, the devout claim, he would have given us the ability to do so. If God had wanted us to travel through time, the scientists say, he would have given us the ability to understand time travel—and oh! Look! He’s done that.

Even now, the arguments devolve from there.

But time travel has become a fact of life for the rich and the powerful and the well-connected. The creation of alternate universes scares them less than the rest of us, I guess. Or maybe the rich really don’t care—they being different from you and I, as renowned (but little read) 20th Century American author F. Scott Fitzgerald so famously said.

The rest of us—the non-different ones—realized nearly a century ago that time travel for all was a dicey proposition, but this being America, we couldn’t deny people the opportunity of time travel.

Eventually time travel for everyone became a rallying cry. The liberals wanted government to fund it, and the conservatives felt only those who could afford it would be allowed to have it.

Then something bad happened—something not quite expunged from the history books, but something not taught in schools either (or at least the schools I went to), and the federal government came up with a compromise.

Everyone would get one free opportunity for time travel—not that they could actually go back and see the crucifixion or the Battle of Gettysburg—but that they could travel back in their own lives.

The possibility for massive change was so great, however, that the time travel had to be strictly controlled. All the regulations in the world wouldn’t stop someone who stood in Freedom Hall in July of 1776 from telling the Founding Fathers what they had wrought.

So the compromise got narrower and narrower (with the subtext being that the masses couldn’t be trusted with something as powerful as the ability to travel through time), and it finally became Red Letter Day, with all its rules and regulations. You’d have the ability to touch your own life without ever really leaving it. You’d reach back into your own past and reassure yourself, or put something right.

Which still seemed unnatural to the Catholics, the Southern Baptists, the Libertarians, and the Stuck in Time League (always my favorite, because they never did seem to understand the irony of their own name). For years after the law passed, places like Sister Mary of Mercy High School tried not to comply with it. They protested. They sued. They got sued.

Eventually, when the dust settled, they still had to comply.

But they didn’t have to like it.

So they tortured all of us, the poor hopeful graduating seniors, awaiting our future, awaiting our letters, awaiting our fate.

I remember the prayers. I remember kneeling for what seemed like hours. I remember the humidity of that late spring day, and the growing heat, because the chapel (a historical building) wasn’t allowed to have anything as unnatural as air conditioning.

Martha Sue Groening passed out, followed by Warren Iverson, the star quarterback. I spent much of that morning with my forehead braced against the pew in front of me, my stomach in knots.

My whole life, I had waited for this moment.

And then, finally, it came. We went alphabetically, which stuck me in the middle, like usual. I hated being in the middle. I was tall, geeky, uncoordinated, except on the basketball court, and not very developed—important in high school. And I wasn’t formidable yet.

That came later.

Nope. Just a tall awkward girl, walking behind boys shorter than I was. Trying to be inconspicuous.

I got to the aisle, watching as my friends stepped in front of the altar, below the stairs where we knelt when we went up for the sacrament of communion.

Father Broussard handed out the binders. He was tall but not as tall as me. He was tending to fat, with most of it around his middle. He held the binders by the corner, as if the binders themselves were cursed, and he said a blessing over each and every one of us as we reached out for our futures.

We weren’t supposed to say anything, but a few of the boys muttered, “Sweet!” and some of the girls clutched their binders to their chests as if they’d received a love letter.

I got mine—cool and plastic against my fingers—and held it tightly. I didn’t open it, not near the stairs, because I knew the kids who hadn’t gotten theirs yet would watch me.

So I walked all the way to the doors, stepped into the hallway, and leaned against the wall.

Then I opened my binder.

And saw nothing.

My breath caught.

I peered back into the chapel. The rest of the kids were still in line, getting their binders. No red envelopes had landed on the carpet. No binders were tossed aside.

Nothing. I stopped three of the kids, asking them if they saw me drop anything or if they’d gotten mine.

Then Sister Mary Catherine caught my arm, and dragged me away from the steps. Her fingers pinched into the nerve above my elbow, sending a shooting pain down to my hand.

“You’re not to interrupt the others,” she said.

“But I must have dropped my letter.”

She peered at me, then let go of my arm. A look of satisfaction crossed her fat face, then she patted my cheek.

The pat was surprisingly tender.

“Then you are blessed,” she said.

I didn’t feel blessed. I was about to tell her that, when she motioned Father Broussard over.

“She received no letter,” Sister Mary Catherine said.

“God has smiled on you, my child,” he said warmly. He hadn’t noticed me before, but this time, he put his hand on my shoulder. “You must come with me to discuss your future.”

I let him lead me to his office. The other nuns—the ones without a class that hour—gathered with him. They talked to me about how God wanted me to make my own choices, how He had blessed me by giving me back my future, how He saw me as without sin.

I was shaking. I had looked forward to this day all my life—at least the life I could remember—and then this. Nothing. No future. No answers.

Nothing.

I wanted to cry, but not in front of Father Broussard. He had already segued into a discussion of the meaning of the blessing. I could serve the church. Anyone who failed to get a letter got free admission into a variety of colleges and universities, all Catholic, some well known. If I wanted to become a nun, he was certain the church could accommodate me.

“I want to play basketball, Father,” I said.

He nodded. “You can do that at any of these schools.”

“Professional basketball,” I said.

And he looked at me as if I were the spawn of Satan.

“But, my child,” he said with a less reasonable tone than before, “you have received a sign from God. He thinks you Blessed. He wants you in his service.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, my voice thick with unshed tears. “I think you made a mistake.”

Then I flounced out of his office, and off school grounds.

My mother made me go back for the last four days of class. She made me graduate. She said I would regret it if I didn’t.

I remember that much.

But the rest of the summer was a blur. I mourned my known future, worried I would make the wrong choices, and actually considered the Catholic colleges. My mother rousted me enough to get me to choose before the draft. And I did.

The University of Nevada in Las Vegas, as far from the Catholic Church as I could get.

I took my full ride, and destroyed my knee in my very first game. God’s punishment, Father Broussard said when I came home for Thanksgiving.

And God forgive me, I actually believed him.

But I didn’t transfer—and I didn’t become Job, either. I didn’t fight with God or curse God. I abandoned Him because, as I saw it, He had abandoned me.

***

Thirty-two years later, I watch the faces. Some flush. Some look terrified. Some burst into tears.

But some just look blank, as if they’ve received a great shock.

Those students are mine.

I make them stand beside me, even before I ask them what they got in their binder. I haven’t made a mistake yet, not even last year, when I didn’t pull anyone aside.

Last year, everyone got a letter. That happens every five years or so. All the students get Red Letters, and I don’t have to deal with anything.

This year, I have three. Not the most ever. The most ever was thirty, and within five years it became clear why. A stupid little war in a stupid little country no one had ever heard of. Twenty-nine of my students died within the decade. Twenty-nine.

The thirtieth was like me, someone who has not a clue why her future self failed to write her a letter.

I think about that, as I always do on Red Letter Day.

I’m the kind of person who would write a letter. I have always been that person. I believe in communication, even vague communication. I know how important it is to open that binder and see that bright red envelope.

I would never abandon my past self.

I’ve already composed drafts of my letter. In two weeks—on my fiftieth birthday—some government employee will show up at my house to set up an appointment to watch me write the letter.

I won’t be able to touch the paper, the red envelope or the special pen until I agree to be watched. When I finish, the employee will fold the letter, tuck it in the envelope and earmark it for Sister Mary of Mercy High School in Shaker Heights, Ohio, thirty-two years ago.

I have plans. I know what I’ll say.

But I still wonder why I didn’t say it to my previous self. What went wrong? What prevented me? Am I in an alternate universe already and I just don’t know it?

Of course, I’ll never be able to find out.

But I set that thought aside. The fact that I did not receive a letter means nothing. It doesn’t mean that I’m blessed by God any more than it means I’ll fail to live to fifty.

It is a trick, a legal sleight of hand, so that people like me can’t travel to the historical bright spots or even visit the highlights of their own past life.

I continue to watch faces, all the way to the bitter end. But I get no more than three. Two boys and a girl.

Carla Nelson. A tall, thin, white-haired blonde who ran cross-country and stayed away from basketball, no matter how much I begged her to join the team. We needed height and we needed athletic ability.

She has both, but she told me, she isn’t a team player. She wanted to run and run alone. She hated relying on anyone else.

Not that I blame her.

But from the devastation on her angular face, I can see that she relied on her future self. She believed she wouldn’t let herself down.

Not ever.

Over the years, I’ve watched other counselors use platitudes. I’m sure it’s nothing. Perhaps your future self felt that you’re on the right track. I’m sure you’ll be fine.

I was bitter the first time I watched the high school kids go through this ritual. I never said a word, which was probably a smart decision on my part, because I silently twisted my colleagues’ platitudes into something negative, something awful, inside my own head.

It’s something. We all know it’s something. Your future self hates you or maybe—probably—you’re dead.

I have thought all those things over the years, depending on my life. Through a checkered college career, an education degree, a marriage, two children, a divorce, one brand new grandchild. I have believed all kinds of different things.

At thirty-five, when my hopeful young self thought I’d be retiring from pro ball, I stopped being a gym teacher and became a full time counselor. A full time counselor and occasional coach.

I told myself I didn’t mind.

I even wondered what would I write if I had the chance to play in the Bigs? Stay the course? That seems to be the most common letter in those red envelopes. It might be longer than that, but it always boils down to those three words.

Stay the course.

Only I hated the course. I wonder: would I have blown my knee out in the Bigs? Would I have made the Bigs? Would I have received the kind of expensive nanosurgery that would have kept my career alive? Or would I have washed out worse than I ever had?

Dreams are tricky things.

Tricky and delicate and easily destroyed.

And now I faced three shattered dreamers, standing beside me on the edge of the podium.

“To my office,” I say to the three of them.

They’re so shell-shocked that they comply.

I try to remember what I know about the boys. Esteban Rellier and J.J. Feniman. J.J. stands for…Jason Jacob. I remembered only because the names were so very old-fashioned, and J.J. was the epitome of modern cool.

If you had to choose which students would succeed based on personality and charm, not on Red Letters and opportunity, you would choose J.J.

You would choose Esteban with a caveat. He would have to apply himself.

If you had to pick anyone in class who wouldn’t write a letter to herself, you would pick Carla. Too much of a loner. Too prickly. Too difficult. I shouldn’t have been surprised that she’s coming with me.

But I am.

Because it’s never the ones you suspect who fail to get a letter.

It’s always the ones you believe in, the ones you have hopes for.

And somehow—now—it’s my job to keep those hopes alive.

***

I am prepared for this moment. I’m not a fan of interactive technology—feeds scrolling across the eye, scans on the palm of the hand—but I use it on Red Letter Day more than any other time during the year.

As we walk down the wide hallway to the administrative offices, I learn everything the school knows about all three students which, honestly, isn’t much.

Psych evaluations—including modified IQ tests—from grade school on. Addresses. Parental income and employment. Extracurriculars. Grades. Troubles (if any reported). Detentions. Citations. Awards.

I already know a lot about J.J. already. Homecoming king, quarterback, would’ve been class president if he hadn’t turned the role down. So handsome he even has his own stalker, a girl named Lizbet Cholene, whom I’ve had to discipline twice before sending to a special psych unit for evaluation.

I have to check on Esteban. He’s above average, but only in the subjects that interest him. His IQ tested high on both the old exam and the new. He has unrealized potential, and has never really been challenged, partly because he doesn’t seem to be the academic type.

It’s Carla who is still the enigma. IQ higher than either boy’s. Grades lower. No detentions, citations, or academic awards. Only the postings in cross country—continual wins, all state three years in a row, potential offers from colleges, if she brought her grades up, which she never did. Nothing on the parents. Address in a middle-class neighborhood, smack in the center of town.

I cannot figure her out in a three-minute walk, even though I try.

I usher them into my office. It’s large and comfortable. Big desk, upholstered chairs, real plants, and a view of the track—which probably isn’t the best thing right now, at least for Carla.

I have a speech that I give. I try not to make it sound canned.

“Your binders were empty, weren’t they?” I say.

To my surprise, Carla’s lower lip quivers. I thought she’d tough it out, but the tears are close to the surface. Esteban’s nose turns red and he bows his head. Carla’s distress makes it hard for him to control his.

J.J. leans against the wall, arms folded. His handsome face is a mask. I realize then how often I’d seen that look on his face. Not quite blank—a little pleasant—but detached, far away. He braces one foot on the wall, which is going to leave a mark, but I don’t call him on that. I just let him lean.

“On my Red Letter Day,” I say, “I didn’t get a letter either.”

They look at me in surprise. Adults aren’t supposed to discuss their letters with kids. Or their lack of letters. Even if I had been able to discuss it, I wouldn’t have.

I’ve learned over the years that this moment is the crucial one, the moment when they realize that you will survive the lack of a letter.

“Do you know why?” Carla asks, her voice raspy.

I shake my head. “Believe me, I’ve wondered. I’ve made up every scenario in my head—maybe I died before it was time to write the letter—”

“But you’re older than that now, right?” J.J. asks, with something of an angry edge. “You wrote the letter this time, right?”

“I’m eligible to write the letter in two weeks,” I say. “I plan to do it.”

His cheeks redden, and for the first time, I see how vulnerable he is beneath the surface. He’s as devastated—maybe more devastated—than Carla and Esteban. Like me, J.J. believed he would get the letter he deserved—something that told him about his wonderful, successful, very rich life.

“So you could still die before you write it,” he said, and this time, I’m certain he meant the comment to hurt.

It did. But I don’t let that emotion show on my face. “I could,” I say. “But I’ve lived for thirty-two years without a letter. Thirty-two years without a clue about what my future holds. Like people used to live before time travel. Before Red Letter Day.”

I have their attention now.

“I think we’re the lucky ones,” I say, and because I’ve established that I’m part of their group, I don’t sound patronizing. I’ve given this speech for nearly two decades, and previous students have told me that this part of the speech is the most important part.

Carla’s gaze meets mine, sad, frightened and hopeful. Esteban keeps his head down. J.J.’s eyes have narrowed. I can feel his anger now, as if it’s my fault that he didn’t get a letter.

“Lucky?” he asks in the same tone that he used when he reminded me I could still die.

“Lucky,” I say. “We’re not locked into a future.”

Esteban looks up now, a frown creasing his forehead.

“Out in the gym,” I say, “some of the counselors are dealing with students who’re getting two different kinds of tough letters. The first tough one is the one that warns you not to do something on such and so date or you’ll screw up your life forever.”

“People actually get those?” Esteban asks, breathlessly.

“Every year,” I say.

“What’s the other tough letter?” Carla’s voice trembles. She speaks so softly I had to strain to hear her.

“The one that says You can do better than I did, but won’t—can’t really—explain exactly what went wrong. We’re limited to one event, and if what went wrong was a cascading series of bad choices, we can’t explain that. We just have to hope that our past selves—you guys, in other words—will make the right choices, with a warning.”

J.J.’s frowning too. “What do you mean?”

“Imagine,” I say, “instead of getting no letter, you get a letter that tells you that none of your dreams come true. The letter tells you simply that you’ll have to accept what’s coming because there’s no changing it.”

“I wouldn’t believe it,” he says.

And I agree: he wouldn’t believe it. Not at first. But those wormy little bits of doubt would burrow in and affect every single thing he does from this moment on.

“Really?” I say. “Are you the kind of person who would lie to yourself in an attempt to destroy who you are now? Trying to destroy every bit of hope that you possess?”

His flush grows deeper. Of course he isn’t. He lies to himself—we all do—but he lies to himself about how great he is, how few flaws he has. When Lizbet started following him around, I brought him into my office and asked him not to pay attention to her.

It leads her on, I say.

I don’t think it does, he says. She knows I’m not interested.

He knew he wasn’t interested. Poor Lizbet had no idea at all.

I can see her outside now, hovering in the hallway, waiting for him, wanting to know what his letter said. She’s holding her red envelope in one hand, the other lost in the pocket of her baggy skirt. She looks prettier than usual, as if she’s dressed up for this day, maybe for the inevitable party.

Every year, some idiot plans a Red Letter Day party even though the school—the culture—recommends against it. Every year, the kids who get good letters go. And the other kids beg off, or go for a short time, and lie about what they received.

Lizbet probably wants to know if he’s going to go.

I wonder what he’ll say to her.

“Maybe you wouldn’t send a letter if the truth hurt too much,” Esteban says.

And so it begins, the doubts, the fears.

“Or,” I say, “if your successes are beyond your wild imaginings. Why let yourself expect that? Everything you do might freeze you, might lead you to wonder if you’re going to screw that up.”

They’re all looking at me again.

“Believe me,” I say. “I’ve thought of every single possibility, and they’re all wrong.”

The door to my office opens and I curse silently. I want them to concentrate on what I just said, not on someone barging in on us.

I turn.

Lizbet has come in. She looks like she’s on edge, but then she’s always on edge around J.J.

“I want to talk to you, J.J.” Her voice shakes.

“Not now,” he says. “In a minute.”

“Now,” she says. I’ve never heard this tone from her. Strong and scary at the same time.

“Lizbet,” J.J. says, and it’s clear he’s tired, he’s overwhelmed, he’s had enough of this day, this event, this girl, this school—he’s not built to cope with something he considers a failure. “I’m busy.”

“You’re not going to marry me,” she says.

“Of course not,” he snaps—and that’s when I know it. Why all four of us don’t get letters, why I didn’t get a letter, even though I’m two weeks shy from my fiftieth birthday and fully intend to send something to my poor past self.

Lizbet holds her envelope in one hand, and a small plastic automatic in the other. An illegal gun, one that no one should be able to get—not a student, not an adult. No one.

“Get down!” I shout as I launch myself toward Lizbet.

She’s already firing, but not at me. At J.J. who hasn’t gotten down.

But Esteban deliberately drops and Carla—Carla’s half a step behind me, launching herself as well.

Together we tackle Lizbet, and I pry the pistol from her hands. Carla and I hold her as people come running from all directions, some adults, some kids holding letters.

Everyone gathers. We have no handcuffs, but someone finds rope. Someone else has contacted emergency services, using the emergency link that we all have, that we all should have used, that I should have used, that I probably had used in another life, in another universe, one in which I didn’t write a letter. I probably contacted emergency services and said something placating to Lizbet, and she probably shot all four of us, instead of poor J.J.

J.J., who is motionless on the floor, his blood slowly pooling around him. The football coach is trying to stop the bleeding and someone I don’t recognize is helping and there’s nothing I can do, not at the moment, they’re doing it all while we wait for emergency services.

The security guard ties up Lizbet and sets the gun on the desk and we all stare at it, and Annie Sanderson, the English teacher, says to the guard, “You’re supposed to check everyone, today of all days. That’s why we hired you.”

And the principal admonishes her, tiredly, and she shuts up. Because we know that sometimes Red Letter Day causes this, that’s why it’s held in school, to stop family annihilations and shootings of best friends and employers. Schools, we’re told, can control weaponry and violence, even though they can’t, and someone, somewhere, will use this as a reason to repeal Red Letter Day, but all those people who got good letters or letters warning them about their horrible drunken mistake will prevent any change, and everyone—the pundits, the politicians, the parents—will say that’s good.

Except J.J.’s parents, who have no idea their son had no future. When did he lose it? The day he met Lizbet? The day he didn’t listen to me about how crazy she was? A few moments ago, when he didn’t dive for the floor?

I will never know.

But I do something I would never normally do. I grab Lizbet’s envelope, and I open it.

The handwriting is spidery, shaky.

Give it up. J.J. doesn’t love you. He’ll never love you. Just walk away and pretend that he doesn’t exist. Live a better life than I have. Throw the gun away.

Throw the gun away.

She did this before, just like I thought.

And I wonder: was the letter different this time? And if it was, how different? Throw the gun away. Is that line new or old? Has she ignored this sentence before?

My brain hurts. My head hurts.

My heart hurts.

I was angry at J.J. just a few moments ago, and now he’s dead.

He’s dead and I’m not.

Carla isn’t either.

Neither is Esteban.

I touch them both and motion them close. Carla seems calmer, but Esteban is blank—shock, I think. A spray of blood covers the left side of his face and shirt.

I show them the letter, even though I’m not supposed to.

“Maybe this is why we never got our letters,” I say. “Maybe today is different than it was before. We survived, after all.”

I don’t know if they understand. I’m not sure I care if they understand.

I’m not even sure if I understand.

I sit in my office and watch the emergency services people flow in, declare J.J. dead, take Lizbet away, set the rest of us aside for interrogation. I hand someone—one of the police officers—Lizbet’s red envelope, but I don’t tell him we looked.

I have a hunch he knows we did.

The events wash past me, and I think that maybe this is my last Red Letter Day at Barack Obama High School, even if I survive the next two weeks and turn fifty.

And I find myself wondering, as I sit on my desk waiting to make my statement, whether I’ll write my own red letter after all.

What can I say that I’ll listen to? Words are so very easy to misunderstand. Or misread.

I suspect Lizbet only read the first few lines. Her brain shut off long before she got to Walk away and Throw away the gun.

Maybe she didn’t write that the first time. Or maybe she’s been writing it, hopelessly, to herself in a continual loop, lifetime after lifetime after lifetime.

I don’t know.

I’ll never know.

None of us will know.

That’s what makes Red Letter Day such a joke. Is it the letter that keeps us on the straight and narrow? Or the lack of a letter that gives us our edge?

Do I write a letter, warning myself to make sure Lizbet gets help when I meet her? Or do I tell myself to go to the draft no matter what? Will that prevent this afternoon?

I don’t know.

I’ll never know.

Maybe Father Broussard was right; maybe God designed us to be ignorant of the future. Maybe He wants us to move forward in time, unaware of what’s ahead, so that we follow our instincts, make our first, best—and only—choice.

Maybe.

Or maybe the letters mean nothing at all. Maybe all this focus on a single day and a single note from a future self is as meaningless as this year’s celebration of the Fourth of July. Just a day like any other, only we add a ceremony and call it important.

I don’t know.

I’ll never know.

Not if I live two more weeks or two more years.

Either way, J.J. will still be dead and Lizbet will be alive, and my future—whatever it is—will be the mystery it always was.

The mystery it should be.

The mystery it will always be.

 

___________________________________________

“Red Letter Day“ is available for one week on this site. The ebook is available on all retail stores, as well as here.

Red Letter Day

Copyright © 2021 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact Magazine, September, 2010
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2021 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Szefei/Dreamstime, Ingvar Bjork/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

We have some tense chapters ahead. Remember, this is not a tornado that will rip your house apart. This is a well-maintained rollercoaster that passed all of the safety inspections with flying colors. It might be scary, but you will walk away from this ride.

Thank you for the numerous offers to “pay for the story right now.” It is so gratifying.

The Inheritance will be available as an ebook pretty soon. Meanwhile, we would really appreciate you spreading the word and recommending this serial to your friends and other readers you know. Thanks again for suggesting the Royal Road a means to reach a wider audience, but unfortunately The Inheritance probably isn’t LitRPG enough to fit there.

There was no way down.

I had scanned the darkness three times. It was a bottomless pit. No route below, no ledges we could drop down to, no escape. The only path out was the same way we came. Through the passage and back into the lake dragon’s cavern.

I gave it about five minutes after the last of the noises faded, and then Bear and I snuck forward to the mouth of the tunnel. We made it just in time to see the lake dragon pull the bug’s corpse under the water. It would be busy for a while. As long as we avoided the shore, we should be safe.

I searched the perimeter of the cave, staying as far from the lake as I could. There were no other tunnels, but there was a path up, along a ledge that climbed fifty feet above the cavern floor. We took it and picked our way onto a natural stone bridge. It brought us across the cavern to a dark fissure in the opposite wall, barely three feet wide. We squeezed through it, and it spat us out into a wide tunnel.

Ahead the passageway gave way to a large natural arch, and through it I could see more ledges and passages, a warren of tunnels, some dark, some marked by bioluminescence.  Unlike the banks of the river, studded with jagged rocks, the floor of the tunnel was relatively flat, with ridges of hard stone breaking through here and there like ribs of some buried giant skeleton. Fossilized roots braided through solid rock between the stone ribs. The air smelled sour and acrid.

Next to me, Bear took a few steps to the side and sniffed something. I focused on it. Stalker poop.

“No,” I whispered and tugged the leash.

She came back and looked at me with slight disapproval. Sniffing strange poop was what dogs did, and I was clearly preventing her from fulfilling her duty.

I could see the other signs now: the faint trail leading to the fissure, more feces, stains from urine on the rocks. These tunnels were stalker hunting grounds. They came through here and took the bridge down to the water below, and because the banks of the river was hard to get to, some of them made their way to the lake to drink. The lake dragon nabbed them like a crocodile ambushing wildebeests.

This wasn’t just a cave stuffed with random monsters. This was an ecosystem. The lake dragon was an apex predator; the giant bug was probably a rank below, and the stalkers were mid-tier.  There must be prey species somewhere in these tunnels. There was certainly enough vegetation to support small herbivores.

What were the breaches? Nobody could definitively answer that question, and there was a lot of debate about whether they had been artificially made by the invaders or if our enemy somehow plucked a section of existing reality and wedged it between our worlds.

I could see the pale stains on the rocks, where stone had been bleached by generations of stalkers urinating on it. None of this environment looked new. This was an established bionetwork that developed over years, possibly centuries. All of this had to have belonged somewhere, to a different world.

This was the longest I had ever been in a breach and the furthest I had gone into one. Assault teams spent days, sometimes weeks in the breaches, but my normal MO was to get in, find the resources, and get out. I had no idea if all breaches were like this, but if they were, what would happen to this place when the anchor was destroyed? Did this environment disintegrate, or did it simply return to its place of origin?

I almost felt something, a memory or a trace of knowledge, just outside my reach. A kind of amorphous feeling, like trying to remember a dream. I nearly understood it, but it slipped from my grasp and was gone.

Officially there were thirty-two times when a breach collapsed while people were still inside. Sixty percent of those were considered fatal events – nobody made it out. In the rest of the cases, some people were jettisoned back to the point of the gate’s origin. A large percentage of those survivors showed brain damage with retrograde amnesia. Some had to relearn basic skills like writing and holding a spoon.

Sooner or later, Cold Chaos would put another assault team into this breach.  I had to get out before they shattered the anchor.

Bear growled softly.

I flexed. Four shapes were closing in on us, sneaking through the gloom. My talent grasped them, and knowledge came flooding in. The re-nah. Fast, deadly, able to regurgitate acidic bile that would burn exposed skin on contact. Pack hunters, cautious alone, brazen in large numbers. The strongest of the group would attack first, drawing attention, while the rest would flank the prey. Their hearts, on the right side, were possible to reach with a long narrow blade, but the best target was at the base of their throat, just under their chin. A small organ that functioned like a secondary motor cortex. It made them fast and helped them coordinate their movements when they swarmed, and when damaged or destroyed, it induced partial paralysis.

A memory unfurled. A clearing in a deep alien jungle, stalkers streaming from the caves in the mountain side, forming a massive horde. Eyes glowing, fangs bared, two males fighting, each trying to rip out the other’s throat…

I reached down and released Bear’s leash.

Around us the cave was perfectly silent, except for the faint sound of water dripping somewhere out of sight. The bracer on my wrist flowed into my hand, its metal familiar by now, slightly textured and comfortable, like a favorite kitchen knife I had used for years. I focused on the blade. Long, flat, an inch and a half wide. As much damage as possible in a single thrust. The organ would be hard to hit on a moving target. Still better than a heart, though.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

There were no thoughts anymore. I just stood still and waited.

Drip. Drip.

Almost there. They were crouching along the walls, measuring the distance, shifting forward, paw over paw. One large male, two smaller ones, and a female hugging the left wall.

Drip.

The large male charged. He tore out of the gloom like a cannonball, jaws gaping. There was no time to think. I just reacted. My sword slid into the soft tissue of his neck. The male crashed, its momentum carrying him forward despite his locked limbs. Somehow I dodged, and then Bear was on him. The stalker was twice her weight and almost twice her size, but his legs no longer worked. She ripped into his throat, tearing at the wound I’d made. 

The remaining males lunged, one from the left, the other from the right. The right one came high, snarling and loud, while the one on the left silently aimed for my legs. I sliced from right to left, turning as I cut. The sword caught the right stalker across the muzzle, carving a bright gash. The stalker recoiled, but I kept going, cutting as I twisted. The blade caught the stalker on the left, slicing through his flesh. There was almost no resistance. The left stalker yelped and scuttled back on three legs, its front left leg severed clean.

Bear ripped into the left stalker. The right one pivoted and charged toward her. I sprinted, slicing like my life depended on it. The right stalker’s head slid off its shoulders.

Bear and the other stalker were a clump of fur and teeth, rolling on the ground. I flexed, willing the moment to stretch out like a rubber band. It did. The frantic whirlwind of bodies slowed, and I narrowed my sword into a spike, and drove down into the base of the stalker’s neck.  It went limp.

Time snapped back. A terrible weight smashed into my back. My knees buckled. Scalding teeth sank into my right shoulder.

Pain tore through me, turning into an ice-cold rage.

I turned the sword into a dagger, bent my elbow, and stabbed the blade straight into the female stalker’s face. She dropped off me, backing away to the fissure. I chased her, blood running down my arm. She made it all the way through the gap before I caught her. She spun to face me and bared her teeth, her nose wet with blood. I bore down on her and kicked as hard as I could. My foot connected with her head. She stumbled back and slid off the stone bridge. For a moment she hung on, digging her claws into the bare rock, but her talons slipped, and she plunged into the river below.

Bear. Shit.

I spun around and sprinted back into the tunnel. The three stalker bodies lay unmoving. Bear sat in the middle. Her shoulder was bloody, and there was a long streak of red across her right side. She panted, her eyes bright, her mouth opened in a happy canine smile, like she just ran around through the surf on some beach and was now waiting for a treat.

She saw me, grabbed the smallest stalker by the paw, and tried to drag it toward me. Hi, I’m Bear and these are my dead stalker friends. Look how fancy.

I dug into my pocket, fished some jerky out, and offered it to her. She took it from my fingers, dropped it to the ground, went back to the stalker, bit it some more, came back, and ate the jerky.

“Good girl, Bear. Best girl.”

We were both bleeding, but we were still alive. Four stalkers! We took down four…

I should be dead.  And Bear should’ve been dead with me. It took the assault team a bucket of bullets to stop eight stalkers, and Bear and I killed four.  A creature the size of a Great Dane had jumped on my back, and I stayed upright. It should’ve knocked me off my feet.

It wasn’t just the weird hallucination and the unusual precision of my talent. I was changing.  Physically changing.

The thought pierced me like a jolt of high-voltage current. The hair on the back of my neck rose.

The year after the divorce had twisted me. I used to like flying.  In my head, flying was married to vacation, because flights of my childhood took me to the beach and amusement parks. Suddenly I was terrified to board a plane. The fear was so debilitating, I couldn’t even talk while boarding. I became obsessed with traffic, avoiding driving whenever I could. I developed a fixation on my health that bloomed into hypochondria.

 I ended up in therapy, where we got to the root of the problem. I had realized that Roger was truly, completely gone and if something happened to me, the kids would be alone. I was desperately trying to exert control over my environment, and when I failed, my body locked up and refused to respond. It took years to get over it, and the hypochondria was the hardest to defeat. Every time I thought I’d finally broken free, it would come back with a vengeance over some minor thing like a new mole or some weird pain in my arm.

In a way, becoming an assessor was the best thing for me. Facing death every week didn’t leave room for anxiety.  I was too busy surviving.

In this moment, it was like all those years of therapy, exercise, and rewiring my brain’s responses never happened. Was I dying?  Was that glowing thing eating at me like cancer? No doctor would be able to get it out of me. There was no treatment for whatever the fuck it was. What if I wasn’t human anymore? What if I got back to the gate and it wouldn’t let me exit back to Earth?

The grip of anxiety crushed me.  I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t move, I just stood there, desperately cataloging everything happening in my body. My breathing, my aches and pains, the strange electric prickling feeling in my fingers.  I could hear my own heartbeat.  It was fast and so loud…

A cold nose nudged my hand.

I still couldn’t move.

Bear pushed her muzzle into my fingers, bumping me. I felt her fur slide against my hand.

Bump. Bump.

I exhaled slowly. The air escaped out of me, as if it had been trapped in my lungs. I swallowed, crouched, and hugged Bear. Gradually the sound of my heart receded.

Yes, I was changing. No, I had no control over it and I didn’t know what I would become at the end of this process. But I was getting stronger. There were four stalker corpses on this cave floor. I made that happen.

I petted Bear, straightened, walked over to the nearest furry body, and flexed. One hundred and fifty-seven pounds. I grabbed the stalker by the front paws and lifted it off the ground. My shoulder whined in protest.  I clenched my teeth against the pain.

I was holding one hundred and fifty-seven pounds of dead weight. It wasn’t resting on my back, no, I was holding it in front of me.

I wonder…

I spun around and threw the corpse. The stalker flew and landed on the cave floor. My shoulder screeched, and I grabbed at it. Okay, not the brightest moment.

The stalker corpse lay 10 feet away. I threw one hundred and fifty-seven pounds across ten feet. Two weeks ago, I’d used a forty-five-pound plate for some overhead squats at the DDC gym, because someone was hogging the Smith machine, and I had a hard time holding it steady for 10 reps.

“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Bear.”

Bear looked at me, padded over to the corpse I threw, and bit it.

“No worries.  It’s dead.  You are the best girl, Bear, you know that?”

Somewhere in the tangle of the tunnels a creature howled. We couldn’t stay here.  We had to keep moving.

I pulled the antibacterial gel out, slathered some on my bleeding shoulder, popped 4 Motrins, and turned to Bear.

“Okay, girl, let’s treat your battle wounds.”

The post The Inheritance: Chapter 5 Part 2 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Please to be joining my peer network.

Hokay, peering.

I am the slightly alarmed peer.

Hey, alarmed is my gig!

I never really liked peers. I’m more of an apples guy.

Just Announced: Leviathan by Robert McCammon (Limited Edition) Leviathan by Robert McCammon
Signed, Numbered, and Slipcased Limited Edition
Includes cover and interior artwork by Vincent Chong
Just Announced and Selling Very Quickly!

Lividian Publications is proud to be publishing a deluxe signed, numbered, and slipcased Limited Edition hardcover of Leviathan by Robert McCammon, the final volume in his acclaimed Matthew Corbett series. This deluxe special edition tips the scales at more than 500 pages and has been lavishly crafted with collectors and readers alike in mind. Vincent Chong provided stunning color artwork for the dust jacket along with a full-color frontispiece and exclusive black and white illustrations for the interior!

We’re expecting heavy demand for this one, so please place your order ASAP if you want a copy for your collection!

Don’t forget that our books are also carried by some of our favorite small presses and retailers:

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Ziesings

Note: commercial airlines fly at 30,000 feet. Private jets fly higher, with the midsize jets specifically flying at 41,000-45,000 feet.

The plane shuddered as it hit an air pothole. Elias put his hand on the maps spread out in front of him on the table to keep them from sliding off. Across from him, Leo sat very still, his eyes unblinking. His XO didn’t like planes. It wasn’t the flying; it was the lack of control. And if he mentioned it, Leo would just feel more self-conscious and withdraw deeper. Comfort and logic didn’t work for times like these, but distraction did wonders.

Elias turned his attention back to the maps. The sooner he sorted through his thoughts, the faster he could put Leo’s sharp mind to analyzing the Elmwood disaster instead of focusing on being stuck in a metal tube hurtling through the atmosphere 40,000 feet above the ground.

Gate dives had stages. Of all of them, the Assault phase was the main and most important. Humanity entered the gates to destroy the anchor and collapse the breach. Everything else was secondary to this goal, no matter how much some people wanted to twist it. Yes, mining paid the bills, but the focus of the mission was to keep the invasion at bay.

Like many others, Elias felt the anchor the moment he stepped through the gate. It tugged on him, a knot of energy, a distant nexus of power that demanded attention. The stronger you were, the more it pulled on you. Not every gate diver sensed it, and the majority of those who did barely felt it. To them it was a spark, a firefly winking somewhere in the distance. To Elias, it was inescapable, like an evil sun. It called to him, and he hunted it down until he cut through its defenders, forced his way into the anchor chamber, and shattered it.

The trick wasn’t just carving a bloody path to the anchor. The real challenge was to destroy the breach and come out alive. Successful gate dives required preparation. It began with the DDC, who measured the energy emissions of a gate, graded its threat level, and assigned a DeBRA and a guild.

Once Cold Chaos received the assignment, the gate became their problem. An assault team, a mining crew, and an escort was determined, and a gate coordinator was chosen to handle the logistics and keep everything running smoothly.

The assault team deployed to the gate and began the first official phase, the Survey. They progressed carefully into the breach and identified the most likely route to the anchor and promising mining areas. They cleared the mining sites, mapped as much of the immediate environment around them and the gate as was feasible, and came back out.

The next stage was called R&R: Rest and Regroup. Each breach was unique. Open air biomes required larger groups. Cave biomes called for a smaller force with higher individual firepower. Some people didn’t do well in dark enclosed spaces. Others couldn’t swim or had trouble with heights. The assault team reshuffled its roster based on their findings. They reviewed their survey with the escort captain, the mining foreman, and the DeBRA, and then they rested for 24 hours.

After the R&R, the Assault stage finally began. The assault team went back into the breach, swept the mining site one more time, sent a scout back to give the mining team an all-clear, and pressed on toward the anchor. An hour after they entered, the mining crew, the DeBRA, and the escort walked into the breach, made their way to the mining site, and began stripping. A rich site would mean a steady flow of carts filled with resources out of the gate.

If everything went according to plan, the assault team would reach the anchor and destroy it. Without the energy of the anchor, the breach would begin to degrade. The assault team would have to haul ass to the gate, usually sending a scout ahead to warn the mining team to wrap up operations. The breach typically collapsed within 12-36 hours.

That wasn’t what happened in Elmwood. 

Radio communications did not work in the breaches, so every assault team carried a “cheesecake,” a beeper stone. Beeper stones occurred in the steppe and mountain biomes and had a core of denser material running through them. When shocked with electricity, they glowed and vibrated. If you broke a piece off and then shocked the core of the main stone, the broken-off piece would also light up and vibrate. Distance didn’t seem to matter. As long as both fragments were in the same breach, shocking the core would activate the other chunk. The first gate diver who discovered this effect compared it to the Cheesecake Factory’s restaurant pager and the name stuck.

The moment the cheesecake was activated, the assault team would know that a fatal event occurred, and they were being recalled. It was the breach equivalent of an SOS. They would turn around and head back for the gate.

The mining crew died less than an hour after entering the gate. As soon as London and the rest made it out, the gate coordinator went into the breach with the core stone, shocked it, and then returned to shock the core stone every half hour for three hours. The assault team was barely two hours into their trek to the anchor. They never came out. It meant only one thing: everyone was dead.

Elias peered at the mining site map. Compasses didn’t work in the breaches, so traditional directions didn’t exist. Instead, the moment you entered, you faced north and the gate behind you was always due south. It was obviously simplified but it worked, and all breach maps followed this principle.

The cave biomes were Elias’ least favorite, and this one was a fucking maze. A tangle of tunnels, passages, and chambers, resulting from eons of erosion as water shaved and carved the stone.

Some people theorized that the breaches were artificial, generated environments, constructed specifically to invade Earth. He never believed in the artificial breach theory. It was bullshit. He’d gone into too many breaches and seen too much. The complexity of the bio systems they encountered was incredible, far too intricate for any artificial construct. No, the breaches were chunks of some other world, maybe worlds, complete with their inhabitants and their own weird rules of survival. And this breach was a perfect example of that. It was old and filled with valuable deposits and extremely dangerous hostiles.

On the surface, Malcolm, the leader of the assault team, had followed the Cold Chaos protocol. The assault team surveyed, they R&R’d, they reentered and swept the mining site for the second time, then started toward the anchor. But the more Elias looked into what actually happened, the wonkier it appeared.

The map in front of him showed Malcolm’s chosen anchor route, which ran almost straight north into the breach. The mining site lay off to the east, roughly a mile from the gate, at the end of a branching tunnel. It was a massive cavern with a stream running north to south. The map showed an entrance in the lower left, through which the mining crew accessed the site, and three tunnels in the north, at the top of the map. The assault team had mapped the tunnels up to half a mile, revealing a tangle of passageways, pits, chambers, and tunnels, half of them carrying running water.

Map of the Mining Site

Click to enlarge

Determining a good mining area was more art than science. The Cold Chaos guidelines for cave biomes dictated that only the larger caverns could be designated as mining sites. The guild lost too many people in tunnel collapses. The mining site had to be safe and defendable, it couldn’t be too far from the gate, and it had to have a good mix of promising minerals identifiable by sight and an abundance of vegetation in case the minerals turned out to be trash. The weirder the site looked, the more promising it would be.

Things would have been so much simpler if they could hire their own assessors, Elias reflected. As it was, they were forced to play the guessing game. That’s why most assault teams identified at least 3 sites.

Malcolm had only picked one.

Elias examined the top edge of the cavern one more time.

Nothing in this world was free. They were never going to go into a breach with fluffy bunnies and rare, priceless resources. The unspoken rule was, the more valuable the find, the harder it would be to extract. Malcolm knew this. He wasn’t sloppy, he wasn’t careless, and yet here they were.

Elias looked at Leo. His XO leaned forward slightly.

“You are Malcolm,” Elias said.

Leo nodded.

Most people assumed that the tank was always the leader. Something about a warrior putting themselves in the path of a threat and soaking up damage while shielding others naturally lent itself to the leader role in people’s imagination. In reality, tanks were almost always too focused on combat to be effective leaders. They were the tip of the spear, and they usually had their hands full.

His own Talent, the Blade Warden, straddled the line between a tank and a damage dealer. He could play either role. On paper, he paid for this versatility with reduced effectiveness. A pure tank Talent, like Sentinel or Protector, of the same power level, could take more damage than Elias. A pure damage dealer, a Pulsecarver or a Stormsurge like Leo, would wreck more havoc. But in the breach, the value of his versatility skyrocketed. He had led teams while tanking – he would do it again in Elmwood – but given a choice, he preferred to go in with a dedicated tank.

Most team leaders were either midfielders or ranged fighters. The ability to survey the terrain was paramount.

Malcolm was an Interceptor, a maneuverable, fast damage dealer. He positioned himself behind the tank, which allowed him to rapidly respond to the changing battlefield. He fought with a spear, could summon plasma javelins, which he hurled at incoming threats, and could teleport about twenty yards once every hour or so.

The man had an uncanny situational awareness. He was slightly precognizant, anticipating the enemy’s actions as well as his team’s. He could predict how and where an opponent would attack and how his people were likely to respond to it. He sensed when someone would need assistance, and he was always where he was needed the most. His only flaw as a team leader was that occasionally he made impulsive decisions. Nine times out of ten, he reacted as expected but once in a while he would roll the dice. To his credit, he was good enough to compensate when his gamble didn’t pay off, but he’d come close to disaster a couple of times.

Elias tapped the map of the mining site. “You find this site. You sweep it. It’s clean. Your next move?”

“I set up aetherium charges in these three tunnels and detonate.”

Exactly. “Why?”

Leo swept his fingers across the three passages veering and branching off, some paths spiraling, others ending abruptly.

“It’s a mess. Everything is connected. The only way to secure the mining site is to prevent access completely. One way in, one way out.”

“Agreed. Malcolm would have known that.”

“Yes.”

The two of them peered at the map. This was basic shit, and yet Malcolm left the tunnels as they were.

“Why?” Elias murmured.

“I don’t know.”

“What’s your best guess?”

Leo considered the map. “Perhaps he was unsure whether he picked the right path to the anchor and thought he might have to double back and take one of the tunnels instead.”

“Yes, but with the firepower in that team and the mining crew’s equipment, he could easily reopen one of the entrances after collapsing it. Why gamble with the miners’ lives?”

Leo shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Next question: why only one mining site? The protocol suggests at least three. Why this one?”

Leo thought about it. “You think he found something in that cave? Something he had to have?”

“That’s the only thing that would make sense.”

In Malcolm’s place, Elias would have spent another three days on a survey and then doubled back and collapsed those tunnels. Then and only then would it have been safe to bring in the miners. Yes, there would be red tape, and they would have to explain to the DDC why they took their time, but in the end, lives wouldn’t be lost. Instead, Malcolm charged in, pushing the mining crew to the site as soon as the guild regulations allowed.

Leo eyes flashed white. The moment he was left to his own devices, he would take a deep dive into Malcolm’s life. Leo took mysteries as a personal challenge,

Elias leaned back. “Let’s say Malcolm glitched out for some reason. He gets impulsive once in a while, but London doesn’t.”

Leo nodded. “London is careful and risk averse.”

Risk averse. Interesting way to put it. Elias would have to remember that.

The XO frowned. “When the team came out with the survey, London would’ve had to sign off on it. He is the escort captain.”

“Exactly. Did you ask him about it?”

“No. It didn’t occur to me.” A hint of frustration showed on Leo’s face. He was his own worst critic. “I should have. It seems obvious in hindsight.’

The intercom came to life. “We’re beginning our descent into Dallas.”

“Don’t worry too much about it,” Elias said. “London isn’t going anywhere. In a few hours we will ask him about that. And a lot more.”

Leo nodded and buckled his seat belt.

The post The Inheritance: Chapter 5, Part 1 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

In reply to Kevin.

There’s no such thing as a Primal sigl that increases your essentia count. There are ones that let you store personal essentia, which lets you simulate a higher essentia capacity, but you don’t get something for nothing – you have to pay that essentia in first (and it’ll de-attune quickly unless you do something to stop it). Also, if your plan is to use multiple sigls at once, you have to actually have enough channelling skill to make effective use of them, which a lot of people don’t.

In reply to Benedict.

Ah I should have clarified better!

I meant could you activate a strong enough Primal sigl to increase your essentia count, so you could activate three more. Thus using four activated sigls at once.

But I am guessing from your answer that is not feasible for most Drucrafters unless in cases where you have 2.8 or above Essentia Capacity where that is practical.

In reply to Kevin.

You can use as many sigls as you want – you can use ten if you like – but unless you’ve got a superhuman essentia capacity, you’re only going to have enough essentia to actually activate 2.5 to 3 of them at once, same as anyone else.

Very informative as always, with this info it makes me wonder if Tobias and Helen are using Essentia Capacity prejudice as an excuse for why they are not the heirs.

On the topic of Essentia Capacity, and since I love loophole abuses is it possible to use four sigls at once with one of them being a Primal sigl increasing essentia to “trick the body” as it were into thinking it can use three sigls?

Happy Spring! It’s nearly time for the release of WE COULD BE MAGIC, my new swoony YA graphic novel, and I have goodies to share!

There is a preorder campaign going on now for readers in the US and Canada. Preorder your copy and upload your receipt to receive these special items below:

• An adorable scrunchie set inspired by the book

• An exclusive digital sneak peek of THE HOUSE SAPHIR (my next fairy tale retelling, coming out this fall!)

A swoon-worthy young adult graphic novel about a girl’s summer job at a theme park from #1 New York Times bestselling author Marissa Meyer.

When Tabitha Laurie was growing up, a visit to Sommerland saved her belief in true love, even as her parents’ marriage was falling apart. Now she’s landed her dream job at the theme park’s prestigious summer program, where she can make magical memories for other kids, guests, and superfans just like her. All she has to do is audition for one of the coveted princess roles, and soon her dreams will come true.

There’s just one problem. The heroes and heroines at Sommerland are all, well… thin. And no matter how much Tabi lives for the magic, she simply doesn’t fit the park’s idea of a princess.

Given a not-so-regal position at a nacho food stand instead, Tabi is going to need the support of new friends, a new crush, and a whole lot of magic if she’s going to devise her own happily ever after. . . without getting herself fired in the process.

With art by Joelle Murray, the wonder of Sommerland comes to life with charming characters and whimsical backdrops. We Could Be Magic is a perfect read for anyone looking to get swept away by a sparkly summer romance.

How to get your swag:

• Preorder your copy via my Bookshop.org store (or wherever you normally purchase your books).
• Submit your receipt here. US/Canada only. See link for full details.

I’m going on tour and hope to see you!

See the special tour linktree for individual event details and ticketing.

The House Saphir

I know many of you are anxiously awaiting THE HOUSE SAPHIR. Not only is there an exclusive sneak peek coming for those who preorder WE COULD BE MAGIC, but other giveaways are coming, including a romance inspired one over on Instagram, so make sure you follow me to get the latest.

THE HOUSE SAPHIR comes out November 4, but you can add it to Goodreads now and preorder your copy from my store at Bookshop.org (or wherever you get your books). Don’t forget to keep those receipts *hint, hint*.

Until next time, happy reading and I hope to see you soon on the WE COULD BE MAGIC tour!

With love,

Marissa

The post We Could Be Magic Tour, Preorder Goodies, and Upcoming Giveaways! first appeared on Marissa Meyer.