• THE SALT SPRINGS REPORT
    The order came through at 0600. Another town. Another mystery. Captain Shane Holt rolled out of the passenger seat of the Humvee and stared at Salt Springs. It wasn't really a town anymore. More like a collection of abandoned trailers and rusted oil pumps held together by dust and indifference. The New Mexico sky was the color of bruised metal. "Thirty-eight dead," Sergeant Kirk said from the...
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  • Blood and Magnolias
    I. The house was sinking. Not dramatically—there were no cracks in the foundation, no doors that stuck, no floors that tilted. It was a slower, more insidious descent, the kind that happens when the earth itself forgets what it is supposed to hold. Bell Thorne noticed it first in the garden. The magnolia trees, which her grandmother had planted in 1921, were flowering out of season. It was...
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  • The Epoch of the Iron Will
    (Act I: The Dying Light) The Empire of Solara was a sprawling corpse of a civilization, its cities crumbling under the weight of a thousand years of bureaucracy. Kaelen was a soldier of the borderlands, a man who had seen the horizon burn and the forests turn to ash. He didn't seek the throne; he sought a way to stop the bleeding. He was a man of iron and silence, respected by his men not for...
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  • The Starlight Protocol
    **Manhattan, 1924** The conference hall at the Plaza Hotel smelled of cigarette smoke and expensive perfume. Thomas Webb sat in the back row, half-listening to a professor from Princeton drone on about the thermodynamic implications of stellar evolution. Thomas was thirty-two, a sociology lecturer at Yale, and he had learned long ago that the most effective way to survive an academic conference...
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  • The House at the End of the Radio Range
    The antenna rose from the cotton field like the skeleton of some enormous creature that had been dragged from the sea and left to bleach in the Mississippi sun. It was thirty feet tall at its highest point, a parabola of rusted steel and salvaged radar parts, angled toward the sky with an intention that made the townspeople uncomfortable. Old Man Silas Thorne had been building it for ten...
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  • The Observer at Omaha
    I first met General Marcus Hale on a Tuesday in March, 1946, at the Omaha military installation where I was assigned as his new aide-de-camp. I was twenty-four, fresh out of the Army Intelligence division, and I carried myself with the particular brand of nervous competence that comes from knowing you've been chosen for a job that's one size too big. Marcus Hale stood six feet two in his boots...
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  • The Architect of Silence
    (Act I: The White Room) The Saint Jude Institute was a masterpiece of minimalist cruelty. Everything was white—the walls, the floors, the uniforms—designed to strip a human being of any sensory anchor. Elias lived in Room 402, but he ruled the entire East Wing. He didn't use violence; he used information. He knew who had a secret addiction, who missed their children, and who was terrified of...
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  • The Last Echo of the Empire
    ## Act I: The Outset The city of Aethelgard was a spire of ivory and gold, the last bastion of the Solar Empire. For a thousand years, it had been the center of the known world, a place of unmatched art, science, and luxury. But the gold was peeling, and the ivory was cracking. The empire was not falling to an enemy from without, but to a rot from within. The nobility spent their days in a haze...
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  • The Black Signal
    The rain in Los Angeles doesn't wash anything clean. It just makes the grime slicker, turns the neon reflections on the pavement into smeared watercolors of red and blue and white, the colors of a crime scene that never ends. Vincent Moretti stood at the window of his office on the forty-second floor of the Moretti Tower and watched the rain turn the city into a blur of light and shadow. He was...
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  • The Rust Belt
    The factory closed on a Thursday. I know because Thursday was the only day the coffee in the breakroom was decent—Maura always brought extra cookies on Thursdays, and the machine didn't jam as often. By Friday, the fences were up. Chain link and razor wire, erected by men in hard hats who didn't look at us when they passed. By Saturday, the sign was taken down. Not the whole sign—just the part...
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