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I’m absolutely giddy over finally getting to show off the beautiful covers for the 9th Dragon King book, DRAGON MARKED, designed by the brilliant Hang Le! It will be out in the world April 15th. I would sell my dragon soul to possess her… From the moment I saw her, she held me enthralled. It...

The post Cover Reveal- Dragon Marked appeared first on Donna Grant.

We’ve been getting a lot of questions in the comments and emails of Hughday snippets, and since not everyone reads the replies, here they are in one convenient place.

Hugh 2– when does it happen?

The action picks up right after Iron and Magic (three weeks later according to chapter 1).

As the notice in front of Iron and Magic says, the entire Hugh series happens before Magic Triumphs. That has not changed.

The chronological order is: Hugh series (all installments) – Magic Triumphs- Sanctuary- Wilmington Years (all installments)- Blood Heir series.

How long will Hugh’s series be?

Currently, House Andrews are thinking of it as a duology, but since the manuscript of volume 2 is being written as we speak, things may change.

Does Hugh 2 have a title?

Not yet. We’ve been calling it Hugh 2, Iron Covenant 2, Iron & Magic 2, Elara’s book, the d’Ambray Bake Off – at the moment, whatever you recognize works.

Will Steve West narrate the audiobook?

The manuscript for Hugh 2 has not yet been finished. That means there is no known exact date when it will be ready for publication, how many pages it will have etc. Which in turn means we cannot yet go to the very busy Steve West and ask whether he is free to take on the project, this is how long it would take, this is when it’s needed by, and all the other necessary details.

What I can guarantee is that House Andrews, the agency and everyone involved believe as much as we do that Steve West is perfect for the role of Hugh and no effort will be spared to book him if that is at all possible.

Will it be a blog serial?

I think House Andrews will be generous with snippets up to a point, but not a traditional serial that shares most of the book in regular installments, as updated this past Friday.

Yes, admin, very interesting, very interesting, I’m not snoring at all. What about spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler?

No one knows about spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler yet in Hugh 2.

Stop mentioning spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler in the comments and spoiling spoiling spoiling spoiling fellow Horde colleagues who want to follow the natural course of the story.

Your comment will be hidden asap, but it might be too late. W*it for questions to be answered by the book and PUT DOWN THAT SPOILER, you Dushegubs!

That’s a good point, what about Blood Heir and put down that cow?

Blood Heir is currently the furthest in time KD World has ever gotten, and it’s roughly a decade after Hugh 2. Whatever bovine developments took place will require our p*tience.

The story was published somewhat out of schedule, because of the pandemic, and the similarities between what we were going through and what Julie was called to do. Like us, she couldn’t go home and see loved ones, or risk losing them. House Andrews wrote it and shared it with us in weekly chapters, as another loving hug in hard times, and I am very grateful it came when it did, even if it jumped the publication queue.

It will be followed by Blood Heir 2, which will be a sequel.

Let me clarify that: Blood Heir 2 will not be the story of Derek’s missing years and Julie’s time with Erra. That rumor started around the fire pits of my people, the proud pioneers of Team Facts be Damned. Love you guys, but no.

What House Andrews said was that it will explain what happened to Derek, but it will take place after Blood Heir 1. That’s why we need Wilmington 3 to come first, so we can fully understand some of the developments in Atlanta. ::cough Pack cough cough:: Oh dear, I really must have that seen to.

Yes, what about Wilmington Years?

The Wilmington Years series, in its entirety, happens between Magic Triumphs and the Blood Heir series.

There is a Wilmington 3 in plan, but not in progress. We have been given a tiny snippet from it here.

Currently, though, IA are working on Hugh 2. As much as we want all these books at once, and that once better be right now, and actually with Maud’s Innkeeper wedding on top, and you know Puffles … – we must attain fluffy awareness that they each take time and effort to be written.

What about Sanctuary 2?

Not on the schedule right now.

Where can I find any extras to tide me over?

All of them can be found on the Free Fiction page, organized by series.

For Kate’s World, they are :
A Questionable Client – prequel to the main Kate series
A bit more Roman – prequel scene to Sanctuary
Purpose, No Heroes – Wilmington Years extras
King of Fire– prequel to Blood Heir
Sandra – Kate’s POV during Blood Heir
Damian Angevin– the Order’s report of the events from the main series

And the fun fan service fiction of Kate and Curran texts, Luther and Roman’s Frinnterviews, Don’t Mess with Fate (Hugh and Roman).

I have a very important final Hugh question. Very very adminy, you have to answer. Don’t think too hard though, first thing that comes into your head, just tell us. Does Puffles fly home?

Nice try.

The post Hugh’s Question Corner first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Polish publisher Vesper has revealed the cover for Godzina Wilka, their upcoming translation of The Wolf’s Hour, to be published in April 2025! The art is by Maciej Kamuda, and the translation is by Janusz Skowron.

The book has not been added to the Vesper website yet, but details can be found here.

 Yep.

 

 

 About:

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The Federation is finally ticking along as things start to come together. The Tauren war is over in the west, the Federation is growing steadily, and the economy is bright. There are dark clouds on the horizon however. The Spirits have returned with dire warnings of an ancient evil alliance brewing in the northern sectors.

Admiral Irons has his hands full with politics and the pirate war in Sigma Sector. They finally have a lead on the pirate capital, the battle moon known as Atlas XIV or El Dorado. Fleets and the Cadre are on the move to Sigma in preparation of the final assault there.

Pirate Empress Catherine the Great has been scheming and readying her titanic ship to flee to a new hiding spot. It is now a race to see if she can get away before the fleet finds her. But Admiral Irons is first and foremost an engineer. Engineers have a motto, when in doubt, use a bigger hammer. Well, Admiral Irons is the premier engineer and if he is good at anything it is that he is an expert on Lowering the Hammer.

Amazon:  Amazon

B&N: B&N

Crime reporter Atkins discovered Scrawny Pete at the scene of a murder-suicide. The hard-bitten reporter took to the cat, and the cat took to him.

Together they travel through the city on the police beat—until the day they come across another crime, one that Scrawny Pete understands.

“Scrawny Pete” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

Scrawny Pete By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

He found Scrawny Pete, flea-bitten, hair coming out in patches, and eyes like a baby’s, in a fifth floor walk-up, crouched beside two dead bodies. The cat wouldn’t come to anyone but him, and in a moment of weakness, he took the damn thing. The vet’d cleaned him up, put antibiotics on the scabs, gave Atkins some salve and some special food and sent him on his way.

A cat owner.

And not just any cat. Scrawny Pete was on his way to becoming a legend.

The dead bodies had been part of a domestic. Typical, in its way. Murder-suicide. Always seemed that the man shot the woman and ate the gun. Fifteen years on the crime beat for whichever daily tabloid paid him enough to write his five hundred words of wisdom showed him that there was nothing in the human existence that someone didn’t try to solve with a gun. In the mouth, out of the mouth, in the heart, in the stomach, it didn’t matter. In America, someone whipped out a gun and entire lives ended. A flash, an instant, leaving more heartbreak than any newspaper could cover.

As if it wanted to. Whoever said, “All happy families are alike, but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own ways,” had been more right than Atkins wanted to imagine.

The problem with Scrawny Pete, as Atkins soon learned, was that the damn cat was terrified of being alone. Surprisingly, loud noises didn’t bother him, and neither did the smell of blood, but his own company in the quiet of Atkins’s apartment drove the cat absolutely crazy. Atkins tried leaving the television on, and bringing home a kitten, but Scrawny Pete was intelligent enough to know that a TV wasn’t company, and he didn’t tolerate any furry companions in his fancy abode.

Somehow the damn cat talked Atkins into taking him everywhere. Atkins started wearing a great coat with a large pocket that Scrawny Pete—who was smaller than most six-month-old kittens—took to riding in. Atkins found that Pete could be smuggled anywhere, restaurants, hotels, even doctor’s offices. And once he started writing about Pete in his column, well, he didn’t have to smuggle the cat anywhere any more.

It was June 21st, one year to the day after he’d gotten Scrawny Pete, that he found himself taking an old Otis to the top floor of a scrungy apartment building on the lower East Side. The cops were already on the scene. Some rookie was standing outside the main door, arms crossed, unwilling to let in any comers even with press badges until he saw Scrawny Pete. Atkins mumbled as the Otis’s doors slid open on the fourteenth floor that if he’d known a cat was worth more than a press badge he’d’ve gotten the cat years ago.

Scrawny Pete had no answer. If anything, the cat seemed tenser than usual.

Pete was always unnaturally tense. Atkins attributed it to the poor critter’s upbringing by such obviously happy folk. He could only imagine how awful it had been. The walk-up hadn’t had any cat food. The only sign that a cat had even lived there were the claw marks on the living room sofa. Obviously the happy couple had let Scrawny Pete fend for his dinner in the hall with the other stray cats, and had let him the bulk of his life outside—which had probably been good for Scrawny Pete or he might have been the first to taste the gun, long before hubby decided the family needed a vacation in Never-Never-Land.

But in this hallway, which smelled of grease and garlic and Asian cooking, overlaid with filth and a bit of despair, Pete’s naturally tense body became a hard little wire. Atkins put a hand on Pete’s back, like he used to do when they first started traveling together, before he realized that nothing—not honking horns, not screaming people, not the breeze from a passing train—could spook Pete enough to make him leave the pocket. Pete’s security was Atkins, and that cat wasn’t ever going to let go.

Apartment 14A had a crooked metal sign and an open presswood door, the outside of which had once seen the backside of someone’s foot. The breaks in the wood weren’t new and they weren’t clean, and all they left was a thin layer of really cheap oak covering between the inhabitants—or former inhabitants as the case might be—and the rest of the world.

Atkins pushed his way inside, felt Pete turn into a statue against his side and start making little huffing noises. Two detectives stood inside, both in plainclothes, cheap off-the-rack suits that had seen better days. The ME stood over the bodies with the department’s camera, preserving the scene for posterity, although it was obvious what had happened.

Husband shot the wife before eating the gun. The air still had an acrid whiff from the double discharge. Atkins was surprised he could smell it over the stench of blood and voided bowels.

The detectives recognized him, showed him where to stand so that he wouldn’t violate the scene. Pete was still huffing, his fur rising on his back. Strange behavior. Stranger way still to spend their one-year anniversary.

Atkins stared at the couple. Young, by the looks of their hands. Poor, by the looks of the apartment. But not that poor, by the looks of their stuff. In fact, a bit upscale for a neighborhood like this.

“Slumming, Atkins?” one of the detectives asked.

“Heard the call,” he said, hand still on Pete. “What is it about this day, hm? It’s not Christmas. Not nothing at all. What makes people go off on this day?”

“What?” the detective said. “There been other calls today?”

Atkins shook his head. “A year ago today, I got Pete at a place just like this one. In fact…” His voice trailed off. He shuddered, something he hadn’t done at a crime scene in more than a decade.

“What?” the detective asked, but Atkins ignored him. Instead he crouched, put his hands up to his face as if he were forming a camera, and looked through the frame.

“Do bodies always fall like that in a murder-suicide?” he asked.

“Like what?” the detective asked.

“Side by side, twinned up like they’re in bed next to each other, only they’re on the floor.”

“Naw.” The answer came from the ME. He’d taken the last shot. “Usually, they are in bed. It’s only a few who do it in the middle of the living room. I think they had some kind of argument, he grabs the gun, waves it in her face, she thinks he ain’t gonna do nothing, maybe even dares him, he shoots, realizes what he’s done, then shoots himself.”

Sounded plausible.

Pete was making little sounds of distress. Atkins put his hand back in his pocket. Pete was shivering. In the whole past year, in all the strange situations, he’d never once felt Pete shiver. Not even in the middle of winter.

“Never figured you for one of them animal lovers who took his friggin pet everywhere,” the other detective said.

Atkins shrugged, pretended an indifference he didn’t really feel. “It gets readers.”

“Sure does,” the first detective said. “The wife reads your column now like you’re writing the adventures of Scrawny Pete. You should mention him every day.”

“Yeah,” Atkins said. “He sure has a place in a story like this one.”

“I don’t see no story here,” the ME said. “Sad to tell, but who really cares when some guy takes out himself and his wife. ‘Cept the friends and family, of course.”

Atkins looked at him. The ME was a skinny redhead with premature aging lines from frowning instead of too much sunlight. “No kids?” he asked.

“Not a one.”

“How common is that?”

The ME shrugged. “I’m not a walking book of statistics.”

“I mean, isn’t it usually long-marrieds, or newly separateds, or bad divorces who resort to this?”

“Can’t say.” The ME looked over his shoulder. But one of the detectives frowned.

“Where you going with this, Atkins?”

“Nowhere,” he said. “Just seems strange to me. The couple that I got Pete from, they were in this position, no kids, dead in the living room in a fifth floor walk-up not a lotta different from this.”

“The world’s weird, Atkins,” one of the detectives said. “Who’d’ve figured? It’s like you and that crazy cat.”

“Yeah,” Atkins said softly, not taking his hand off Pete. “Who’d’ve figured.”

***

It didn’t stop him from checking anyway. Superstition was sometimes a reporter’s best friend. He and Pete spent the afternoon digging through records, and what he found chilled him. The past five years, there’d been a murder-suicide on the same date. Same day, same pose, different precincts. No one recognized the scene. And because it was looked like a murder/suicide, no one did more than a cursory investigation. Did he shoot her? Yeah. Did he shoot himself? Yeah. End of story.

But not really.

Atkins called the detective in charge of the latest one, told him what he’d learned, and didn’t explain how he got his hunch, except to say that he remembered the anniversary of getting Pete.

Pete was still freaked. Atkins had learned, in the year he’d had Pete, that cats had memories, emotional memories, like people. The apartment drove him crazy; whenever one of the neighbors got to shouting, Pete dove under the couch. He sat in the corner like a terrified rabbit when Atkins wasn’t home, not moving at all, defecating and urinating in the spot where Atkins left him in the morning. He’d done that for a week before Atkins, who knew that Pete understood a litter box, tried taking Pete to work.

The rest, of course, was history.

The detective didn’t call back for two days. By then, Atkins was three columns away from the scene. He remembered it, of course. That night, Pete had slept like a baby in his arms, something he wouldn’t admit to anyone, barely admitted to himself, and the cat seemed spookier than usual. But life marched on and Atkins with it, turning in his five hundred words, crime beat, the most popular column in the city with or without mention of Scrawny Pete.

“Atkins,” the detective said.

“Yeah?”

“You got a story here. Want it? We wouldn’ta got it without you.”

Reporters lived for calls like that. Atkins was no different, even after fifteen years. He went to the precinct, which was gray and dirty and smelled like ancient coffee, just like every other precinct in the city, and listened as the detective explained, in excruciating detail, how they went over the crime scene, how they found things that didn’t exactly fit: a shoe mark in blood that didn’t belong to any of the cops; a handprint on the coffee table; fibers in the wounds that had nothing to do with either deceased.

The detective didn’t apologize. He knew that Atkins was a pro, Atkins understood how overworked they all were, how they liked to close cases, especially easy ones, like a murder/suicide, how hard sometimes serial killings were to see.

Luckily, or so the detective said, this one was easily solved. A neighbor—one Tobias Craig—heard the fighting, complained, complained again, finally decided to take matters into his own hands. Apparently he snapped every June 21st. Left a visible trail once they knew what to look for. Every apartment super with the June 21 murders remembered the guy complaining about the noise.

The cops had interviewed him at every scene and he’d always been the one who said the expected litany: It don’t surprise me, officers. They were fighting all the time.

Atkins knew better than to ask for a why, but he got it anyway: Apparently Craig’s name was all over the system, not as a criminal, but as a victim. Parents dead of a murder/suicide—a confirmed one—that happened in front of the children on June 21st, 1979. He’d been six at the time.

Atkins found the clippings, saw the blood-spattered children being led out of the apartment. In his imagination watched them watching their father pull out the gun like the ME had said, pull the trigger, kill his wife, then in sudden remorse, kill himself. He’d forgotten the children, sleeping in the next room, the children who’d crawled out of their shared bed to see what the noise was just in time to watch him eat his gun.

Scrawny Pete’d seen it of course. That explained the terrors, the fears of being left alone with neighbors who shouted and screamed. Was he their cat, the dead couple’s? Or had he originally been a stray who’d taken food from Craig? No telling, and certainly Pete wouldn’t say. Not in any way Atkins wanted to see anyway.

So he wrote the column, asked if it could go on more than 500 measly words, and because he rarely asked, and because his longer columns usually got national attention, sometimes awards, his editor said sure. Atkins wrote the story, mentioning Pete’s reaction to the smells, the repeated scene. Mentioning, only mentioning. And then he’d gone on to reflect on the way the system failed the victims and the way it created more victims and was it guns or the human race’s innate violence that caused a man to shoot his wife and then himself, to start a ball rolling that would leave five couples dead after some kind of terror at the hands of a crazy man who’d once been a blood-spattered six-year-old kid.

People didn’t remember the analysis or the arguments or the excellent prose, some of the best of his career. Nope. They remembered the bizarre nature of the story, and they remembered Pete. And over the years, it became the crime that Pete solved, and Scrawny Pete became a legend.

Atkins didn’t mind. Cats could become legends. Reporters shouldn’t. Reporters schlepped from scene to scene, observing, recording, trying to make sense out of one corner of the world. Sometimes he managed it, sometimes he didn’t. But he was the best at it, for a few years at least.

The years he had Scrawny Pete in his pocket.

 

____________________________________________

“Scrawny Pete” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

Scrawny Pete

Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published as an Amazon Short, June 2005
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2016 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Jeffery Koh/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.

After a cataclysmic interstellar war that came very close to exterminating humanity, the Daybreak Republic has risen from the ashes and embarked upon a mission to unite hundreds of human colony worlds under its banner, in hopes of preventing a second and final conflict that will complete the destruction of the human race. But not everyone agrees that the empire’s ends justify the means.

Though a technicality, Lieutenant-Commander Leo Morningstar commanded the lone starship in the Yangtze Sector, but no more. The arrival of reinforcements brings a senior office who has no patience for jumped-up officers, and an axe to grind against Leo personally. Relieved of command, Leo finds himself serving under an old enemy and then assigned to an isolated war-torn world while his rival steals the glory Leo rightfully earned. They think they’ve gotten rid of him for good …

But that didn’t work out very well last time, did it?

Read a FREE SAMPLE, then download from the links here: Amazon US, UK, CAN, AUS, Books2Read.

It is Monday the 89th of January (or certainly feels like it) and if, like me, you need reasons to push through to the end of the month, I have them right here.

The dramatized adaptation of Magic Shifts will be released by Graphic Audio this Friday, on their website as well as on other third party retailers platforms (Audible, Chirp, Audiobooks.com etc).

Because the Horde is what? Beloved! I have 2 generous exclusive samples director Nora sent over just for us:

Why *does* Kate always hang out with weirdos? aka Luther in the hooooouse!

And car chases are a girl’s best friend. (Only if that girl is Dali)

For more, including the classic Apple + Bee moment and the heart-wrenching earring carrying scene, we’ll have to make it until Friday. Courage!

Nora and team are hard at work already on Magic Binds, unapologetically my favourite, so I preordered and can’t w*it for March. That means the main Kate series will be entirely adapted this year and we will potentially hear more about the dramatized fate of other books in Kate world.

I will also have more exciting announcements from Graphic Audio for you next week, if all goes well, but until then, the fun isn’t over!

Giveaway

The second volume of the Clean Sweep graphic novel is being released tomorrow by Andrews McMeel – this is the Tapas run comic book, turned into paperback and Kindle formats.

To celebrate, the publisher is running another Innkeeper sticker sheet giveaway for US-based readers, from now until February 2nd which can be accessed here – also includes an extensive list of retailers. Good luck all!

Disclaimers: This is not Sweep in Peace, a sequel to the Tapas episodes. It’s the second volume of Clean Sweep. The comic book has expanded the story and added new characters. Tomorrow’s date is the US release, please check your retailer of choice for international dates (Amazon, Bookshop.org, World of Books etc) – in the UK for example, we have to w*it until March.  

We have a lot of surprises coming, and we heard you about more quizzes, games and snippets each Friday. In the meantime, happy listening, reading and sticking!

The post Kate Exclusive Samples and Innkeeper Giveaways first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

I meant to do that.

Of course you did.

Yeah, every cat dreams of getting covered with water.

They do? Huh. Guess I need to revise me thinkages.

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Chapter 4

 

Antigua

 

Admiral Irons replacement search for a new secretary of industry was off to a rocky start. Sandra’kall had recently resigned to join her family at the Nuevo B colony and be a member of the ruling cabinet there. He still thought she would have done better for her people in her previous position; however, she wanted to be closer to her people and her family so he couldn’t fault that decision. It was just unusual for a usually logical Centaurian to choose emotion over cold hard logic.

Of course, there might be something else involved he was not aware of. Not that it was any of his business apparently. He glanced at the candidates. Sprite had two dozen files from the literal thousands that had been initially generated. Even more had applied for the position once it had come out that the Centaurian was resigning.

He’d thought they’d be able to fill her post before her departure, but apparently, that hadn’t been the case. The first three candidates had not passed the vetting process and the fourth runner-up had some issues that had come out during the committee hearing with congress. It had been embarrassing enough for the candidate to withdraw.

Of course certain parties on the hill had gloated over that. He wasn’t certain why; it meant the post was vacant and the star nation as a whole had a problem. Not that they saw it that way of course. They saw it as scoring off of him and his administration. Reining him in.

Petty politics in other words.

<<V>>

Antigua

 

Jethro continued to deal with the pain of loss of Lil Red. Shanti continued to blame herself. Both had been to a therapist but it helped to talk to each other. “I was supposed to keep her safe,” she said.

Jethro shook his head. She sounded so … broken. Like it was her fault. It wasn’t; they both knew that. She hadn’t been home; it had been a freak crash during an air show that had killed their adopted daughter.

“You can’t be blamed for a freak accident! Murphy maybe, but not you love. It happened. We can’t wrap them in cotton and keep them safe forever.”

“You’d think she’d be safe at home! I should have insisted she stay with you.”

“It happened,” Jethro sighed. “It is something that … the rest of us will have to live with. I love you,” he said softly.

“I love you too,” she murmured back, kissing her fingertips and then holding them out to him. He smiled tenderly to her holographic image.

A blinking LED caught his attention. He knew it was time up. He reached out for a phantom caress of her cheek. She smiled tenderly and closed her eyes and seemed to rub into it.

“I won’t tell you to stay safe. I know you too well,” he said.

She chuffed.

“But watch your six and kick ass.”

“Yeah,” she said huskily. “We have to go.” She dashed a tear and then straightened up and nodded. “Kick some pirate ass. I love you.”

“I know and I will. And I love you too,” he said. “Thanks, Captain,” Jethro said as he looked up.

“You’re welcome, Chief. Terminating virtual chat,” Commander Enki replied.

<<V>>

Jethro prepped for work quietly. “Was that mom?” Baghera asked sleepily. He was the black panther male of the quartet. All four had a ways to go in the maturity department. A bit of that was because he hadn’t been around to be a father. He was trying to make up for lost time but it wasn’t easy this late in the game.

“Yeah, she had to go; sorry, you lot were asleep.”

“Was she here?” Bagheera asked, looking around in confusion. He sniffed the air, his brows knit still in confusion. “Wait, I don’t smell her.”

“No, it was a holo call. Brief,” Jethro explained patiently as he cleaned up the kitchen.

Bagheera blinked in confusion. “Oh,” he said.

“Red is …”

“They cremated her body and will ship it back as a diamond,” Jethro said quietly.

 Bagheera blinked again and then yawned. “Damn,” he muttered. “It is … is she really gone?” he asked and then ran a finger under his nose as he snuffled.

“I’m afraid so,” Jethro sighed softly. Some of the family were still struggling with the loss. Red had been their adopted daughter and an older sister/aunt/sitter to each of the litters. They were each dealing with the grief in their own way. The FBI as well as the Cadre had each offered a grief counselor to the family. So far he wasn’t aware of anyone taking them up on it.

The first litter were buried in their work. They were more mature and knew intellectually such things were bound to happen eventually. The sudden reaction was what caught them off guard.

“Mom should have left her here to be safe with us,” Bagheera muttered bitterly.

“Red was an adult; she wanted to be with your mom to help her out and so she wouldn’t feel so alone.” Jethro shook his head.

“Yeah? And it cost her her life!” Bagheera flared.

A corner of his father’s mind recognized anger as one of the stages of grief so he kept to reason. He didn’t want to provoke the fragile truce with his son or make the irrational anger turn towards him.

No, it wasn’t irrational, the anger was real. It was just adrift without a target as they all were, he reminded himself before he spoke.

“No, a freak accident did. She was at home safe. It could have happened here as easily as their or anywhere,” Jethro said, trying to keep his tone even. Bagheera glowered at him. “When fate chooses to snip your thread, it's a part of the circle of life.”

“Oh gah, not that shit again,” the smaller black panther said voice rich with disgust. He snorted harshly.

“It is what it is,” Jethro said with an ear flick of a shrug as he felt his fur stiffen. Bast shook her head on his HUD. He took it to indicate a lost cause. “Some things are just out of our control. It sucks. Trust me, I’ve felt it. I still feel it.”

He reached out to touch his son but his son turned away and headed into the bathroom. The door clicked shut with a sound of finality to the argument.

Jethro escaped to his commute to work while he could.

<<V>>

Jethro saw motion in the hallway near the floor as he walked through the new section of the base. His attention flickered from thinking about the list of things he had to do to prepare for the movement to curiosity. Bast rolled her eyes on his HUD and highlighted a familiar feline figure crouching in the shadows.

He chuffed softly in amusement and pretended to ignore her in passing. Ember had figured out how to cloak in order to try to sneak out of the crèche again. She was good, but she had been tagged with an IFF tag and her cloak was only good if she didn’t move. She didn’t have implants or an AI to manage her cloaks so everything ran on instinct.

He turned suddenly and swooped in to catch her and swing her off her feet. She growled in surprise as he held her with one arm under her armpits and the other under her bottom as he leaned over her and gave his invisible prey a cheek rub.

She mock growled and her ears went flat but he chuffed and purred. After a moment, she started to purr in response.

A tech saw him cheek rubbing something and holding it but whatever it was it was invisible. The human stopped and stared until Jethro tickled his prey. Ember growled and lost focus and faded into place in his arms giggling and squirming. “Stop!” she said in a high pitch giggly voice.

Jethro churred and laughed at her and hugged her tightly. The observer then blinked and puckered his lips and looked away. After a moment, he shook his head and walked off.

“So, what are you doing out and about, young lady?” Jethro teased. “Aren’t you supposed to be with your friends?”

“No nap,” she growled as he slung her up to his shoulder. She began to play with his ear in retaliation.

“Really? You don’t like to nap?”

“No,” she pouted as he walked to the crèche.

“Uh huh,” he said. “Do they know you are gone?” he asked in a light voice. She suddenly looked shy.

Bast rolled her virtual eyes and sent a text out to the crèche as well as Zuhura.

Just as she did a security alert came over the 1MC to look for a lost black kitten.

“I think they know you are missing. Your mommy is going to be upset,” Jethro warned.

Ember looked a little contrite but then flicked her ears.

Find out supposed to be in crèche. Snuck away in naptime.

Zuhura arrived outside the crèche. She was clearly exasperated with her wayward charge.

Jethro play fought to hand her over, eventually relenting with a mock pout. Ember giggled. The byplay lightened the mood.

“You aren’t supposed to leave the crèche without an adult, young lady,” Zuhura scolded.

“She’s getting good at being sneaky,” Jethro said. “She almost got past me,” he said. He shrewdly tickled her. “Almost,” he teased as she shrunk back and giggled and then growled and play swatted at him.

She might be playing but her eyes flashed, her ears went back and she started in with her trademark head cock that said she was ready to get feisty.

“Uh oh,” Zuhura laughed. “Now you’ve done it,” she chuffed. She pretended to hold her charge away from Jethro as Jethro pretended to box with her and then hold his arms out on either side and then move in to strike. She couldn’t look in both directions and growled ears flat.

Zuhura chuffed as her father used one hand to distract and the other to strike. The head cock came out again.

“I think they need to learn to wear this little lady out a bit more before naptime,” Jethro observed.

“No nap!” a certain kitten said, crossing her arms and instantly pouting.

“Yeah,” Zuhura said with a snort as she took the kitten into the crèche. “Thanks, dad.”

“Anytime,” he said with a wave to the kitten.

<<V>>

Thanks again for the weekly fix of Drucraft! I assume that next week we will have some more on Motion Sigls? Waiting to see how how Calhoun can move so fast!
I hope that sales are still good for the new series? (PS: When is paperback of Book#2 due for release please?) Also I trust that edits are now ‘done’ and that you have started on Book #4 !

Is it a serial? No. It’s going slow, and we are having to backtrack, so it is probably not suitable for serialization. However, people are really stressed. We are seeing an uptick in “My emotions are frayed right now, and the snippets are helping” messages.

The political ban is still in effect, so Mod R will be removing comments that mention politics. We are committed to keeping this blog a place where everyone can come to decompress, especially because spaces like these are in short supply right now. However, I wanted to address some of these emails. We see you, we understand that life is hard and you are struggling and stressed, and we are so sorry.

When the pandemic started, the economists warned that recovery would take 15 years. You can’t just hit pause on the world for months and not pay the price later. We did it to survive, but now we have to collectively try to claw our way back out of the pit it created. This is a very difficult process. It’s slow and painful, it affects every aspect of our life, and it makes everything so much harder.

I’m with you. I’m creatively discouraged and stressed. We’re going to take a financial hit later in the year due to unforeseen circumstances, and I’m not wild about that. One of my children is choosing to return to college to get her degree, because the opportunities she had previously evaporated. Gordon will likely need surgery. It’s easier to say what isn’t wrong with his shoulder – it’s not broken. I was on the phone for 2 hours trying to get a referral put through and I know my nerves are frayed, because I had to take a few minutes after that.

However, we are all going to keep going, because rolling over and giving up is not an option. So, for the foreseeable future, we are going to have something fun here on Friday. Something that will give you a break from the constant stress and daily grind. For now, it’s Hughday. Some Fridays, it might be something else.

If you have any fun ideas for quizzes, giveaways, or articles, please leave us a comment.

Chapter 1 Part 2

The depression gouged the forest floor, about forty feet long, twenty-five feet wide, and two feet deep. It was less of a pit and more of a hollow, vaguely rectangular, but without the defined corners or sheer walls that would point at a human with a shovel being involved. The edges of the hollow sloped slightly, as if some giant pressed their palm into the forest floor, and the ground at its bottom was bare and soft like a plowed field.

Hugh crouched on the edge and frowned. Around the shallow pit, a dozen Iron Dogs waited, holding their torches over it. The flickering lights played on bare bones arranged in the dirt. A lot of bones. He recognized femurs from at least two horses, wings from what might have been a griffon, and paws from a bear. A freakishly large bear, too.

The bones had been carefully arranged into a pattern. Here and there, the different femurs, radiuses, ribs, and vertebrae were bound together by copper wire and twine with little bone beads. This wasn’t a mass grave. This was something else. Something malignant, with a specific purpose.

He passed his hand over it, just in case. Nothing. With tech up, the bones were inert.

Hugh looked up, past the hollow, at the massive tree rising behind it, soaked in night shadows. An Iron Dog had thrust a torch into the ground by its roots and the glow of the fire illuminated a fragment of twine hanging from the bark, its end frayed. Someone had wrapped the same twine that secured the bones around the giant trunk and then sliced through it and ripped it off.

Must’ve been in a hurry.

He rose and glanced at Sharif, waiting on his left. The dark-haired scout master met his gaze. Yellow fire rolled over his irises.

“How old is the site?”

“Three days.”

The end of the most recent magic wave.

“Any scents?”

Sharif grimaced. “Wolfsbane.”

Damn. The sense of smell was the most acute and accurate of a werewolf’s senses.  They memorized thousands of human scents. Normally Sharif would’ve identified the gender, possibly the age, sometimes even a chronic illness, and if he’d met them before, a name. Wolfsbane nullified all of that. It rendered shapeshifters nose-blind, and it stuck around for days after the other scent trails faded.

“Nothing useful at all?” Hugh asked.

“Their wolfsbane is very potent, so there is that.”

And the best producer of potent wolfsbane was a mile to the south, watching baking shows in her turret.

“Could it be someone from Baile?”

Sharif shrugged. “It could be. We followed the wolfsbane to a clearing a hundred yards to the north. It ended there.”

“What do you mean, it ended?”

“The trail stopped.”

“So the magic user disappeared in the middle of our woods?”

“I cannot say. The trail ended.”

Teleportation was possible, but it was inherently rare and extremely risky, and the magic was down. Yet another thing that didn’t make sense.

“So we have a magic user,” Hugh said. “The wave caught them mid-whatever this is.  Something alarmed them, and they took off, leaving all their toys behind, and then disappeared a hundred yards north.”

“It was Tatter,” Sharif said. “That’s how Karen found this in the first place. She was following the pack, trying to map their hunting patterns.”

Tatter and Gold were the dominant breeding pair of a local dire wolf pack, and they were a massive pain in the ass. Tatter, a huge male with a torn right ear, clocked in at two hundred pounds. His mate was only slightly smaller, and she made up for it with viciousness and cunning. They led about sixteen wolves, making circles around the castle and the adjacent village by the lake. They were smart and patient, sending out strike teams to bring prey back, while the aging generation watched the pups. The livestock herders were having the devil of a time keeping them away. If it hadn’t been for the guard dogs, Baile’s herd would be half of what it was in early fall. He had had to heal two of the hounds just last week.

With magic down, whoever put this bone mandala together would have no chance against Tatter and his hunting pack. That explained why the magic user split. It didn’t explain what they were doing here or why.

“Tatter left a mark on a tree about ten yards out,” Sharif reported.

Didn’t touch the bones though.

“Is this some kind of witch ritual?” Stoyan murmured.

Baile was home to seven different covens. It was a good guess, but this bone arrangement gave off a different vibe.

Hugh nodded to the huge tree. “That’s an oak.”

Stoyan squinted at it. “Druids?”

“Probably.”

Pre-Shift Druidism was a folkloric speculation. A prevalent religion among ancient Celts and Gauls, Druidism relied on oral tradition, lost to time. What little was known about it came mostly from Roman records, written by biased invaders determined to conquer new territory. Historic druids revered trees, especially the oak, treated and induced diseases, composed poetry, and foretold the future by means of augury and sacrifice. That sacrifice wasn’t always chickens and rabbits. Sometimes they needed a little more juice.

Post-Shift, when magic became real, druidism, like other neo-pagan religions, returned with a vengeance. The modern practitioners patchworked it together from Julius Caesar’s journals, Taliesin’s poems, new age mysticism, and wishful thinking. Over the decades, the neo-druids codified their rites and holidays and set forth some fundamental philosophical tenets, but beyond that, the consensus on how to be a druid was rather shaky. Some of them waded neck-deep into the kind of evil shit that would get them exterminated if the public at large knew about it. He’d come across that kind of druidism before, and the experience was never pleasant. The dusk druids packed a lot of power. 

There were druids in Baile Castle, and their leader, Dugas, was one of Elara’s closest allies. She treated him like a surrogate father. On a scale from 1 to 10, when it came to dangerous opponents, Dugas was around 12. During the battle of Aberdine, the druid had stuck to support spells and then used his staff as a club–except for one time, when he was cornered by three armored soldiers and didn’t think anyone was looking. Hugh saw him tap his staff on the ground and then the three men in front of him vomited tree roots and died.

Dugas took care to appear less dangerous than he was. Hugh had no idea whether the man was a dusk druid, but if that was true, he wouldn’t be surprised. He had never seen him sacrifice anything; however, Stoyan and Lamar, his other centurion, had. Or almost had. Elara chased them off before the actual act, but the night she came to get him, they saw a line of cows painted in glyphs and Dugas with a knife.

He glanced at Stoyan. The centurion leaned closer.

“When you saw Dugas with the cows, what was he wearing?”

“A white robe.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

Druids wore special robes for sacrificial rites. They were blood red. It could’ve meant something or nothing.

He didn’t know how territorial Dugas was, either. The overwhelming majority of druids felt that the way other druids used their magic was none of their business. If they knew that one of them was doing terrible shit, they wouldn’t prevent it, as long as it didn’t directly affect them.

This ritual site was about a mile from the castle. Too close for any kind of comfort. Either this was done by an outsider, who didn’t fear Dugas or was confident he wouldn’t care; or it was done by Dugas himself or with his blessing. Either way, whoever had done it didn’t want to be identified, otherwise there was no point in using wolfsbane.

If this was Dugas’s handiwork, he was trying to hide it.

It could be part of the darker side of Elara’s magic. Dugas could be doing something with her blessing and instruction to keep it from them.

Hugh still had no idea what she was. Her people called themselves the Departed – again, he didn’t know why – and most of the time they were friendly and straight-forward, going about their lives. But then he had seen a time when they acted together as one, their magic united into a frightening whole, and that power had an ancient bite.  The older the magic, the more power.

Hugh studied the bones again. If there was a choice between him and Dugas, he had no doubt Elara would choose the druid.

He could investigate it quietly, using just his Iron Dogs, or he could take it to Elara. If he took it to Elara, and this was something of hers that she wanted to protect, he would be putting his people at risk. But if it wasn’t and later she asked him why he found weird shit in the woods and didn’t tell her, he would have to admit it was because he didn’t trust her.

That would be the end, he realized. They would not come back from that.

She came to get him. She faced Roland for him.

Fuck it.

“Take the Polaroids,” Hugh ordered. “Sketch it, photograph it, and guard it. Nobody touches it while I’m gone.”

The Iron Dogs snapped to attention. “Yes, Preceptor.”

The post Wait, Is It Hughday Again? first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

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Chapter 3

 

Tortuga, Omicron sector

 

The being known as the Wraith Queen reached out through her communication centers in the vast ship and tested them. She worked out new protocols to control the ships around her. But she knew she was lacking in abilities. She resented having to rely on the alliance. It ran against her core programming in some ways. Not all ways thankfully, as her organic partner had pointed out; their creators had left room for them to use and exploit other beings in accordance with completing their mission.

She was still looking forward to the day that she could renounce the partnership in fire and end the Necrons once and for all.

Until then she had to rely on them to fill the gaps in her abilities.

At least, for the time being.

<<V>>

Edessa

 

One of the cruisers dispatched south to hold the border to Pi sector returned to the nearest ansible location with news that two ships had been stopped but one other had been spotted but was now missing. The leadership of the Necrons was concerned. They passed the news on to their partners in Tortuga as they went over the data.

<<V>>

Tortuga

 

Hazel Irons was not surprised that her Queen reacted badly to the news when it came in through the ansible. The AI was not happy at all with the events and seethed about it. Hazel did her best to try to soothe her.

She was one of the oldest clone changelings in existence. Her line had been so reliable; it had been used until it had become too recognizable by the enemy. In fact, to date they had not found any other changelings.

By luck or circumstance, the changeling and her AI partner had been dumped into a stasis pod and left adrift in Pi sector. They had been found and salvaged by pirates who had been fleeing the growing Federation presence in the area. The duo had accidentally been awoken, and they had decided to first take over the ship and then move on from there.

It was an interesting partnership. Hazel had no illusions as to who was the dominant of them. She was a kingmaker, the power behind the throne, the voice of sweet reason and the spark of creativity that her partner lacked.

She also knew she was ultimately disposable. She believed she was still of use for her partner and the cause though, so she did her best to remain useful.

Her partner had grown to the point where she had been forced out and into a new body in the form of the massive flagship under construction. However delays had kept the ship in dock and hampered by problems that plagued their ability to fully function as planned for some time. It did not help the AI’s mood at all.

“If the ship did escape, and we don’t know if it did, it would have to survive the jump back to Pi sector, which is over a year. It has an unknown amount of supplies available and fuel,” Hazel mused.

“I see what you are doing. You are trying to convince me that the risk of exposure is small. Small enough to be ignored,” the Wraith seethed.

“No, I am working the problem by defining the variables in it,” her clone partner explained gently. It hurt to argue with her partner. They were made to work together after all. They were an incredible team, just look at what they had achieved so far! Other changelings would have doggedly stuck to their mission or given up! They had instead taken over a ship and then others and then forged an unlikely alliance with Necrons to take over the sector!

They still had some work to do but their progress was breathtaking. And it was happening faster than either of them expected. Well, faster than she had expected.

“I cannot in good conscience state that the risk is negligible given that the missing ship is a Federation ship,” Hazel said slowly.

“And?”

“I believe that means we have to generate some plans and modify existing ones,” the clone stated slowly.

“Such as?” the Wraith prompted. Her clone and former host was the spark of ingenuity in their partnership. She was cunning and clever to a degree, but the human was the true mastermind of some of their achievements.

“Two paths are obvious to me,” the clone said as she came up with the plan. “First, we send a task force to defend the jump line in Pi with an ansible link to keep us alerted to any further events there.”

“A bit late,” the Wraith said scathingly.

“Only in attempting to stop the single ship. There may be others,” her human partner warned.

“Agreed,” the AI hissed.

“And there may be new traffic coming from Pi. In fact, that is inevitable given how the Federation is expanding. Eventually they will send ships, if only to find out what happened to the first explorers they sent.”

“Agreed,” the AI stated. “What else?”

“I suggest we send a small task force, possibly just a couple of cruisers to Pi to run the fleeing ship down. If they can get ahead of the ship, they can lay in wait and ambush the ship and thus prevent it from reporting back. At the least, they could report on events in Pi sector and possibly even interdict shipping in that sector before it even comes to us.”

The Wraith queen took some time to respond. Hazel glanced around and then checked the status board of the star system in a bid to keep busy.

“You would want to send an ansible there too I suppose?” the AI finally asked after running a number of simulations. “The risk of exposure is high.”

“It is if they enter a star system. If they remain outside it as observers, it is less of a risk. If they engage, yes, the risks grow.”

“Especially if the ship escapes them further.”

“Correct. But if we do nothing, that risk is there anyway. Attempting to stop them may correct the problem.”

“Or make it worse,” the Wraith replied. “But I see your point.” The AI paused. “I will give the order.”

“Good.”

<<V>>

While Teacup—the Peacock series very loosely-based on Robert McCammon’s Stinger—has already been cancelled after just one season, one aspect of the show that was done well is the special effects work by KNB EFX. Given that the ‘N’ in KNB EFX is Greg Nicotero, who is co-producing the upcoming Swan Song series, it’s a safe bet that KNB EFX will also be doing the effects for that show.

On December 30, 2024, the website Animation World Network published an article about the effects in Teacup, complete with a bunch of photos showing the concepts and how the effects were done.

Carey Jones Serves Up a Macabre Special Effects Brew for ‘Teacup’

Also, as Hollywood is wont to do these days, just six days after the first two episodes of Teacup were released, Peacock released this spoiler-filled video about the special effects for the show.

 

Brian Freeman of Lividian Publications posted this news today on his Patreon.

The interior font size for LEVIATHAN was selected to keep the already high retail cost from going higher, but the text turned out smaller than I expected for some reason and I definitely understand it was too small for some readers. None of us are getting any younger! So, here’s what we’re going to do:

The Limited Edition, like the other Matthew Corbett Limited Editions from Lividian, will have a larger interior font size. But those are expensive books and down the road a bit.

In the meantime, Robert McCammon gave the OK for us to rush a “Larger Print” version of the book. This isn’t a traditional Large Print edition, but it uses the same font size as the Limited Edition, which is considerably more readable. See the photo above.

Note: there are significantly more pages in this edition but it contains no new content. That’s just the result of the larger text taking up more space. You’re not missing out on anything new.

This “Larger Print” version is a trade paperback to keep the price reasonable, but there will be a “real” trade paperback published later this year with new Vincent Chong artwork, just like most of the other books in the series, and it will also use this larger font.

You can order this “Larger Print” edition on Amazon now — or if you bought the trade hardcover directly from me and need one, please just send me an email and we’ll work something out: brian@lividian.com

Also, I’m trying to figure out the best way to send this to the Lividian tier supporters. I know in the past some of you haven’t wanted trade paperbacks, and some of you won’t necessarily feel a need to have this particular edition… I’m thinking it might get included in another shipment to save on postage.

More news soon!

Best,
Brian

P.S. Some of you have correctly guessed we have Matthew Corbett news for later this year. First of all, shhhhhhh… Secondly, we’ll be using the standard Limited Edition font size for the text in all editions of that title.

 Sitrep: So, Rea got the manuscript back to me early. So, I went through the usual stuff and shot it off to Goodlife. Shelley just said that they'd have it back to me by the weekend or in a week.

So, snippet 2:

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Chapter 2

 

Atlas XIV

 

“So, where are we on things?” Catherine asked once the Admiralty had assembled. Among the senior leadership was her lover, Rear Admiral Elvira Varbossa. The assembled officers came to attention politely as protocol dictated.

Catherine glanced at the seat to the right of her that Captain Su was standing in front of. He wasn’t bad but she keenly missed Countess Newberry from time to time, specifically this time.

“We have the latest intel dump in, ma’am. It isn’t good,” the captain stated.

“Oh?” Catherine said as she took her seat at the head of the table. The standing officers took their seats quickly.

Going around the table were Vice Admiral Aden McRaven of Operations; Captain Sherman Su. head of ONI and Imperial Intelligence; Vice Admiral Hyman Preece, head of BuShips; Vice Admiral Latisha Nuert, head of BuPers; Vice Admiral Hsong Chen, head of Logistics; Vice Admiral Jennifer Post, head of Schools; Captain Lorna Justice, head of Medicine, and then Elvira as head of special engineering operations aka the battle moon itself.

Many of the officers around the table held double positions in the civilian cabinet.

Everyone felt the pressure of their position. But the cutthroat attitude was missing. Catherine was known to be ruthless but she had put an emphasis on quality and on civility. She was pushing professionalism and turning over a new leaf. After over a decade as Empress, she was starting to make some headway.

Well, I had been making progress until the damn Fed spy had gotten on board and broadcast our location to the galaxy and wrecked a lot of stuff, she thought sourly. May you rot in hell you son of a …. she cut the errant thought off.

“We have the latest news intercepts. The war in Tau sector has more or less ended several months ago,” Captain Su reported.

“Which?” Admiral Chen asked.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Is it more or less?” Admiral Chen asked.

“Ended as in they are in a truce and have been undergoing extended peace treaty talks,” Captain Su explained.

“Oh.”

Catherine grimaced. She had read the précis and wasn’t happy with the news.

“There has been a catastrophic change in leadership with the Taurens after the battle of New Tau Metropolis. Once their fleet was run down and destroyed, their government fell and a new one was elected to replace them. They sued for peace.”

“Darn,” Catherine said mildly. The distraction was one reason they’d been able to continue to operate. Clearly, that was coming to an end. That meant the Federation would be returning its attention to them soon enough.

Not good, she reminded herself.

“The Secretary of State Moira Sema is traveling to the sector now to finalize the peace treaty,” Captain Su reported.

“How did the Federation win?” Admiral Preece asked. “I thought they were in trouble given the distance and weight of metal against them?”

“Well, they managed to fight a rearguard action to delay the enemy, primarily around their carrier forces. The Taurens left themselves vulnerable to fighter and bomber strikes repeatedly. That delay allowed the Feds to get their wormhole open,” Captain Su explained. He used his implants to control the view screen nearby to show a series of still images and even a short video clip. “They sent two fleets over which took the Taurens with Fifth Fleet.”

“Oh,” Admiral Preece said. He looked thoughtful.

Looks were exchanged around the table.

“That leads to the second bit of really bad news,” Captain Su stated. The room grew tense. “The Federation has activated the gate here in this sector. They now have a straight shot from Rho to here.”

“Two fleets,” Catherine murmured. All eyes turned to her slowly. The admirals were not happy about the last news. Her eyes flicked back and forth. She’d read it but it hadn’t sunken in until that moment that the Federation was continuing to expand and grow. Meanwhile, her people were struggling to make good on what they had.

It just drove the point home that they were pirates. They had no business standing toe to toe with the Federation anymore.

“We need to accelerate the repairs and get the hell out of here,” Admiral Chen said firmly. That earned a few nods around the table.

“I’d love to but we are still making good on the repairs from the recent sabotage,” Catherine said with a nod to Elvira.

All eyes shifted to the raven haired admiral. “Yes, well, we have made good on most of the physical damage. But we do have some issues there. The software is still an ongoing trial to sort out and fix. The spy was fiendishly clever in putting viruses everywhere,” Elvira reported.

A few people grimaced.

“Stop making excuses. Can you get us out of here or not?” Admiral Post asked testily. It was a sign of the stress that she was under that he spoke to the Empress’ lover in public.

“I’m not making excuses, I am explaining the situation,” Elvira said before anyone said or did anything. Her eyes cut to Catherine briefly to quell Catherine stepping in. She could and would fight her own battles.

“At the moment, our risk assessment puts us at a 20 percent chance of success if we jump now.”

“Twenty?” Admiral Post asked. She didn’t look like that she liked that number at all.

Elvira nodded grimly and pulled the latest sim up on the main screen. “That is correct. The sabotage also slowed our forward progress. We are now getting back on track there.”

“Can we accelerate it if we raid for parts? The Feds make good stuff I believe,” Admiral Chen stated.

There were hopeful and even a few mischievous expressions around the table at that idea.

“That is very true, but …,” Elvira looked to the captain.

“The risks aren’t worth the exposure I’m afraid,” the captain said with a shake of his head.

“Without risk there is no reward,” Admiral Chen said doggedly.

“You’d think that, but in doing the risk assessment, we noted a few things. First, the components we need are no longer easily accessible here. The only two places we can source them are in the gate system and in the system capital. Both of which are heavily guarded by Second Fleet task forces.”

“And potentially another fleet by now,” Aden said quietly.

“Another problem is their built-in security and safeguards. Any hardware we catch will come with those problems that could set us back even further,” Admiral Preece warned.

A few people winced.

“Correct. We have become aware of some logistic nodes, but they are no doubt honey traps arranged for us to send a raiding force to,” the captain stated.

A few more people winced.

“I’d rather not lead them back here or have another raid go bad,” Admiral Post said dryly.

More than one person around the table winced again. Rear Admiral Paul Race, the former second-in-command of operations, had led a raiding force to take on a convoy of grav emitters destined for the gate system several years prior. Somewhere along the way, his task force had been spotted and ambushed. The Federation had done an excellent job turning the tables on the raiders.

A few ships had made it back; the admiral’s flagship had not been among them.

Catherine missed him for a brief moment. He had been a good fleet commander, solid and dependable. Pity he’d walked into a trap and gotten his fleet torn apart. She missed those crews and ships too.

“So, those are out obviously,” Admiral Chen said sourly.

“Correct. The only other known source is the factories which are located in Rho and thus out of our reach,” the captain stated.

“Damn,” Admiral Chen muttered.

The captain nodded. “My sentiments exactly.”

“There has been a recent uptick in scouting along the western flank. It is … concerning,” the captain stated with an eye to the head of operations.

Admiral McRaven nodded grimly.

“Can we wake some of the sleepers? See if they could help? I don’t know, isolate them like before?” Admiral Post asked. She looked over to Latisha and then back to the captain.

Catherine puckered her lips. She didn’t like the idea and the security risks involved.

“The problem is that they know something is off over time. Keeping them distracted with work and with sex helps, but eventually, they start to wonder. Like why there are only humans around them. That is a big one.”

“They are ticking time bombs,” Admiral Preece muttered. “Not worth the risk.”

“Well, I’d hate to wake a damn bear,” Admiral Post growled.

“We can’t. We don’t have any,” Latisha stated as she glanced down at her tablet. Admiral Post turned to her in surprise. “All of the aliens and Neos were turned over to the gladiator pits or to R&D or um … others. We actually have two hundred thousand humans and light chimera left in stasis.”

“I thought it was less?”

“We did another inventory after the recent incident and lockdown. There was an original crew of civilians and a skeleton crew of naval personnel of one hundred thousand people. Of those, roughly fifteen thousand were human form. We kept those obviously. Over time we added to the collection with people that were found in stasis pods that were brought in from abroad. Some we brought from the homeworld,” Latisha explained.

“Oh.”

Catherine nodded slightly. There had been some rancor about her including them in the evacuation. She didn’t regret the decision, though she didn’t trust the sleepers to help any more. The last bout of sabotage from a sleeper had cost them additional time and resources to set to right.

That and seeing the military personnel melt into puddles of goo when they activated their suicide nanites was … horrifying. It also did some damage to people and equipment around them.

“Well, what about the civilians? Can’t they help?” Admiral Chen demanded.

Captain Su shook his head.

“Why not?”

“They don’t have the requisite keys and tech,” Latisha interjected as the captain opened his mouth to reply. He paused, closed his mouth and then nodded with a glance to the head of BuPers.

“Damn it!” Admiral Chen growled as he clenched his fists.

“We’ve flipped a few of the civilians but oh so few. None have what we currently need. They have the general idea but not the specific knowledge that is required,” Captain Su stated. “Most were either low level techs or middle management.”

Admiral Chen turned to Elvira. “Wait, why only 20 percent? I know engineers; you are all conservative and like to think of yourselves as miracle numbers. What is the real number?” he demanded.

Eyes shifted to Elvira again. Some were amused, a few accusing.

The raven haired flag officer squared her shoulders slightly. “Twenty percent is the average from this week’s simulations,” Elvira stated firmly. She flipped her hands slightly in an indication of a shrug and something out of her hands.

“It was higher before,” Admiral Post pointed out.

“Before the sabotage you mean?” Aden asked mildly.

“No, I mean two weeks ago,” Admiral said, eyes still locked on Elvira.

“We had a node fail an inspection. It is currently being swapped out and then we have to tune the replacement and those around it,” Elvira explained. She hit a button on her tablet and then swiped the report to the main screen. A window opened and a node blinked. The cluster then blinked a different color around it.

All eyes turned to the report.

“Oh. Damn.”

“We’ll naturally rebuild the node and use it somewhere else that is less critical. But the components are scarce. It will be less … reliable. Scabbing in civilian and military grade components that were not designed for the purpose is … sketchy. Which is why we have a lot of variables to consider.”

There was a soft rustle, almost like a sigh of frustration from the assembly.

“Right. As to being conservative, you are correct. Engineers tend to be conservative because we do not want to create a situation of disappointment and we do not want to have a piece of equipment fail under load. Such things depend on a lot of variables that is outside of engineering too, however. The status of the helm team for one. The status of real world conditions, the engineering hardware as I mentioned, software, and so on.”

“Real world?” Admiral Post asked with a puzzled frown.

“If we are under attack or not. If we are rushed or taking damage, the odds of survival drop to single digits rather quickly,” Elvira stated flatly.

“Oh.” Admiral Post scowled. “Shit,” she finally said as she sat back in disgust.

Elvira nodded. “My sentiments indeed,” she murmured as she looked around the table.

“I hate to even suggest this, but what if we pull apart one or more of our capital warships? The biggest ones we have are super dreadnoughts. We have thirty-five of them, right? And we do have those three monitors but they are in mothballs.”

There was an instant look of hope from the assembly. Admiral McRaven didn’t look happy at sacrificing a ship or two under his command, but he was curious. The looks didn’t last long, however.

Admiral Preece shook his head in unison with Elvira. Admiral Chen looked from one to the other and then sat back in disgust. “No? Why not?”

“It is a matter of scale. The nodes we need are nearly the size of a dreadnought,” Admiral Preece explained patiently.

Admiral Chen blinked and then his lips puckered. “Damn.”

“Yeah.”

Faces fell around the table.

“Yeah, it is a matter of scale, which is a bit off,” Admiral Preece said dryly.

That’s what she said echoed perversely in Catherine’s mind but was left unsaid. She didn’t want to antagonize anyone. They needed to focus and work together to solve the problem.

“We can strip a few ships to make one node. It will have half the power of an all-up node,” Elvira said. She frowned as she tapped at her tablet until she found the relevant file and then loaded it and then swept up to push it to the main screen.

They looked at the bastardization of a bunch of nodes from a capital ship clustered into a hole on the hull of the battle moon. “We actually have done that on a few points on the hull. But they are notoriously hard to tune and stay tuned. It is also a pain in the ass to modify the mounts and it all sorted out.”

“Damn it!” Admiral Chen snarled. “Spirits, damn it!” he snarled.

“Let’s not tempt infernal retribution any more than we need,” Admiral Preece said dryly.

“I honestly think it is a good idea. We’ve already pulled all of the nodes from the monitor and other material in the boneyard,” Elvira stated slowly with a look to Admiral Preece. He nodded. “We’re at the point where we have too few options and manufacturing replacements is clearly out. So, we may need to give it a shot. If we keep the node clusters together, we would hopefully have an easier time tuning them. But it would only get us so far. A few extra nodes, maybe parts to rebuild two of the existing nodes to get them operational again.”

“But …,” Aden frowned. “What about the crews?”

“We pull them and distribute them to the other ships that have holes in their ship companies until we can find replacement parts of course,” Latisha said. “This would actually help us a bit,” she said with a look to Catherine.

Catherine cocked her head thoughtfully. Most of the ship companies were at 70 percent strength. The capital ships drew the most manpower. Since they were more or less anchored in place, there was no real call to have them fully manned at all times.

“I suggest we also shut down all construction programs. Finish anything we have left of course but then focus the yards on repairs and getting the ship online. We can’t hide here forever,” Admiral Preece offered.

Catherine looked to the chief engineer in surprise. He shrugged and flapped his hand.

“It’s not like the ships we can produce now can stand a snowball’s chance in Hades against the Fed ships at the moment anyway,” Admiral Preece said sourly.

Catherine’s gaze shifted to the head of operations. Aden had recently been pushing to swap out the old hulls for new. She had thought he was right; the old hulls were just that, old. No matter how many times they had been rebuilt they’d never stand up to a modern warship and definitely not to the Fed ships.

Besides, she had recently passed a resolution, backed by the assembly of pirate lords, to not fight stand-up battles with the Feds anymore. The pirate adage of “fight to runaway” was in full force.

“Very well. Stop production of new hulls but finish those you can. Mothball the rest. You can work on individual ships as resources dictate. Focus everything on Atlas.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” Admiral Preece said with a note of relief in his voice.

“As to the proposal, pick one super dreadnought with good nodes. One that we can use easily. Pull her nodes for the ship and then pull components for the other ships. Transfer the crew where you see fit,” the empress said with a nod to the head of BuPers. Latisha nodded back.

“The officers won’t like it,” Aden observed.

“We’ll find a posting for them,” Latisha stated.

“They aren’t paid to like it. They are paid to do their duty and serve,” Catherine said firmly. That ended the growing dissent. “Get it done. If it works, we’ll look into an additional ship.”

“Shouldn’t we go with ships with the lowest efficiency levels? That way we’re not sacrificing our best?” Aden asked hopefully.

Catherine recognized the ploy and she empathized with it. She even agreed, but she knew there had to be a reason for wanting the best hardware. She turned to Elvira.

“It doesn’t do us any good if the hardware is subpar,” Elvira pointed out. “For this to work, we need good hardware—solid, dependable, and reliable.”

Catherine nodded. “Figure it out and have the final proposal on my desk in two days.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Moving on,” Catherine said. She looked to Captain Su. “I talking with Latisha and we are frocking you to Commodore, Sherman.”

The captain sat up straight.

“If you continue to do well, we will make the promotion permanent,” the empress stated.

“Thank you, ma’am. I’ll try my best.”

“Good. We will hold the ceremony in a few days. I’ll let the staff handle the details. Now … next on the agenda …”

 Sitrep: so, I'm still working on figuring out our housing situation. Not fun.

Anyway, I started Shelby 9, Peacekeepers and I also sent Lowering the Hammer to Rea.

 

 

On to the snippet!

 

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Chapter 1

In Hyperspace, Sigma Sector

 

Scamp looked from one to another crew member. Everyone was awake despite the boredom of their journey. They were all excited, the prowler was headed back to their contact point with the Federation.

They were traveling with news of the location of El Dorado. He was nervous, he didn't want to blow it. No one did. It was probably the single most important thing that Batmobile and her crew of SEALs had ever done. As Chief Thompson put it, it might be the single most important thing that they could ever do. Definitely historic... if it played out.

He listened quietly as they talked at the evening meal. "Do we even know if the ship is still there?"

"Oh, its there," PO Sia Clarkson insisted. She had a tablet in front of her and was keeping tabs on the ship's systems.

"How do we know?" PO Chase Denvery asked.

"It's too big to go far. Even if they get their sublight drives going it will take time to get them very far. Once Fleet jumps in, they can run them down."

"Yeah, but I meant escaping in hyperspace," Chase insisted.

"How?"

"All that antimatter and stuff they stole? Not to mention all of the work they've put into the ship over the past couple of decades?" Chase said helpfully.

The tiger frowned thoughtfully. After a moment she flicked her ears. "I think if they could have moved her they would have."

"Well, they didn't have any real incentive to do so and a lot to not move before Admiral Briggs showed up and set off his here I am broadcast," PO Randy Guetta stated.

The tiger nodded and flicked her ears.

"Word is that the ship and her original crew fell out of hyper after a long jump. They were dry on fuel. We don't know what they did to try to survive. They ended up in stasis," PO Ben Sully said from his seat at the table. "In theory with all the antimatter they stole they could get her in hyper again."

"And we know this from where?" Randy asked.

"We caught a few of the crew who were being used by the pirates,"  the ship's AI Alfred stated. They all looked up to the ceiling.

"Caught them?"

"They were technically aiding and abetting the enemy in a time of war. They were duped into it. They were debriefed thoroughly and then given discharges," Alfred stated flatly.

"A bit light isn't it?"

"Not our call," the Noechimp said with a shrug. "I'd hope someone would not hold me to the letter of the law if someone played me. I'd be so pissed at myself it wouldn't be funny."

Sia nodded. So too did some of the others around the table. The tiger reached down to pet the pup and then playfully tug on a flappy ear. He pretended to snap at her. She managed to dodge the snap and then tapped his nose in response.

"The byplay was noted by Ben who leaned over to eye the pup. Scamp lowered his eyes in response.

"Anyway," Ben said as he took a sip of coffee. "Intel knows that part of the story. They were found, woken up in small groups, isolated, fed a story, and then dispatched to do odd jobs. They were carefully insulated from the real world and events. I'll say one thing about the pirates, they can do a damn good job playing people," he said gruffly.

"Practice," Randy growled.

"That and sex. They were very good at playing the sex card," Ben replied as he looked at the cup.

"Oh."

"Just humans though. Only humans were awake. The survivors said they never saw any of the crew who were neo or alien. Which..." he grimaced and looked away.

The pup looked at Sia in confusion as her fur bristled and thens lowly went back down. Her ears were flat. She didn't look happy.

He glanced at some of the others. None of them looked happy. It was a little intimidating. He knew it wasn't about him personally though. He just wasn't certain why they were bristling like that.

"Anyway," Ben said gruffly. "We know what we know from them and some other sources that the brass didn't identify."

"They didn't have a location though obviously," Chase growled. "Rather convenient," he said darkly.

"Hey, do you know our exact position? Or where we found the signal from Admiral Briggs?" Ben retorted.

Chase blinked and then after a moment shook his head.

"Yeah, thought not. The rank and file just keep their heads down and do their jobs. These people were mostly techs. Engineers. Give them a job and that is their entire world." He pointed a subtle finger to the tiger in their midst who was tapping at her tablet and looking at it intently.

Chase and Randy snorted.

Sia looked up from her tablet. "Um, something I missed?" she asked.

That sparked a chuckle from the others.

<<V>>

2 light months outside of the Sector Capital

Captain Ellie Dunn felt relief as the third week passed and the enemy hadn't noted their arrival.

Her battlecruiser command France had been sailing in on a ballistic course to her final monitoring point for a full 6 weeks. The Kurama class battlecruiser had made a painfully slow and gentle final translation from hyperspace at that point over 2 light months out. They'd given a burp of fuel to get them moving in the right direction and then went into silent running mode.

There were few ships of their scale left in the fleet. She had heard the whisper from her crew that they should run to Beta sector but had ignored it. Her family was on the battle moon after all, there was no way she was just going to abandon her 3 kids. The same for many of the senior officers, they all had family. She was pretty sure it was by design to ensure their loyalty.

Well, that and some of the privileges that they'd gotten. Better schools, larger condos, and all of that, she thought in mild amusement. Just because she knew she was being played didn't mean it wasn't working, it just meant she wanted it to happen on her terms, she noted.

Besides, she'd been warned that there was a self-destruct package embedded in the ship. If they didn't report back by a certain time period the ship would blow up. She had no idea if the threat was real but she had to take it for real. She didn't want the crew to know however.

A light cruiser would have been a better choice for the asssignment, however none were available. There were few left in the fleet. Most were out and about on assignment so France and her division mate Tormentor had been tapped for the duel mission.

And who's fault was that? She thought with a pang. They all knew that the bitch Catherine the so called Great Ramichov had been the real one to blow apart Horath and the fleet there. Some might be... reassured by her ruthlessness. They'd certainly seen it when she had reportedly killed her own family down to her siblings after all. There had been something to respect in her. She had shown empathy by helping people after the gladiator stadium masacre, she had shown her steel and cunning by eliminating her mad father and getting them out of the deathtrap that Horath had proven to be. All while under the eyes of the Federation invasion no less.

Ellie had to admit, setting off the nova bomb to cover their tracks had been a sick twisted yet brilliant act. She hadn't had many bones with it at the time because she'd managed to get her husband Henry and the kids off the planet. She did regret loosing her parents though, but not his damn mother. The in laws were no loss. That bitch could fry.

Her lips twisted slightly in an aproximation of a smirk.

After the destruction of Horath she had no problem believing there was some sort of self-destuct on her ship, none at all. Possibly in the coding, possibly in a warhead, possibly the hardware. There were too many places to go looking. It wasn't worth upsetting the crew over it.

"No change in traffic patterns," CIC reported on the tick. She glanced up and then over to the open hatch.

"Very well," she murmured. They were so far out that everything they were seeing was months old. But that was the way she liked it. She didn't want the bastards to see her and come after her. It might be tough to sus out what they were seeing with just passives, but they would make the most of it. Besides, it gave CIC and the computers something to do in combining sensor feeds and refining the results.

Over the past few weeks they had gotten good at building a profile of traffic around the star system.

She glanced at the empty helm tank. At the moment it was not manned, an enlisted sailor was holding the position and playing a video game to stay busy. The mermaid clone was asleep in the water dweller quarters. They had 3, all sisters and all experienced at their jobs. Half of her crew were down for the ship's 'night'. A quarter of the crew were in stasis to help draw out their time on station.

One year, she thought. One year and then her family was free. They could run when she returned to the battle moon.

46 weeks and 3 days remaining until they left. After that another six months to pick their way across the sector to the battle moon, and then they'd be free.

It couldn't happen soon enough. She felt a keen pang at all of the time she was missing with the kids. They were growing like weeds. Then again, the 2 eldest were teens now so maybe it was best that she didn't have to deal with adolecent hormones? Her lips twitched again. Henry was going to have his hands full, she thought in amusement.

It was funny that each of the brat pack had been concieved after a long deployment. Would this deployment cause a fourth child to be born in a few years? Each reunion was passionate and memorable. Maybe, she thought cheerfully, though she was getting a bit on in years to have kids she reminded herself firmly.

<<V>>

SG3R211-94

 

Admiral Dwight Harris stared at the plot as he worried. It was now a race, he noted. The bulk of Second Fleet was split between 3 positions, the capital where he was at, the nearby Gate star system formerly known as Tortuga Sigma, and in penny packet pickets and patrols across the sector.

But, he was working to consolidate his command even though TF 2.7 was off establishing a naval station near where they suspected the battle moon to be. He had made it clear to the admiralty and to Admiral Irons especially, he wanted in on the upcoming action. He flat out refused to be left behind and sit on the sidelines guarding the sector capital. Not when he and his people had a score to settle.  The more he'd thought about it, the more he believed that one task force would not be up for the battle. They not only needed to pin the battle moon down, they also had to run down any leakers... and eventually board the damn thing.

All with the risk of the empress blowing it up in their faces at any time of her choosing, he reminded himself tartly.

"We owe it to our dead to see this through to the finish. One way or another," he murmured to himself.

He had recently cut orders to consolidate his remaining command by replacing his deployed cruisers, carrier groups, and battle cruisers with his destroyers as well as some borrowed from Fifth Fleet. It stripped his screen bare but that was fine, he needed those larger ships back with him.

Whoever the admiralty sent to relieve him would replace those pickets. I might even steal their screen as a replacement, who knows, he thought in amusement.

Once they sent a fleet through the gate he planned to pull everyone together and meet with TF 2.7 and then move on El Dorado.

That was, if the prowler came back with a positive report.

<<V>>

We have snow! Only an inch or so, but still snow. The animals are horrified and excited. We got the semi-feral cat inside, and she is being very persistent about getting pets. If only she didn’t go to war any time she sees the other cats, we would be in business.

So far the grid is holding.

We also have a fire. If you are getting this through email, there is a video of the fireplace here.

Kid 1 asked why it was this funky yellow color. It’s that color because iPhone attempts to enhance colors. Look at this yarn I bought.

Pretty, right? I bought it because it looked like that in the picture.

This is what it actually looks like in person.

This shot was taken far away. I stood on a chair so I would get a wider angle and the iPhone color correction wouldn’t kick in on the yarn specifically. It was like magic: you hold the iPhone over it and look at all the colors. You can even see that the color of the island is different, more yellow, and there was no filter involved. I tried turning off HDR and all that, but the color correction is still happening.

I’m not a fan of that brown. Just no. I’m not going to return it. It’s a small business dyer. Their overhead is already low and shipping yarn back and forth is silly. When you buy small batch dyed yarn, there is a chance for stuff like this happening, so I decided to dye over it. I wanted to experiment anyway so we will see what happens.

On that note, Expression Fiber Arts has yarn kits at 17% off today, according to their newsletter. Not today, Satan. Not today. I do not need pretty yarn kits. I need to finish my happy cardigan. I need to find some white worsted weight yarn for the trim somewhere. For some reason I only have off-white. Also I need to work! Yeah.

Yesterday we plotted the next scene and I ended up measuring the living room with measuring tape to figure out how big of a hollow we need.

The depression gouged the forest floor, about forty feet long, twenty-five feet wide, and two feet deep. It was less of a pit and more of a hollow, vaguely rectangular, but without defined corners or sheer walls that pointed at a human with a shovel being involved. The edges of the hollow sloped slightly, as if some giant pressed their palm into soft sand, and the ground at its bottom was bare and soft, like it had been plowed.

I’m going to make a big old pot of stew for today. I have mushrooms and parsnips I need to use up. Get stew cooking and then work. Maybe I will bake it. That way I won’t have to keep checking it on the stove.

Hold, grid, hold. Must make words happen.

The post Snow on Tuesday first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s alternate history stories have won or been nominated for every award in the sf field. “The Arrival of Truth” shows why. In pre-Civil War Virginia, some slaves tell a story about Sojourner and the Truth. One young girl, forced to give up her own children and nurse a white baby, wonders what the Truth will mean. Will it set her free? Or will it force her to make terrible choices of her own?

In “The Arrival of Truth,” Kristine Kathryn Rusch casts light on the powerful struggle between right and wrong, slavery and freedom.

“The Arrival of Truth” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

The Arrival of Truth by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I first heard the story the morning they took my third child. My body, half-hidden in the feather bed, ached from the effort of birthing a baby I would never raise. My breasts dribbled milk that would soon feed a white child. The Missus and Old Sal, the midwife, took my new baby out of the room so I couldn’t hear it cry. I reached for it—all small, bloody, and wrinkled—but wasn’t strong enough to get out of bed. As the door closed, I turned by face against the Missus’ feather pillow and wished I had died.

A breeze rustled the gingham curtains on the open window. Voices echoed in the yard, and from Big Jim’s yelp, I knew I had had a son. The voices hushed for a moment, then Big Jim cried, “No! No! That’s my boy! You can’t take him away! That’s my boy!” and I tried to sink deeper in the soft bed, softer than I was used to, the bed the Missus used when a girl gave birth to a baby she could sell and make more money for the House. Big Jim’s shout got cut off mid-word as a whip snapped and cracked through the air. Big Jim would get another scar because of my baby, and the child wasn’t even his.

The door creaked open, and Nesta stood there, eyes sad as eyes could be. She snuck inside and let the door close quietly. She was big and soft, and I wanted to bury my face against her chest and cry until no more tears would come, but when her hand caressed my forehead, I couldn’t look at her.

“Oh, baby,” she said. “All that learning didn’t save you. It don’t save none of us, long as we look different from them.”

She took a cornhusk doll, painted black, with frizzed yarn hair and a sackcloth dress, and tucked it in my arms. “Sojourner’s coming,” Nesta said. “And when she gets here, all them white folks are going to learn the Truth.”

Then she slipped out the door, quietly as she came. I buried my face in the doll’s rough skin and I wished, Lord how I wished, it could move and cry and pat its little fist against my cheek.

***

Some days I can still remember the feeling of being a child, the closest to white I’ll ever get.

The old Missus, she had ideas that her son, Master Tom, said was dangerous and harmful to his way of life. But when he was a boy and had no say in the house, the old Missus would teach some of us. She taught us how to read and spell and how to talk proper. She read to us from the Bible and said we needed to know God’s Word so we could get into heaven. She made us promise we would never tell nobody what she done because she would have to stop and some of us could get killed because of her mistakes. So we practiced reading in private, hiding the books when the old Master or Jake the overseer or any guests came to the House. The old Missus talked to use like we were the same as the white folks she spent the rest of her time with. And she loved us, each and every one. No babies got sold when she ran the House, and she promised that when she died, we would all go free.

But she died one sunny afternoon when her horse stumbled and threw her. The old Master said her will was written by a crazy woman who didn’t understand money, and he wouldn’t abide by her wishes. So none of us got our papers, and none of us were set free. The old Master brought us—the ones she educated—into the House and made us “the best House niggers” in the state of Carolina. We were never allowed to leave, never able to talk with the field hands or any of the others, as if he was afraid our knowledge would spread like pox through a room full of children.

***

Three days later, when I could stand alone, the Missus let me return to my cabin behind the House. I took the doll with me, clutching it like the child it had replaced. The Missus had promised me to the Wildersons down the road, and I was to pack my things and get before nightfall.

Big Jim wasn’t inside, but we had already said our goodbyes before he took the livery out that morning. He said he’d keep my side of the bed warm, but we both knew I wouldn’t be back until the Wilderson baby was weaned. A lot could change in that kind of time. People could get sold, people could get killed, people could disappear in the middle of the night. I only promised that I would love him as long as I lived.

The cabin was neat except for a pile of bloody rags that sat by the door. Jim had probably used them to stop the bleeding on his arm where the whip had wrapped around his skin while he was trying to save my baby boy. The cabin wasn’t much—a straw bed, a few chairs, and a table—but it was the place where we could speak our minds. After the old Master died, and Master Tom married, places like that had become harder and harder to find.

I put my other dress and my doll in a scarf and packed it in a wicker basket. Then I went out front to catch the delivery wagon as it made its way into town.

I sat on the back, and got off on the road outside the Wilderson place. The Wildersons had a bigger plantation than we did, and more babies this year than we did. But Missus Wilderson wouldn’t tolerate a field hand nursing her babies, and she wanted someone “almost human”—like me. After I’d been there a while she told me I didn’t talk like a nigger and if she closed her eyes she could pretend I was a person, someone worth talking to. She expected me to be flattered, and even though I thanked her in a quiet voice, I could see she was surprised by my tone.

Big arching trees hung over the Wildersons’ lane. After the wagon dropped me off, I walked, exhaustion making my limbs shake. I had to stop once, and lean against a wide tree trunk to catch my breath. My mother used to go back to the fields the same day she had a baby, and my pa used to say that was what faded her away. Dizziness swept through me, just as it must have through her the day she collapsed on the field—the day after my baby brother was born—and the overseer beat her to death with his whip. The old Missus had fired him, and the old Master had jailed him for destroying property. But that never did bring my mama back.

“Hey, girl, they’s expecting you up to the house.”

The voice came from a big man standing just inside the trees. His skin was dark as tree bark and his muscles bulged out of his ripped and torn shirt. His eyes shone with intelligence and when he spoke, he smiled.

“How much farther is it?” My voice sounded breathless.

“Half mile maybe,” he said.

I nodded, the thought of the extra distance defeating me. Maybe I could go a few more yards, but not a half mile. My body hadn’t recovered enough.

He peered at me through the trees, then crossed the road and stopped beside me. He was a big man, bigger than Big Jim. “You don’t look so good.”

I nodded again, afraid to say anything.

“How long since you had that baby?”

“Three days.” The words were no more than a whisper.

“And they sent you to walk? Here, honey, lean on me. I got strength enough for both of us.”

He touched me and I jerked back.

“It’s like that, is it?” He spoke softly, almost to himself. “Okay. I ain’t gonna hurt you, honey. Just let me put my arm around you, and then you can lean against me. Okay?”

I swallowed, not wanting him to touch me, but knowing I wouldn’t make it to the great house any other way. He slid his arm around my back, his skin hot against mine. He smelled of soap and honest sweat, and his touch was gentle.

“Come on,” he said, and together we walked down the center of the road leading to the great house. The trees towered over us, and an occasional bird chirped. The Wilderson plantation was quiet. No one shouted over the breeze. No overseer’s whip echoed in the distance. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought no one lived at the end of the road.

A bead of sweat trickled down my forehead, and the man tightened his grip. By the time we had reached the house, he was almost carrying me while keeping me upright.

“Lord a mercy, girl, where you been? The mistress is swearing and that baby’s crying like it won’t never shut up.” A woman stood on the porch, hair tied back in a scarf, sun reflecting off her dark face. She had her arms crossed on her hips and her skirts swished as she walked. She was in charge of the house. No one had to tell me that.

“She’s three days from the baby,” the man said, “and they left her down the road. She can barely walk and I think she’s bleeding.”

“Don’t know how to take care of their people over there,” the woman muttered as she walked down the stairs. She leaned over me and took me from the man. She was almost as strong as he was. Her hand brushed my breast as she reached around. “Lord, you’re full up too. We’ll get you to a bed, put that baby against you. He’ll ease that pain in your chest some.”

I looked at her sharply. Maybe she was referring to my swollen breasts. But I didn’t think so. I wondered how many babies had been taken away from her.

The man hadn’t let go of me. The woman looked at him. “I got her, Sam,” she said. She pulled me close, but he still didn’t let go. “Let her go, Sam. You ain’t allowed in the house.”

Sam released me. I stumbled against the woman, then she supported me.

“It’s a crime,” he said, “the way they treat people. When Sojourner comes—”

“Shush,” the woman said. “We don’t have talk like that at my house.”

“This ain’t your house.” But he said no more. He tipped a make-believe hat at me. “When you’re feeling better, you come sit with Sam. We’ll have ourselves a talk.”

I nodded, and the movement made me dizzy. When we reached the porch, the front door opened, and Missus Wilderson stood there, face blotchy and red. “They said you’d be here this morning. A sugar teat isn’t doing my Charles any good.”

Behind her, I could hear a baby wail. The sound made the pain in my chest grow stronger.

“She’s sick,” the woman holding me said.

“Something she’ll pass to the baby?”

“Her babe was born a few days ago. She ain’t recovered yet.”

Missus Wilderson humphed and moved away from the door. “As long as she can feed my boy, I don’t care what you do with her, Darcy.”

Darcy didn’t reply. She helped me in the front door. The house was cooler than the outdoors, and the hallway was lighter and airier than the one I was used to. She led me past the kitchen to a small room furnished with a cross and some figures made out of straw. I set my basket down, and she eased me onto a chair. The dizziness swept across me as she opened my bodice and handed me a wet rag. I ran it across my chest and my face. The cool cloth sent a shiver through me.

Then Darcy was beside me again, the squalling baby in her hands. I reached for him before I knew what I was doing. I didn’t want to feed another woman’s child. I wanted to feed my own. But if I closed my eyes, I didn’t see this little boy’s pale skin. All I felt was his soft baby fat. He smelled of newborn, and he clamped onto my breast with a greediness that hurt.

I rocked him, not opening my eyes, not wanting to see him, and I crooned a lullaby that Big Jim used to sing to our boys before they got taken away. But I couldn’t pretend. I knew that someday this boy in my arms would grab a woman with skin darker than his, beat her senseless, knock her to the ground, and stick himself inside her. I knew he would hire an overseer who used a whip instead of kindness. I knew that no matter whose breast he nursed on, he would never see people with dark skin as human beings.

***

After a week of Darcy’s food and care, I could walk on my own. The dizziness left me and the ache in my bones left with it. I missed the ache—it was my last attachment to my child. The bleeding stopped after about a day, and we didn’t discuss it or what it might mean about my chances for having future children. Little Charles was growing fat, and he reached for me instead of his mother, much to her dismay.

I had no place in the household, except as a milk store for Charles. I had to stay near the house, so that I could feed him when he was hungry, but other than that, I could do anything I wanted.

It took me another week to find Sam. His words had bothered me because they echoed Nesta’s. When Sojourner comes . . . When she gets here, all them white folks are going to learn the Truth.

Twilight had fallen across the fields, making shadows long and dark. Charles was already asleep. I walked toward the field-hand cabins—no restrictions on me here. Apparently Master Tom hadn’t told the Wildersons that I could infect their darkies with all kinds of evil knowledge.

Children scrabbled in the hard dirt, and adults sat on porches and talked. Sam sat outside his cabin, whittling, and listening to the conversation around him.

“Okay if I join you?” I asked.

He indicated a space on the wood stairs leading up to the door. I gathered my skirts under me and sat.

“I didn’t spect to see you again,” he said. “You one of them precious house girls your master always bragging up.”

A shiver ran down my back and it was still light enough for Sam to catch it. “He don’t treat his people right, do he?”

I bit my lip and looked across at the children. They were yelling and carrying on, playing a game I didn’t understand.

“And he didn’t want no baby around to remind him of that, did he?”

I started to stand up. Sam reached over and grabbed my arm. I pulled away from him.

“He hurt you right bad.”

His words brought back that night: the smell of liquor on Master Tom’s breath, the weight of his body on mine, the bruises I couldn’t hide from Big Jim. He had wanted to kill Master Tom that night. I had stopped him.

Sam was watching me with the same intensity he had that day in the lane. “And you ain’t never gonna let a man touch you again, are you?”

“Lordy, girl, you a bunch of sticks and bones, and that baby broke some things when it busted out of ya. I had me a woman once. Don’t need another.” He waved a hand. “Sit. Tell me why you come searching me out.”

I sat back down and laced my hands in my lap. My fingers were cold, despite the heat of the night. “When I came here, you spoke of something. You said, ‘When Sojourner comes.’ What did you mean by that?”

He let out air slowly, then glanced around to see if anyone was looking. Twilight had given way to darkness. The children were inside. Candles flickered through the open windows, and five cabins down an old man smoked a pipe on his porch.

“You ain’t never heard of Sojourner?”

“Once I did. Nesta, the cook up to the Great House told me when they took my baby away. She said when Sojourner gets here, white folks are going to learn the truth.”

“The Truth, girl.” He put an emphasis on truth so strong that I could hear the capital letter. “You was born into this life. I can tell from that fancy speech of yourn. Was your mama born into this life?”

I nodded. My family had come to the colony with the Master’s family. The old Missus said we had a good and strong heritage.

“And you been a house woman your whole life?”

Again, I nodded.

“They raised you like family till the young master decided that the people can’t be family.”

“This isn’t about me,” I said. “I want to know about Sojourner.”

“Girl, what I’m saying is you’d know if you was raised in the fields.” He leaned back in his chair. The chair creaked. The muscles rippled through his dark skin. “When I was a boy, they’d sing a song when the overseer was gone. They’d sing about the promised land and how the savior would come to the land and take us all to a better place. You ain’t never heard them stories?”

I shook my head. My mama was happy that the old Missus took me into the schoolroom. When Mama put me down at night, she would say, “You almost white, honey. Someday, you go free and you will live without no whip and no dogs.”

“You do remember when that boy up to Virginia led a bunch of the people and killed the white folks?”

I didn’t remember it because it happened the year of my birth. I had heard of it, though. Master Tom would talk to the overseer about it. The way they had to keep us separate so that we would never think of a rebellion. “I know of it,” I said.

Sam stared straight ahead. Nothing moved in the darkness. “I was ten. The overseers came down and locked us all in our cabins. They took the men away and the women were left alone with the children for days. They was afraid the rebellion would spread down here and all the white folks would die. Anyone caught singing about the promised land got whipped. And anyone who talked about a savior got beat within an inch of his life.”

“I don’t remember that,” I said, and felt inadequate because of it. I was glad the darkness hid my face. My mama talked about the bad times, but I never associated it with the rebellion. It hadn’t mattered to me. It had happened before I was born.

“That didn’t stop the stories. They just got whispered in bits and pieces, back and forth. We spected things to get worse. And we spected our savior to come. But no one ever did.” Lights came on in the kitchen in the back of the house. I strained to hear the baby’s cry, but the yard was quiet.

“Then a few years ago, a runaway come through the barn. He was torn and bloodied and tired, but he told a story, Lord, we wanted to hear. He said Sojourner came to his plantation and taught white folks Truth. And all the people went free.”

I sat up straighter. “What happened?”

“He was too addled to tell us. We passed him along, and another came, just as bloodied, saying the same thing. Only he said Sojourner led them into battle, like the white folks’ Bible talked about, and all the people went free.”

“How come we haven’t heard about it?”

Sam shook his head. “These battles are quiet ones. Ain’t nobody getting caught, and ain’t nobody gonna tell.”

“Sounds like tales to me,” I said. I stood up and brushed off my skirt. “White folks won’t let niggers free, not without a fight. And if niggers put up a fight, then white folks kill them, and kill other niggers until the fight has gone out of us.”

Sam was silent for a long moment. I thought, with my simple argument, I had knocked a hole in his belief, and I felt oddly disappointed. The story of Sojourner had an appeal to it that I wanted to feel. I didn’t want to destroy his belief so easily.

“You call the people ‘niggers,’” he said. “Just like the white folk. We all know we different. But we ain’t niggers or pickaninnies or any of them pet terms they use. We’s people just like they is. And we shouldn’t make ourselves sound any other way.”

He got up and walked around me. The steps sagged under his weight. He went into his cabin without saying good night.

My cheeks were hot. I hadn’t meant to offend him, by insulting his beliefs or by using a word that I had heard since I was a child. I stood on his porch for a long time, thinking about the difference a word made. I had never thought of myself as a person. To me, people were always white.

The light in the kitchen grew, and a bad feeling ran through me. I lifted my skirt and crossed the now-empty yard. I was too awake to sleep, but something called me indoors.

I mounted the back porch steps and let myself in the back door. A hand slapped me across the mouth, and I stumbled backwards, holding up my arm to protect myself. Missus Wilderson stood there, her long hair flowing down her back, her nightgown askew. “You were brought here to feed my baby, not to go whoring.”

I wiped my palm against my mouth, felt if come away bloody. “I wasn’t—”

“Sam is a big man and probably just what you girls want, but I won’t have my baby’s milk tainted, you hear me? You stay in the house at night. You stay here where the baby can have you if he needs you.”

I nodded, knowing that she would never listen to my denials. She turned, grabbed her lamp, and walked back through the darkened hallway, looking like Lady Macbeth from the Shakespeare stories the old Missus used to scare us with.

Darcy stepped out of the corner where she had been standing. She dipped a rag in the water basin and wiped my mouth. “She knows you wasn’t doing nothing with Sam ‘cept talking. She watched almost from the start. She just don’t like him none. She’d have sold him long ago, but the Master says he’s a good one in the fields, and won’t let him go.”

My lower lip hurt. I could feel it swelling. “Why did she hit me?”

“She’s got a sense about her. When you showed up at the door, she said the final time was here, and there wasn’t nothing she could do.”

“Final time?”

“Lord, honey, white folks is as superstitious as we are. They got their strange beliefs too. I think all the white folks know they’re sitting on a powder keg, and they just waiting for it to explode underneath them.”

I took the cloth from Darcy’s hand and wiped my own mouth. I had never thought of rebellion before. No one talked about it at home, at least no one had talked about it with me. If Sojourner had come there, would they have killed me with the white folks? Because I had lessons and could read and talk like a white person, did that mean my skin had lightened? It didn’t stop Master Tom from beating me senseless and planting a baby in me. Or did he only do that to some women? Those who could pass for his own kind?

“They’ll kill us,” I said.

“Ah, honey.” Darcy brushed a strand of hair from my forehead. “At least we’ll die free.”

***

I didn’t leave the house for weeks. Little Charles grew heavier and more demanding. Missus Wilderson ignored me. Darcy made sure I was fed and had someone to talk with, and Sam waved whenever he saw me on the porch. I didn’t wave back.

The humid spring turned into a hot summer. The aches left my body and Charles crawled into my heart. Sometimes, as I put him down to sleep, I called him mine. And in so many ways he was. He reached for me and cooed when he saw me. When he had angry fits, only I could stop them. He tolerated his mother, cried at his father, but loved me.

I found no solace in that.

Mid-July I was sitting in the porch swing, rocking Charles and humming him a lullaby. He didn’t want to sleep. He reached for the butterfly circling around us, played with the buttons on my dress. His eyes would droop and then open again, as if he didn’t want to miss anything. I told him now was the time for sleeping. When he grew up, sleeping would be something he would have no time for at all.

A noise stirred Charles out of his playfulness. He turned his head toward the road, and so did I. A horse’s hooves pounded against the dirt. An angry or panicked horse, one that had ridden at top speed all day. Darcy came onto the porch followed by the Master and Missus. Sam appeared from around back, and even though the Missus tried to send him away, he stayed.

The rider came around from under the canopy of trees. He leaned over his horse, mud-splattered and exhausted. His hair, plastered to the side of his head, was straight, and his skin under the dirt was white. His clothes had once been nice, but they were torn and showed signs of wear.

“Get them out of here,” he said, waving a hand at Sam, Darcy, and me.

“How can we help you?” the Missus’ tone was cold. She didn’t take orders from anyone, especially from someone she didn’t know.

“I came to warn you,” he said. “But I won’t do it with them here.”

The Master nodded at Sam, Darcy, and me, but we didn’t move. “Come inside,” he said. “We’ll find you something to drink and maybe a bite to eat. Give Sam your horse, and he’ll take care of it.”

The man clutched the reins tighter. “Just show me where,” he said, “and I’ll rub down the horse myself.”

“Sam,” the Master said, then caught the look on the man’s face. Pure fear. I recognized it because I had seen it on so many dark faces all my life. “Never mind. I’ll take him to the stables. I don’t want you people here when I get back.”

Charles was wide awake now, and leaning forward. The excitement entranced him. The Missus took him from me. “He’s not going to sleep now,” she said. But for the first time, her words held no blame. The situation had her as spooked as it had the rest of us.

Darcy took my arm and led me down the stairs. We followed Sam into the back. The Master and the stranger were on their way to the stable, the horse limping behind them.

“Something had happened,” Darcy said.

“He’s scared of us,” I said.

“They all scared of us.” Sam reached in his pocket, took out a handkerchief, and rubbed the sweat off his face. “That’s why they treat us the way they do.”

“He’s scared worse,” Darcy said. “You seen him.”

“Yeah.” Sam tucked the handkerchief in his pocket. “That’s why I want to hear what he says. He ain’t going to tell it all to the Missus. He saying something right now.”

The groom came out of the stable, along with two stableboys, looking as confused as we felt. Sam signaled us to stay where we were, and he hurried along the path, then went around behind the stable. Darcy shook her head.

“Boy gonna get himself a whipping if he not careful,” she said.

I stood as quietly as I could. I didn’t like the feeling that surrounded me. The stranger’s presence had added a tension to the place, a tension that made all the other tensions visible.

The groom went to his cabin, and the stableboys sat outside, staring at the stable as if they could learn the secrets. Darcy said no more to me. After a few minutes, she touched my elbow. The Missus had come onto the back porch and was staring at the stable. She no longer held Charles. A slight frown creased her face. She too knew she wasn’t going to get the whole story.

And if she stood there long enough, she would see Sam.

I wiped my damp palms on my skirt and headed up the stairs. “Did you get Charles to sleep, ma’am?”

She looked at me as if I were intruding. “He’s down. I don’t think he’s sleeping though.”

“Long as he’s quiet,” I said. “I think it’ll be a minute before the men come back. Let me help you get out some lemonade, in case they want something cold.”

Her glance was measuring. I brought my head down. My heart pounded. It seemed important to me that she didn’t see Sam.

“I’ll be gone before they get back. I promise.”

She sighed then, and lifted her skirts. I followed her into the big cool kitchen. Her cousin had sent a shipment of lemons from Florida the week before, and although much of the fruit was bruised, some of it was good enough to use. We had had all of the lemonade that morning, and so I stood side by side with Missus Wilderson, squeezing lemons and listening for any sign of the men.

We had filled two pitchers by the time we heard footsteps on the stairs. I grabbed a towel and wiped off my hands, then disappeared out the front way, as the men came in the back.

“—didn’t see me leave,” the stranger was saying. “That’s how they’re getting away with this. No one is left.”

I couldn’t hear the Master’s response. I went out the front door and circled around the house to find Sam and Darcy standing in the yard.

“There you are,” Sam said. “Come to my cabin. We’re far enough away there.”

I glanced up to see if the Missus was watching, but she was nowhere in sight. Darcy and I followed Sam down the path to the one-room shack he called home.

The inside was neat and well kept. The straw mattress had a wooden frame beneath it, and the wooden furniture lining the walls was strong and well made. Not hand-me-downs issued by the family. Sam had made his own home.

I took a cane-backed chair in the corner, and Darcy sat beside me. Sam sat on the edge of the bed, where he could see through the windows and keep an eye on the door.

“It’s happening,” he said to Darcy. “Right now.”

“That’s just talk,” she said.

“Not no more. He’s been riding up from the south, warning every Great House he sees. He ain’t gonna stop until he hits every plantation between here and the capital.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“He said the people were talking among themselves for days, then this stranger shows up, and suddenly the people don’t take orders no more. Then, in the middle of the night, they come into the house just like they did in Virginia all them years ago, with pitchforks and knives and butcher the family. He’d been staying with one of the daughters—snuck in so’s nobody would see, and he got out before the mess got too bad. He grabbed a horse and started to ride, to warn white folks it was coming.”

“Now they’ve probably lynched all the people who done the killing,” Darcy said, “and the rest of us will get punished.”

“Maybe,” Sam said. “Or maybe he’s just the first wave in a battle we ain’t begun to fight.”

“Or maybe he’s crazy,” I said, “and none of this is true.”

“Don’t think so,” Sam said. “He looks like a man who knows.”

We were quiet after that. The small cabin grew oppressive. I went out onto the stairs and heard Charles wailing. He was hungry. The Missus came on the back porch, looking for me. When she saw where I was standing, her mouth set in a thin line.

“I guess you can come back in now,” she said. “Charles needs you.”

I nodded and crossed the yard. Missus Wilderson went back inside. As I climbed the stairs and stood on the porch, I heard voices coming from the kitchen.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” the Master said. “We give them a good home.”

“A good home isn’t all they want.”

I pushed open the door. Missus Wilderson stood near it, biting her nails. Charles was in a basket on the table, face red and streaked with tears. I went to him and picked him up, not happy that she had let him cry without comforting him.

“I’ll take him outside,” I said.

She shook her head. “They’re almost done. I don’t want Charles outside.”

I sighed and sat in a kitchen chair. I unbuttoned my blouse and put Charles to my chest. He clasped with his mouth and both hands. He hadn’t been hungry, he had been starving.

Missus Wilderson watched for a minute, then went into the other room. Her look had left me cold. I had seen her use it with me before. Almost a jealousy, and half an envy, as if she wanted Charles at her breast instead of mine. But it was a sign of good breeding and wealth when a woman didn’t have to feed her own children. Besides it would destroy her figure and give her marks.

I didn’t mind the marks. I just wished they had come from my own child instead.

“I take good care of the people who work for me,” the Master said. They must have been in the dining room. Only in the kitchen could we hear the dining room so well.

“They don’t work for you,” the stranger said. “You own them. I think that’s what they object to.”

“And I feed them, and house them, and clothe them. They’re little more than savages. Only a few can be trained to do anything beyond the most menial task. I take care of them and they’re grateful to me.”

I brushed the thin hair on little Charles’ scalp. Feeding his baby was a menial task? I could read and write and it was against the law for me to have those skills. I could speak better than Missus Wilderson and I was still owned by someone. I was as smart as they were, and still all of my children had been taken away from me. Maybe Sam was right. Maybe I had let their thinking invade my own.

“Grateful,” I whispered to Charles. “We’re not grateful. We’re scared.”

He closed his eyes and continued sucking. I cradled him to me. I didn’t want a revolution in which all the white folks would die. I loved some of them. I loved the little ones, like Charles, before they had time to turn into someone like Master Tom back at the plantation I was born at.

“I thank you for the warning,” Master Wilderson said. “I will heed it as best I can.”

“Protect your family,” the stranger said. “Get rid of as many of those slaves as you can.”

The voices receded from the dining room. Soon I couldn’t hear them at all. I was tense, waiting for Missus Wilderson to come back. She didn’t. Charles fell asleep, letting my nipple slip out of his mouth. I held him and rocked him just a little, clutching him to me.

After a few minutes, I heard a horse on the lane. The stranger was gone.

I took Charles to his daybed in the front parlor. The Master and Missus were standing on the porch looking at the dust cloud in the lane.

“. . . give this kind of thing credence,” he was saying. “It might give them ideas.”

“But don’t we have to protect ourselves?” she asked.

“This family has been on this piece of land for over a hundred years. If slaves were going to rebel, they would have done it long ago, when things were much more isolated. I think he got caught in an unusual incident, and it has spooked him so badly that he is afraid of any nigger he sees.”

Missus Wilderson shrugged and moved away from her husband. She didn’t believe him, but she had no choice except to abide by what he wanted. We weren’t so different, she and I. She had a nice house and a legitimate place in society, but her husband still owned her. She couldn’t do what she wanted to do.

She couldn’t even nurse her child herself.

I made myself stop watching the interchange and took Charles to his bed. He didn’t wake up as I put him down. I covered him with a light sheet and kissed his forehead. He stirred, but his eyes remained closed.

“He’s a beautiful baby.” Missus Wilderson stood behind me. I made myself turn slowly, even though my heart was pounding a drumbeat against my chest. “Even though sometimes I think he’s more yours than mine. Do you love my child?”

We had never had a moment like this before. She wasn’t speaking to me out of anger or even fear. She was actually curious about how I felt. I was the one who felt the fear. I didn’t know what she wanted of me.

I decided to tell her the truth.

“They took my baby away from me the day he was born,” I said. “Once he left my body, I never got to see him or touch him again. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I pretend Charles is that baby. But he isn’t. He’s yours. He looks like you and he loves you and I could never ever do to another woman what’s been done to me.”

The words rushed out of me before I could stop them. She put a hand to her chest as if she were trying to guard her heart. “I never sold anyone’s babies,” she said. “I’m not like your owners.”

“I’m not blaming you. I just wanted to reassure you that I would never hurt or steal your child.”

She nodded, brushed her hair out of her face, and walked out of the room. I leaned against the daybed. My hands were shaking. I had never spoken that frankly with a white person before, not even with the old Missus.

I wondered if anything would change because of it.

***

The tensions remained after the stranger appeared. My Master and the Wildersons had a long conversation and other gentlemen from the area appeared to discuss the situation. From the bits and snatches I gathered, they decided to tighten security around their homes, to punish “uppity niggers,” and to make sure if more than three of us gathered it got broken up.

Missus Wilderson didn’t speak to me again, and I cared for Charles in almost complete silence. Sometimes I exchanged words with Darcy and sometimes I spoke to Sam, but mostly I kept to myself.

Early August brought with it hot nights and sweltering days. Just into the month, I carried a sheet to the back porch swing, hoping to catch a little midnight breeze. I lay across the wooden slats. Even though they were uncomfortable, they were better than the sweaty stickiness of my straw bed. Down by the cabins, I could hear restlessness and children crying as people moved about.

The moon was full, and cast a thin daylight across the path. The dogs started barking out near the road, then just as quickly stopped. The voices from the cabins stopped too. I sat up. It felt as if the entire yard was waiting.

People came out of their cabins and stood on the stairs as if they felt the same thing I did. In the Great House, no one got up except Darcy, who let herself out of the kitchen and stood by the door. She didn’t seem to see me.

We were all looking in the direction of the dogs. Then I heard a gasp. I looked toward the sound. Sam was standing in his door, facing the opposite direction from everyone else. I followed his gaze and gasped myself.

A woman stood at the edge of the path. She was tall and angular, her hair cropped short. “Let’s gather at the edge of the field,” she said.

Sam went and got the others. Darcy and I walked toward the nearest field following the woman. As we got closer, we realized that she was old. Her skin was leathery and tough and her hair had turned white. Neither of us had even seen her before.

She stood on a wooden box that Darcy brought over and watched as the people gathered around her. Mothers held their children close, and the men stood forward, eager for a fight.

“My name’s Sojourner,” she said, her voice just loud enough for all of us to hear. “And I come to give you a message. The white folks ain’t gonna give us freedom. It costs them too much. We got to take freedom. There’s more of us than there is of them. It’s time to make life ours not theirs.”

She looked at her hands for a moment, then faced us again. In the moonlight, her face looked as if it had absorbed the night. “I’m going from place to place telling people it’s time to be free. I want to see all my people stand on their own in my lifetime, and my lifetime is going away quick.”

“You telling us to fight?” Sam asked.

“I’m telling you to take control of your lives however you want to do it. And I want women to take control two places, with the white folks and with your men. We’re all equal in God’s eyes.”

Simple words. As I repeat them back, they have lost the magic they held that night. She spoke with the power of a vision, and we listened as though the words of God himself came from her lips. She stepped down off the platform, and people tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t talk. “I got too many places to stop,” she said.

And she walked away.

The others stayed behind and talked, but I followed her to the road. She walked with her back straight, her head up, even though her movements were slow and tired. So the stranger had been right. Someone was leading my people home. A woman, with a single message, seeking to overthrow an unjust system that had existed for generations.

Shouts and cries echoed behind me. I turned back to see people hacking at their own cabins and setting fire to the Great House. Through the smoke, I thought I saw the Missus’ face. Do you love my child? she asked.

He was the only baby I got, and now they were setting his house on fire because he was born in the wrong place to the wrong family. Wasn’t that as bad as what they had done to us all these years? Or did we follow their Bible: an eye for an eye, a whip scar for a whip scar, a murder for a murder, and a baby for a baby?

A giddiness took me. I ran toward the house. I wanted to be free like the rest of them. I wanted to have my own babies and my own life. I wanted a house with more than one room and Big Jim beside me for all the rest of my days. I wanted to live like free people lived, making my own choices.

But I didn’t want to do it at the expense of Charles and his mama.

Smoke was already inches thick as I burst through the front door. In the back, I heard glass smashing and people laughing. My eyes started to water. I charged up the stairs. Charles was crying, gasping wails that made my heart ache. I ran into his room and gathered him in my arms as the Missus came in.

“You’re stealing my baby.”

“I’m saving him.” I wrapped him in his blankets and hid his face against my arms. “You got to get out now. They’re going to kill you.”

“I can’t let you take my baby,” she said.

“Then come with me. Get out now.”

“Laurel?” The Master’s voice echoed from the other room. For a moment, he sounded like Master Tom, and I wanted to go in and use a knife, hacking him to death. Beneath my surface lurked a sea of hatred.

“It’s like the man said,” she shouted. “They’ve gone crazy.”

He came into the nursery, with a shotgun leveled at me. “Put the baby down,” he said.

“You’re not going to shoot me while I’m holding Charles,” I said. “And you need me. I’m the only one who can get him away from here. You have to convince the people downstairs that you never meant them any harm. And I don’t think you can do it.”

He didn’t move the gun, but I knew he wouldn’t shoot. I turned and ran from the house, Charles pressed against me. The smoke had grown so thick that my breath caught in my lungs. Charles was gasping against me. The fire was eating the entire first floor. We ran past its heat and into the cooler night. I drank the fresh air like cold water. Charles coughed and spit up on me.

Sam was off to one side, leading them all on, and Darcy leaned against a tree, tears glinting off her cheeks. I ran down the road with half a dozen people I had never seen, not caring where I was going, careful to keep Charles’ face hidden.

We ran for what seemed like miles until we found an abandoned barn. I crawled inside, followed by a few others. Charles was crying softly, in fear, and I bared my breast for him. He took the milk, but his eyes remained open. He knew something was wrong.

Outside, we could hear the sounds of destruction. A woman I had never seen before made a place beside me in the straw. “She never said kill ’em,” the woman said. “She just said to take what’s ours. We could have slipped away in the night and nobody would have known.”

I didn’t say anything. I watched Charles eat, and then I soothed him until he slept. The woman beside me slept and I watched the light change through the crack under the door.

I hadn’t been thinking when I took Charles. I needed to go home, to Big Jim. When we took our freedom, we would search for our own children, our own past. But I knew, from the sounds all around me, that people had already scattered all over the countryside, and Big Jim was probably running, just like me.

We had said our goodbyes, just like we had done with our children. And even though I wasn’t ever going to stop looking for them, I doubted I would ever find them.

My arms were growing tired from holding Charles. I wrapped him in his blanket and put him in a nest of straw. Then I went to the door and peeked out. Smoke rose over the trees like a threatening cloud.

When she gets here, all them white folks are going to learn the Truth.

What truth? I wondered. That we hated them for holding us in place? That we hated the way they ripped up our lives and treated us like cattle? That we were human too? That was truth? That was something white folks had never been able to see? It seemed so simple. They had to have been blind to miss it.

Cries and yells echoed around me, and my body ached to join them. Smash a wall with an axe, destroy a man for taking a child. An eye for an eye.

A baby for a baby.

I looked back at Charles, sleeping peacefully. Within my reach, I had the best revenge of all.

***

I didn’t take it. At least, not in the obvious way.

After the fires, we followed the old Underground Railroad line and eventually ended up west, where the land goes on for miles and people are as scarce as coyotes. The trip wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t as rough as it could’ve been either. Charles and I survived.

Which was more than Big Jim did. I went back to my old home the morning after Sojourner appeared, and found his grave outside the house where I had been born. They’d buried him two weeks after I’d left. Master Tom had killed him for some infraction no one remembered. The Great House was torched, and the Master’s family dead, just like the Wildersons, who had been too stupid to listen to me. I left with Sam and Darcy and the rest from the Wilderson house, and they were the ones who got me and Charles safe.

Now we live in a house with five rooms in a community made up of our people. I wasn’t the only one who grabbed a white child, and by an unspoken pact, we never told them a word about their origins. Charles believes I’m his real mama and Sam his real papa. And he thinks that skin color changes like eye color. Some babies are born dark and others born light. I’m not going to tell him otherwise. I don’t ever want him to see me as anything less than I am, nor do I want our roles to get reversed, and for him to become the slave to my master.

We never learned what happened to Sojourner. We just know that most of the eastern and southern sides of the country disappeared in flames. All people may be equal in God’s eyes, but every once in a while only wrath will make us equal on earth.

And I still dream about that moment in the barn, when I looked at Charles and saw only his white skin. Not his baby fat, not his beloved blue eyes, not the little hands that trusted me. Only a white boy who would grow into a white man, and white men had hurt me and left me to die. When I took him in my arms, the anger filled me—

And then I remembered why I ran into that house for him. Why I had risked a freedom I had always desired for one baby boy.

I had lied to Missus Wilderson.

He was a substitute, yes, for the children I would never ever see.

But that never stopped me from loving him.

 

____________________________________________

“The Arrival of Truth” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

The Arrival of Truth

Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Alternate Warriors, edited by Mike Resnick, TOR Books, September 1993
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2016 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Zacarias Pereira Da Mata/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 are freezing here in Texas. I’ve thrown caution to the wind and made myself a second cup of tea. We started with Hot Apple Spice from Harney’s and now I have Christmas tea from Fortnum brewing.

Questions from readers have been piling up, so here is an interesting one.

What is a workshop burn?

A workshop burn occurs when writers overedit. One time I watched a documentary on beauty pageants and a hair stylist shared that hair looks best when it’s a little dirty, which is why we put product in it. Good writing is like that, a little dirty in a sense that it’s slightly rough and imperfect. There is texture to it.

In a workshop environment, you have a single manuscript being edited by a lot of people, and everyone is actively looking for imperfections. Even worse, everyone is also simultaneously attempting to perfect their own writing, and most writers concentrate on a single issue at a time. Meaning that if Bob became convinced that he is using the word “said” too much, he is going to scrutinize every occurrence of said in your manuscript.

The apartment below mine had the only balcony of the house. I saw a girl standing on it, completely submerged in the pool of autumn twilight. She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together. The way the profile of her face and body refracted in the soupy twilight made me feel a little drunk.

~ J.D. Salinger, A Girl I Knew

A gorgeous paragraph.

The writer sees the girl and forgets to breathe. It is a moment of profound loneliness and longing. You know that even if they never meet again, the writer will remember the girl for the rest of his life.

In a workshop environment, inevitably someone would want to fix “She wasn’t doing a thing” to “she wasn’t doing anything.” Then someone else will point out that it is too passive and it needs to be rewritten in an active voice, so it will become “doing nothing”: or “She did nothing,” and then someone else will point out that the girl has no description. Pretty soon you have “The girl leaned on the balcony rail, doing nothing, the curtain of her dark hair spilling over her shoulders” and the magic is gone.

Here is what Chat GPT did with it:

The apartment below mine was the only one with a balcony. I watched a girl standing on it, enveloped by the rich haze of autumn twilight. She wasn’t doing anything that I could discern, just leaning against the railing, as if she were holding the universe in place. The way the soft contours of her face and body merged with the hazy light left me feeling a bit unsteady, as though the world itself had shifted.

Ehhhh, no.

Does this mean you should ignore the workshop feedback?

It’s a complicated question. The stock answer is to use the suggestions that you feel make your writing better, but when you are starting out, it’s often hard to figure out what is “better.”

If you are in doubt, it helps to ask when the edits were made. Did the reader read the whole piece of writing first and then offered corrections because they are supposed to or was the need to correct strong enough to stop the reader? Only the second type of correction really matters. Did they stumble over something? Was the issue severe enough to interrupt the act of reading? If it was, it might be something to consider. But then again, we have Bob, who will highlight every “said” in the manuscript as he is going through it out of principle.

::raises her cup of tea:: Here is to Bob! Good luck with your writing this week.

The post Workshop Burn first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Dis mah tunnel, do note trezpaz.

Jus chillin.

I see nothings, I hear nothings.

Y’all are weird. You know that right?