S.R. Hughes's Blog: The Froth-Mouthed Ravings of a True Lunatic, page 9
April 19, 2021
Epigraph : When They Wear the Mask
“A name is a mask, a hiding place. We are all nameless inside.”
—Marty Rubin.
“…it had whispered to him things about himself he did not know, things of which he had no conception until he took counsel with this great solitude — and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.”
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
What Happens Next? Table of Contents
April 4, 2021
UPDATES: When They Wear the Mask & Patreon!
Today we sing the future-song, the hymn of what-is-to-come.
(tl,dr: When They Wear the Mask Cover Reveal
When They Wear the Mask Launch Dates
Official Patreon Page Announcement)
Hear the first verse lilting through your bones:
Yes! Check out this killer cover-art designed by the phenomenal Patrick Tsao, creator of the Half-Man webcomic.
A fun detail: the cover, itself, is something of a spoiler. It’s drawn directly from a scene wherein…
Well. We’ll save that dark discovery for later.
In the meantime, feast your eyes on this cryptic work of dark art.
When They Wear the Mask Launch DatesThe second whale-hum attunes us!
Hear: the first chapters of When They Wear the Mask are upon us! Do we know fear…or excitement? Maybe a little bit of both?
(As the author, I mostly know the Fear.)
When They Wear the Mask will release on my site on Monday, April 19th, 2021.
It will release on RoyalRoad and Wattpad shortly afterwards.
If you’d like to skip on ahead to the next note in today’s gibbering chorus, you can become a Patreon patron and start reading it on Friday, April 9th, 2021. In fact, one of the key bonuses to becoming a Patreon patron is getting early access to all serial fiction. So for Patreon patrons, When They Wear the Mask will actually release on Friday, April 9th, 2021.
Speaking of which…
…is today!
(As the third fluting pipes through our innards.)
A few people have picked up the link on their own (sorry and also thank you) but I haven’t been particularly active on the platform because…I hadn’t planned to go public with it until…uh…today.
Yes, today! At this very moment! (Or, depending on when you read this, at a moment in the far distant past.)
Patreon represents a very important opportunity for me (and, by extension, my writing).
The business I ran as part of supporting my writing career went under during the pandemic and my income has drastically changed over the past year. I moved back to my home town to avoid a second stint of homelessness in NYC, but things have not gone particularly well since my return. Near the barrel-bottom of my life savings, I’m extremely uncertain what happens next. Writing has been my major passion for twenty years but the pay is painfully low (even when working with a publisher) and I’m doubtful I’ll be able to make quite as much money—or, more importantly, have anywhere near the control I used to have over my working/writing/living schedule—working at a business I do not run myself.
Any Patreon subscription represents, to me, an inch more breathing room in which to write. It represents an hour more time that I can spend writing instead of desperately scraping things together and re-tabulating my budget for its hundredth iteration.
So, yes, I would appreciate very much if you would be so kind as to subscribe to my lunacy.
Become a Patron!…the transmission has ended for now…The static-shriek lullaby has drifted back to silence, squidlings.
But beware: the future remains unknown.
With great love and squelching ululation,
S. R. Hughes
March 30, 2021
When They Wear the Mask, Excerpt #2
Detective John Bowman Booker stared up at the empty air long after the techs had cut down the hanging body and loaded it into the coroner’s van. Judge Howard Lesser had died during a violent confrontation the night before. His downstairs neighbor had gone on a date that evening and hadn’t returned. Otherwise, she’d have heard something. Instead, another condo owner in the complex had discovered the body while walking his dog into the park across the street just before dawn.
Someone had stabbed Howard Lesser multiple times, caused some amount of blunt force and lacerative damage to his torso, sliced and carved his face, and hanged him with a length of extension cord from his balcony. By the time of discovery, the birds had already seen to his eyes. The birds or something else…
Reaching a brown hand up to adjust a white medical mask, his glasses fogged by his own breath, Booker turned his gaze away from the nothing where the corpse had hung and peered down the street. A familiar, boxy old sedan rolled its way toward him. Chief of Oceanrest Metro PD Virgil LeDuff sat in the driver’s seat, hair graying to white, his pale, wrinkled hands on the wheel, slowing as he approached. Virgil LeDuff had a longstanding habit of getting over-involved with murder investigations. A longstanding habit of playing the role of a third detective.
For better and for worse, Virgil LeDuff meant well.
Booker waved his memo-pad at the car as it rolled to a stop. Virgil climbed out wearing a faded blue police parka, fumbling a white medical mask over his face. Adjusting the mask as he moved, Virgil crossed the sidewalk toward Booker, barely acknowledging the crime scene techs still working the area inside the yellow tape.
“As if there wasn’t enough wrong in this son-of-a-bitch world already,” Virgil said. Considering his sixty-year lifetime in Oceanrest, he didn’t have much of a down-east accent. But Booker didn’t sound much like a Bostonian, either.
“This was a deeply personal killing,” Booker replied.
“Is Castellanos even here, yet?”
“Nope. I mean, no, sir, she isn’t.”
“Nope’s good enough.” Virgil sighed. “That woman, earnest…I know she tries, but…” Detective Alejandra Castellanos carried two of the profession’s stereotypical crosses: a cunning mind and rampant alcoholism. Unfortunately for Booker, the latter usually overcame the former. Or, rather, fortunately for Virgil, since this allowed him the tacit permission to barge into the case. Shaking his head, Virgil switched topics. “Anyone knocking on doors, yet? Making calls?”
Two squad cars rolled up, preparations for the inevitable and imminent press.
“His fiancee’s at a conference halfway across the country,” Booker replied. “She was supposed to come back tonight.”
“Have any theories?” Virgil asked.
Judge Howard Lesser had been left out hanging as a portent, a sign. The corpse became a symbol, a method of communication. The murderer hadn’t just killed the man, they’d done it brutally, up close and personal, with the intent of making it hurt. They hadn’t needed to hang him. He would’ve bled out from the stabbing, anyway. From the stabbing or whatever they’d done to his face. If they’d wanted to stop his screams, they could’ve just cut his throat. The hanging made it a message. An omen.
(a lock and a)
“Who do you think most hates a judge?” he asked.
“I’d imagine the judged,” Virgil answered.
“Think we can get a hold of his case history?”
“A’yeah. I imagine we could.”
Previous Excerpt Take Me HomeWhen They Wear the Mask, Excerpt #1
Robert Robertson, Jr., recently divorced and more recently unemployed, sifted through his late Uncle’s estate mostly on autopilot. Bob had loved Uncle Nick more than any other member of his family, mother and father included, and the vice versa seemed equally true. Nick had always called him “Mikey,” which Bob preferred to his own name despite the cereal connotations. It beat out “Have you met Bob, y’know, Bob’s son?”
Ha ha.
He’d always hated his father for that. The name. Who lived their lives with such an embarrassing name and then handed it down to their children? But to Uncle Nick he’d always been “Mikey,” never Bob-Bob’s-son, many-faceted disappointment.
Few other people had harbored such affection for Uncle Nick. Bob’s late Aunt attested to that.
In the basement of a dead man’s house, recently divorced and more recently unemployed, Bob-Bob’s-son, multi-faceted disappointment, discovered a box, lock-garlanded and patina’d in a layer of white-out painted sigils and glyphs beyond his recognition. Breaking it open without quite knowing why (had he heard something whispering inside?), Bob found a mask.
What did it look like?
What an unimportant detail.
With a jacketed shoulder leaned against a tiled hallway wall, Deirdre reached out and knocked on Rehani’s door. Four teenagers, unmasked, joked their way upstairs from below. Deirdre, nee Imani Greene, reached out to repeat the knock when—
“’bout time,” Rehani greeted, flapping a hand that told Deirdre to enter.
Deirdre pulled down her own mask as she passed the threshold. A perimeter of Kosher salt lined Rehani’s apartment; the woman had nailed together a small step at the entrance so that guests wouldn’t break the seal on ingress. Deirdre stepped down. “None of the kids on the court had masks on.”
Rehani shrugged. “It’s an outdoors space.”
“COVID doesn’t care.”
Rehani wore bundled dreadlocks down to her waist, black sweatpants, and wraps of colorful sashes across her torso. In sandals, she flopped out of the foyer and into the main of the apartment. Despite having arrived from the Congo over twenty years earlier, she carried a slight accent. “You want something to drink?”
Passing under a dozen hanging devil’s traps and dream-catchers, Deirdre followed Rehani into the apartment’s kitchen. Deirdre also wore black sweat pants, with a camo tanktop and leather jacket above. A malignant growth of months-condensed and unmaintained hair snarled from her scalp where a clean-cut high-top once stood. It ached her scalp but she’d learned to live with it.
She’d learned to live with a lot of things.
Or without them.
“It’s noon,” she answered.
“So? You got anywhere to be?”
“I…no.”
“Well, not yet.” Rehani chortled. “Anyway, sanitizer’s next to the Tarot table. I’ll fix us up some, hmmmm…Cuba Libres?”
“You mean a ‘rum and coke?’”
“Sounds boring.”
Deirdre turned right, leaving the kitchen for Rehani’s living room—if ‘living room’ could adequately describe it. Rehani did relatively little living in the room, having converted it into an unofficial psychic business. While claiming not to use her actual psychic abilities with her clients—in fact, while claiming to have little control over them at all—Rehani felt confident enough in her theatrical skills to charge people for readings, advice, and fortune-telling. Deirdre found the industrial-sized jug of hand sanitizer and squirted some into her gardener’s palms. She rubbed her hands together and whuffed down on the over-cushioned couch that usually served as Rehani’s ‘waiting room.’
Rehani joined her shortly afterward, carrying a tray. Two coffee mug Cubra Libres and an enormous bowl of stew occupied most of the space. Next to the stew, twin plates carried pale balls of thick dough and twin bowls waited for filling. “Fufu.” Rehani set the tray down on the reading table proper. “And two Barista Communistas. Sit over here, come on.”
Deirdre sighed up from the couch and walked to the faux-velvet armchair opposite Rehani. She slumped down and sank into cushion. “You said you had something important to talk about.”
Rehani pointed a finger between the smaller bowls. “Serve yourself some stew. Or don’t and just drink.”
“I ate before I left,” Deirdre said. “I didn’t know you’d cook.”
“You didn’t?”
“I…no, I didn’t. Why would I know that?”
“Sometimes people just know things.”
“Sometimes psychics just know things,” Deirdre corrected.
“And I wish it was more useful than it was,” Rehani replied, half a joke.
“So, free drinks, hot food…do you need an advance or something?” Deirdre worked as an apothecary, trading in supernatural prescriptions and supernaturally-modified recreationals as her major form of income. “’cause you can just ask and I’ll give it to you.”
“Rude,” Rehani accused. “So rude.”
Deirdre opened her mouth.
“No,” Rehani pre-empted, “I don’t need some ‘advance.’ And it’s impolite not to talk to a friend after such a long absence.”
“Sorry.”
“Whatever,” Rehani flapped a hand, “we’re all learning how to be with people again.”
Which was truer for Deirdre than for most. For five years she’d taken care of a boy who went by ‘Razz.’ The summer before, he’d been murdered. The people who’d done it had all ‘gotten theirs’ to various extremes and the bloodfire from that had kept her moving for a few weeks afterward. But eventually…
The official COVID lockdown had only extended a solitude she’d already long held.
She cleared her throat. “But you did say you had something important.”
“Rude.”
“Sorry. So. What’s up, then?”
Rehani leaned back in her fortune-teller’s chair, high-backed and tapestry-draped. “You know that Vietnamese woman down the hall?”
“I don’t.”
“She’s the one who walked out naked in front of all those cops at downtown precinct.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
Deirdre nodded. “Wow.”
“Chh. Right?”
“You get her autograph?”
Rehani chortled. “Maybe when she gets out of jail.”
“They arrested her?”
“Oh, she’s out from behind bars, Oceanrest PD can’t fuck up those kinda optics after last summer’s shit show. But they charged her. She’s got a court date.”
Deirdre shook her head. “Goddamn.”
Rehani shrugged. “Dark days are coming.”
“It doesn’t take a psychic to see that.”
Rehani pulled a piece of fufu away from the larger whole and dipped it into the stew. She put it in her mouth before the soup had all dripped off and used her index finger to stop a stray drop’s descent. She wiped it on her clothes. “I had a vision.”
Deirdre pried off a knot of fufu. “What kind?”
“What kind you think?”
“I meant what did you See?”
Rehani reached into a hidden pocket folded somewhere among her fabrics and procured a wrinkled sheet of notebook paper. Handing it across the table to Deirdre, she said, “I was off on dreamer and sixth sense stims. Was meditating, focusing my Sight, and this shit hit me out of nowhere. Wrote down everything I could remember, after.”
Deirdre hesitated. “Do I want to read this?”
Rehani scoffed. “Did I wanna write it?”
Deirdre read:
it moves unharassed peels souls over itself
it’s happening again
oh spirits what if it’s happening always
there: a knight, her armor rusted, hair a crumbling stormcloud
the key
a hanging man / blood pouring down / change
they scream in the streets
there: a seer who plucks out his eyes not to see,
pours poison in his ear not to hear
all the things wanting into this place
it’s pushing thr / who are you?
who are you? who are you?
take off your mmmmm
aaaaaa
sssssss
CALL HER NOW
“Goddammit,” Deirdre muttered.
“And that’s when I called you.”
“God-damn-it.”
“I thought: ‘who do I know who sounds like a knight in rusted armor with real fucked-up hair?’”
“You know what?”
“What?” Rehani asked, palm uplifted to indicate Deirdre’s head.
Deirdre didn’t really have a response.
Rehani waved an apology. “But, anyway, maybe it is time you took on another… ‘case.’”
Deirdre had had a reputation for taking ‘cases’ from the city’s most desperate and destitute, the squatters and indigent of Oceanrest’s most scarified reaches. Once, people had conjured the unofficial burden of ‘Sheriff’ for her. They’d called her ‘the Sheriff of Squatter City.’ But she hadn’t taken a case since…well, as with so many things, since.
She folded the page in her hands.
“It pretty much calls you by name,” Rehani added. “As close as it calls anyone, at least.”
“Yeah. I think it calls someone else out, too,” Deirdre grumbled.
“Where’s that boy live, anyway?”
October 27, 2020
The Future of A Maze of Glass
Hey squidlings, ‘tis I, a madman. I wanted to talk to you lovely creatures about the future of the recently-wrapped A Maze of Glass.
“Ah,” I hear you saying, “but didn’t we just finish reading it?”
In serial form, yes, indeed you did! Which brings me to the point of this blog entry: there will also, in the future, be a novel form.
Sort of.
The version of A Maze of Glass that came out during the serial release was mostly third-draft material. The last five chapters were, in fact, second-draft material. I performed numerous revision and punch-up passes before publishing any given chapter, but the material published was still, essentially, a third draft.
I’ll explain this in terms of my general writing style.
Only myself and my fiancee ever read first-draft material. I recruit beta-readers and friends to read second-draft material. When I had an agent, the third draft was the point at which he’d become involved. The third draft is the one I usually seek professional opinions regarding. At that point, I allow myself to imagine that I have a firm grasp on the characters and their story, and so I dive back in to write a fourth (and hopefully final) manuscript draft.
But I fired that guy. So...
The third draft content from A Maze of Glass was, in my opinion, solid. The second draft stuff skates along by virtue of being the most dramatic section of the book. But having read through it all again, myself, and having received commentary and critique from numerous outside sources, I don’t think it’s quite where I want it to be.
So: I’m going to be writing a fourth manuscript draft (with numerous revision and punch-up passes) as a full-fledged novel for Summer 2021.
Well, anyone who picks up the novel will notice significant changes to the first few chapters in particular. My overall goal for the novelization of A Maze of Glass is to attempt to carve off ~10% of its overall length, with a particular eye toward shaving off 15% of the first two chapters. There were plot elements I wanted to frontload into the story that didn’t need to be front-loaded, and they weighed down the opening of the book. Worse, some of the elements I front-loaded turned out to be unnecessary, to play smaller roles in the story than originally envisioned. I’d like to fix all of that.
Due to the nature of a serial, some important pieces of exposition were provided to the audience more than once. Originally, I did this to remind people of things they may have forgotten about during the weeks-long reading schedule, but when reading the piece as a full novel I found the repetition needless and boring. I may leave in a couple call-backs or reminders, but my goal is to minimize them as much as possible. This will also tighten the prose and shrink the overall length--but, most importantly, it cuts gristle from the meat.
There are a handful of small plot and character inconsistencies that I need to resolve. They aren’t plentiful and (I hope) they’re not obvious, but I noticed them during my own read-through and I can only assume other people are equally, painfully annoyed by them. They’ll be patched. Any necessary rewriting or revision to patch them will be done.
And, after all of that’s finished, I’ll be doing my usual revision passes, punching up descriptive sentences or lines of dialogue, scanning for aesthetics and rhythm, and other minor editing miscellany. Given a new draft and four or five passes, I think this thing might go from ‘Good’ to ‘Great.’ And isn’t that what we want?
Then you’ll be able to grab A Maze of Glass (Director’s Cut) as an eBook, paperback, or even hardcover (no promises on the last one). It will be an improved version of the same basic story, meaning that you won’t have to pick up a copy if you don’t want to (the broad story elements and important plot points will remain largely unchanged); but if you want an improved version, it will be available.
Yes, that’s true. And if reading the story in its current form and on its currently-available platforms is all you want, that’s awesome and thank you for reading. Thank you so, so much. Really.
But if you’d like a sharper, improved cut, that will also be available for a very reasonable fee, that’s why I’m doing this. And buying it won’t just give you access to the improved prose, characterization, and pacing--it will also show your support and appreciation for me, the human who wrote it!!
In fact, purchasing a copy is one of the best ways to show support!!
(So is Patreon.)
The future remains uncertain. Right now I’m writing the second draft of When They Wear the Mask, our next serial novel, and then I need to send that out to my handful of beta-readers. I’ll probably begin the rewrite for A Maze of Glass while waiting for the critique and commentary to come in. Once we get closer to launch for When They Wear the Mask, I’ll have to switch focus back to that to make sure the serial carries the quality I want when it starts releasing.
If When They Wear the Mask turns out similarly to A Maze of Glass, I’ll probably still be writing the third draft as it starts to release. Depending on how well I handle the workload, I may reach a point during When They Wear the Mask where I don’t have time for any other writing work. If that happens, I’ll have to set aside Maze’s fourth draft to focus on the serial.
But I believe I should have ample time to accomplish both projects if I set my deadlines reasonably.
The novelization/director’s cut of A Maze of Glass will release in Summer 2021. Whether that’s early summer or mid-summer or late-summer will depend on other factors...but I’m hoping it’s sooner rather than later.
I’ll keep you apprised as the situations develop.
And I’ll see you soon, squidlings.
I’ll see you When They Wear the Mask...
September 22, 2020
Teaser: A Kingdom Without End
Greetings, squidlings!
If you’ve reached this page after reading A Maze of Glass, thank you so much for reading!! I hope you enjoyed the story. If you’ve found this page from some other esoteric origin, check out A Maze of Glass, it’s a quite fine serial! (If I do say so, myself.)
Below you’ll find a teaser for A Kingdom Without End, an Oceanrest serial due out sometime in autumn of 2021 (September? October? Around then.) It takes place…around the time it will release, in September/October of 2021.
If you’re looking for something to read before then, check out the teaser for When They Wear the Mask. When They Wear the Mask is the next Oceanrest serial due for release; it should start to come out in February or March, 2021 and takes place August/September, 2020. It features many recognizable cast members for people familiar with The War Beneath, most notably the main character Deirdre.
Without further ado, a teaser from the current (and very changeable) draft for A Kingdom Without End.
…The Present…(as the fallow soil offers up one living thing)
Hyun-jung dug nails into Rashid’s shoulders. Below them, a blanket they’d bought in Cuzco and the cracked dust of the Andean desert. Above them, an infinity of stars spiraled outward. Below her, Rashid bit his lower lip, his hands iron around her hips. “Hyun-jung,” he groaned, pressing up as she ground down, “Hyun…”
A full moon glistened his sweat into pearls. Cool desert breeze stroked his pores to gooseflesh. His neck curling, his back arching, he gripped her. She bent over him, hands on his shoulders, her body rocking serpentine. Breaths escaped them in delightful gasps and awe-struck curses. “Fuck yes, oh, fuck yes, fuck yes, fuckyesfuckyesf—”
“Slow down!”
“—uckyesfuckohmygod—”
“Hyunnnn—”
She felt it like magic. The climax rose through the conceptual and into the material; it pressed itself against the surface of reality ready to become everything. It pushed, liminal, being and not being. Rashid thrust up, she bore down. Nails bit skin. His voice pitched high, grasp so tight on her hips that their molecules met, and the world split open. She shivered and shook, speaking tongues, euphorically out of control.
He groaned, still plunging, his grip rocking her even as she lost the mental wherewithal to do it herself. As his moans dissipated into pants, she collapsed on top of him in a hungry swarm of kisses. They laughed, hands wandering, until she rolled off of him with a sigh.
“Accidental vacation,” she muttered, staring up at the blazing gallery of night.
Intel-Analytics had reported the decent probability of an active and dangerous pishtaco in the region. Since the South American field operatives were already all booked on assignments, Malleus North American’s ASOD caught the case—and Rashid and Hyun-jung caught it from there. They’d landed in Peru less than sixty hours later.
Except Intel-Analytics had gotten it wrong. The pishtaco turned out not to be a pishtaco at all, but a small group of mundane men and women with a willingness, if not a taste, for violence. Rashid and Hyun-jung filed reports with local authorities as anonymously as they could and received the rest of the week off. Since the Advanced and Specialized Operations Division required ten business days of Decompression/Recovery anyway, and since they didn’t have anything to decompress or recover from, they’d turned the entire situation into an impromptu vacation.
Such things were among the very few perks of the job, the byproduct of a field where intelligence and analysis were simultaneously required and, by the nature of their world, essentially dubious.
She kissed sweat from his collarbone, her head on his chest.
“Hyun-jung,” he said, staring up, his chin slanted against her crown. “I…”
She kissed sweat. “Uh-huh?”
“I…” he swallowed, gulped, took a deep, sucking breath. Grabbed for his throat with his free arm.
“What’s wrong? Can you breathe?” she jerked up, kneeling, scanning his body for clues.
The liquid on her lips wasn’t sweat. The drying slick on his chest wasn’t sweat, either. His heart jumped, pumping hard. His Adam’s apple bobbed and spasmed. His jaw clenched. “I--I--I wanted…” his eyes bulged.
Hyun-jung pushed away from him, reaching for--for what? They were on vacation.
“Hyun-junggggg….” the sound stretched as he ground his teeth together. His stomach bulbed, something pushing up against the skin from inside. His lower ribs popped one by one, breaking. She scrambled through their picnic for something to do. Veins bulged down Rashid’s arms and up his neck. He spat, gagging. “I lo—I l—I lo—”
His skin ripped apart, shreds of stomach and liver and unspooling intestine spilling out of him. Twin mantid appendages reached up from his ragged cavity, tearing him open from throat to groin. A skull tried to force its way through his skull. His teeth shattered. His tongue lolled.
The monster crawled out of his empty skin laughing.
Hyun-jung shouted herself awake behind the cashier’s counter. Faint music jingled through the empty gas station. The clock on the register couldn’t tell her when she’d passed out or how long she’d stayed under, but it told her the current time, 8:41 PM. She wiped nightmare sweat from her brow and ran a hand through fear-greased hair.
The Peru vacation had happened over five years ago. Rashid’s death, three years ago.
Her court martial from ASOD and subsequent burn notice from Malleus came only months after that.
Now she worked at a gas station in the middle of southwestern U.S. nowhere. After nine years as a monster hunter, after over a decade of military and ASOD training, after a lifetime spent in the secret shadows of a hidden world…now she worked at a gas station. The burn notice saw to that. The burn notice and a lack of alternative skill sets.
But something was coming, now, she knew.
She’d first felt the magic a couple weeks earlier, the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck all standing static-straight as she drove to work one evening. The car clock had read 3:00 PM and the song on the radio had switched over mid-track. It played ‘Sixteen Tons’ by Tennessee Ernie Ford, not a song that usually appeared on radios anymore. Not long after, she’d found three dead crows on her apartment balcony, causes of death uncertain. Other flares of mystical synchronicity had unfolded from there, warning signs of some major ritual or powerful entity putting its sights on her.
She pushed herself off of the stool and excused herself to the employee bathroom. She excused herself for her own sake, her work-buddy Trey having neither shown up for work nor called with a justification for his absence. On the toilet, she puffed on her vape pen, trying to bury her nightmare in THC. She clicked the pen four times to turn it on, took four hits, and clicked it four more times to turn it off again. She coughed after the last hit, hacking until something gunky formed at the back of her throat. She hocked it into the toilet on her way out.
Back behind the counter, she checked the cashier-clock again. 3:33 ??, it told her.
She blinked, recoiling from the wrongness. 3:33 ?? it repeated.
She blinked again, rubbing at her face this time. 8:58 PM, the clock corrected.
Nine and three were important numbers cross-culturally. People in the know paid attention to cross-cultural patterns, to the coincidences that suggested so much more than coincidence. Ramadan happened during the ninth month of the Islamic calendar; in Christian myth there were nine choirs of angels. Nine looked like Bahá'í completeness, like divinity in Hinduism, like a body curled up, head bowed, asleep or maybe dead. Odin hung himself from an ash tree for nine days and an average human pregnancy lasted nine months. Etc. Or three: father, son, holy ghost; maiden, mother, crone; Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva; neshamah, ruach, nefesh; the three treasures, the three jewels, the trinity. And, of course, nine was a triune of trinities.
Coincidence? Maybe. Sometimes the strongest magic looked like coincidence.
Sometimes that was the whole point.
The hex laid on her during her court martial, for instance: if she ever successfully convinced someone who didn’t believe in the para-normative to start believing in the para-normative, black cancer would eat her alive within weeks. If she spilled the wrong information to the wrong people, she’d rapidly develop brain and bone cancer. It would be terminal, impossibly terminal. Doctors would shake their heads at lab reports that didn’t make sense to them, anymore; they’d try every treatment in the book and every treatment would fail. Sometimes cancer won. Statistically, it happened.
Magic hid in such places.
Hyun-jung reached into her uniform pocket and found her charm ring. Dozens of cross-cultural symbols hung from it. She ticked them off like rosary beads. A spell formed in her mind, a defense against harm. Before the court martial and the burn notice, people had considered her among the best ward witches in the world. Now, few people considered her at all.
The cashier-clock said 9:00 PM.
Tennessee Ernie Ford crooned from the speakers. Hyun-jung figured one of two things was about to happen, and she hoped for the one that meant she lived a little longer. She held her breath. The prepared cantrip floated in her mind, ready.
The gas station door swung open, mounted brass bell dinging.
The woman who walked in was, in many ways, Hyun-jung’s opposite. Five foot eight to Hyun-jung’s five-three, slender and toned to Hyun-jung’s more muscular stockiness, middle-aged to Hyun-jung’s…well, nearly-middle-aged. A white forty-something woman wearing a leather jacket, jeans with subtle armor plating sewed inside, and motorcycle boots approached the counter. She lifted her eyebrows expectantly.
“Holy shit…” Hyun-jung whispered, finally recognizing her.
Zoe had commonly visited Hyun-jung’s father back when Hyun-jung’s father was still alive and working for Malleus/ASOD. The two had had something of a mentor-mentee relationship before Hyun-jung was old enough to pledge. Zoe, Leo, and Shreya had all spent a lot of time in that apartment. But after Hyun-jung’s dad transferred from field work to a desk assignment, Zoe all but stopped coming over. After his retirement, especially. Hyun-jung remembered seeing her only three or four times between her dad’s retirement and his funeral.
“Long time no see,” Zoe said.
Hyun-jung nodded.
“Leo sent me.”
Hyun-jung nodded again.
Tennessee Ernie Ford told Saint Peter not to call him. He couldn’t go.
“We should get drinks,” Zoe continued. “Have a chat.”
“What kind?”
“Well…how would you like to be reinstated?”
(I owe my soul to the company—)
Hyun-jung’s head swam, memories of Rashid screaming into memories of what she’d done to avenge him. She’d killed four people in Florida, left them cold-cased in Missing Persons. It had seemed fair. They’d killed the love of her life, after all. The Arbiters hadn’t seen it the same way. Thus the court martial. Thus the burn notice. Thus, a gas station surrounded by silence and dark. “Wh-what?”
“First, I need some Zippo fluid,” Zoe scanned the wall behind Hyun-jung. “And do you know a place I could get a pack of Djarum this late at night?”
“Uh, no. Not legally. We have some—”
“No, thanks. I’ll just take the fluid.”
“You said…they want to reinstate me?”
Zoe smirked. “There’s a catch. Feel like going somewhere? Talk?”
Hyun-jung closed the gas station early.
Teaser: When They Wear the Mask
Take Me Away from Here
Teaser: When They Wear the Mask
Greetings, squidlings! ‘tis I, a madman.
If you’ve reached this page after finishing A Maze of Glass, thank you so much for reading. I hope you enjoyed it. If you’ve reached this place from somewhere else, check out A Maze of Glass!
Below, you’ll find a couple brief excerpts from my next Oceanrest serial, When They Wear the Mask. If everything goes well, When They Wear the Mask should start coming out in February, 2021. If things go less-than-well, it should start coming out in March.
These excerpts are taken from Chapters One & Three, respectively. In the current draft, at least. (Which reminds me: as this project is still in rewriting/redrafting stages, anything/everything is subject to change.)
When They Wear the Mask takes place around, well, now. Most of the action will take place between August and early September of this terrible year, 2020. It features a cast familiar to those who read The War Beneath, particularly lead character Deirdre.
For those interested in the next time they’ll get to read about Zoe, you may have to wait until A Kingdom Without End, expected out in autumn 2021 (September, October?). Check out a teaser for that right here. You should recognize the narrator pretty quickly…
…three months before…(when the deed found the hand to do it)
Robert Robertson, Jr., recently divorced and more recently unemployed, sifted through his late Uncle’s estate mostly on autopilot. Uncle Nick had always been Bob’s favorite member of the family, mother and father included, and the vice versa seemed equally true. Nick had always called him “Mikey,” which Bob liked better than his own name despite the cereal connotations. It beat out “Have you met Bob? Y’know, Bob’s son?” Ha ha. He’d always hated his father for that. The name. Who lived their lives with such an embarrassing name and then handed it down to their children? But to Uncle Nick he’d always been “Mikey,” never Bob-Bob’s-son, many-faceted disappointment.
Maybe that was why he had to handle the estate. His late Uncle hadn’t left many other people in so much admiration. His late Aunt attested to that.
In the basement of a dead man’s house, recently divorced and more recently unemployed, Bob-Bob’s-son, multi-faceted disappointment, discovered a box, multiply-locked and patina’d in a layer of white-out-painted sigils and glyphs that Bob didn’t recognize. Breaking it open without quite knowing why (had he heard something whispering inside?), Bob found a mask.
What did it look like?
What an unimportant detail.
…now…(steeped in the quiet before)
Deirdre knocked on the houseboat door, Rehani just behind her. The sun blazed westward from its apex, late afternoon shedding its early-afternoon skin.
“Coming,” Paul Somers grumbled from inside.
She heard shuffling, sounds of kicked-aside clutter as the man maneuvered the dozen-or-so paces between his ‘bedroom’ and the ingress. Ignoring Rehani’s raised eyebrow, she stepped back and folded her arms.
Paul Somers looked in worse condition than she did, and that said a lot.
Before the lockdown, Dr. Somers had already caught two warnings and a probationary term from the dean at the University of Maine at Oceanrest. As the summer cooled into autumn, it didn’t look likely he’d return to his position. He wore his situation flagrantly: a tangled scribble of thinning hair covered his scalp, a bristling, unkempt beard blended his jawline and neck, and rumpled clothes stained by days of showerless, food-spilling life hung loosely from his thinning limbs. Redness tinged his sclera.
“Jesus,” Deirdre muttered reflexively.
“This is your ‘friend?’” Rehani asked, nostrils flared.
“Okay, well, nice seeing you,” Paul reached for the door again.
Deirdre caught it. “We need to talk.”
Paul’s hazel eyes softened. He’d always had a soft spot for Deirdre. Not that it had saved the day when the day had needed saving. Still, the door inched back open. “You know, you don’t look so good, either.”
“Nobody here’s winning a beauty contest any time soon.”
“Speak for yourselves,” Rehani said.
“Who’s that?” Paul asked.
“Rehani.”
“Rehani who?”
“What, you going to look me up online?” Rehani asked.
“Just…” Paul sighed. “What is this about?”
Deirdre stared at him.
Paul understood the stare. “Goddammit.”
He left the door ajar as he walked away.
Rehani and Deirdre removed their masks on the way in. Inside the houseboat, they found a kingdom of clutter. A pile of dirty laundry sat next to the bed. Bills scattered the narrow eat-in table. Dishes piled high in the sink. Empty liquor bottles filled the recycling bin. Faint music played from a laptop Deirdre didn’t immediately see. Paul had never been the type of guy to make his bed regularly, but now he’d let the sheets tangle and spill onto the floor. Faint odors of cannabis and booze and sweat stagnated the air. Deirdre gave Rehani a warning glance as they stepped inside. Rehani shrugged.
Closing the door behind them, Deirdre cleared her throat. “You smoke already, today?”
“Just weed,” Paul shrugged. “And one hit of the depressants to keep things…quiet.”
“Nothing to drink?”
“Too early.”
“Not for everyone,” Deirdre glanced again at Rehani, whose lips struggled to contain a chuckle.
“So you want me to…listen?” Paul Somers heard dead people. He saw them, too. He could touch and feel them with enough sixth sense stimulants in his system. Over the thirteen months since Razz’s death, he’d learned enough control over his abilities to call out, too…though whether or not he received an answer still remained a gamble.
“For starters,” Deirdre said.
“For starters?” Paul made the words sound a lot harsher.
“Chh, hear the tone coming off this—”
“Rehani!” Deirdre interrupted.
“Does she need to be here?” Paul asked.
Deirdre didn’t know what her face looked like, turning back to Paul, but he couldn’t keep his eyes on it for longer than a second. After Rehani shut up and Paul set his attention on the floor, Deirdre let the silence settle for a moment. She sighed, picking her way across the clutter to Paul’s bed. “You promised, Paul.”
“I…yeah, I did.”
She sat on the edge of the mattress and examined the deep-hued blackness on the backs of her hands. “Never again, right?”
“Right,” he said, suddenly hushed. “I’m…I’m sorry.”
Gulping down the memories collecting at the back of her throat, she peered back up at Paul and Rehani. “Rehani brought a couple joints of psychic stimulants. I need you to smoke one down and start tuning into your sixth sense. It might be all we need you to do is listen. It might be we need more than that.”
Paul nodded, gaze still pinned to the floor.
Rehani pulled an antique casement from the folds of her fabrics and opened it to reveal a series of slender joints. She took one, herself, and held the rest of the case out to Paul. When Paul didn’t immediately move, she jostled it at him.
He took a joint and dug a plastic lighter out of his stained jeans. They lit up and started puffing.
“So what’s this about, exactly?” Paul asked.
“I want to hear what’s going on, first,” Deirdre said, running over whatever answer Rehani had opened her mouth to give. “Just to make sure you don’t…I dunno, misinterpret something.”
The two smokers filled the houseboat with thin vapor. Paul had enough square footage to avoid a hotbox situation, at least. An edginess shivered through Deirdre’s own admittedly-weak sixth sense, due to a secondhand high or her own anxious awaiting, she couldn’t tell.
Rehani sat at one of the two ultra-cheap chairs pulled out from the kitchen table. Paul sat on a normal-cheap armchair kitty-cornered from the bed and closed his eyes. Together, they waited. Three minutes passed before Paul shook his head and stood up again. “I need another,” he said.
Rehani frowned. “Fine. But you owe me.”
Deirdre pressed a hand to her brow. “Come on.”
“Well, someone owes me. I’m not some supernatural charity.”
“Give him the joint.”
Rehani gave Paul the joint. Halfway through this one, Paul went into a coughing fit. He did so regularly, only having developed his predilection for sixth sense depressants and cannabis after his doctor had told him to cut his drinking at least in half. Rehani managed to stop giggling by the time the fit finished. Sitting back down, Paul kept the half-burnt joint pinched between fingers and closed his eyes again.
They waited.
“This is…” Paul blinked, shaking his head again. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
“What do you mean?” Deirdre asked.
“They’re…quiet.”
“How quiet?”
“Not ‘quiet’ quiet,” Paul tried to explain. “Just…whispering instead of speaking, muttering instead of screaming. Everything I can hear within range, it’s like all the ghosts and spirits—like they all turned their volume down.”
Deirdre rucked her brow. “Is it…is it you? Like, the receiver?”
“No, it’s…” Paul kept shaking his head. “It’s the ‘transmitter,’ or whatever. It’s just. Okay. This is going to sound insane.”
“Nothing sounds insane in our world,” Rehani observed from the kitchen.
“She’s right,” Deirdre confirmed.
Paul stopped shaking his head. He pursed his lips. Stared at nothing. Unpursed them. “It’s like they’re waiting for something. It’s like they’re waiting for something they know is going to happen.”
Back to A Maze of Glass
Teaser: A Kingdom Without End
Take Me Away From Here
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twenty Three, Pt. 2
“The long-run is a misleading guide to current affairs; in the long-run, we are all dead.”
— John Maynard Keynes
every story ends the same way: every story ends.
(nothing ever really ends)
Zoe, forty-five years old, sat back against the same greened steel hood above the Astor Place station that she’d sat back against at twenty-four. She was the dangerous kind of drunk a person only became when they needed booze as an excuse to weep and sob and scream. She had a switchblade, a can of pepper spray, and a half-empty bottle of whiskey on her. She felt ready to use any or all of it.
Twenty years had passed. How had twenty years passed?
Astor Place was a fucking Chase Bank now. When had that happened? How hadn’t she noticed?
The NYU kids had manifested their destinies all across Alphabet City and had reached Avenue C before their wave broke and crashed back again. Tompkins Square still played host to a revue of indigents, but the streets and avenues ran more rampant with cops than crust-punks. At some point, she guessed she’d stopped leaving Murray Hill. Everything had changed, unobserved. How? And why?
Jill had killed herself.
The story read like this: during her lucid hours, Jill slowly realized that the frequent visitors who came during her non-lucid states were Malleus agents. Medical staff, employed by the Winters-Armitage corporation, dismissed her subsequent paranoia as a further symptom of her alleged psychosis. Jill didn’t want to talk to Malleus, didn’t want to tell them whatever they wanted to know, and so she’d spent her lucidity working on a spell. Nobody in the company knew how long it had taken. One day, a nurse walked into the room to discover Gillian Briar freed from her restraints and hanged with a bedsheet.
The psych facility specifically selected bedsheets that lacked the tensile strength to break the cervical vertebrae. They weren’t even supposed to be able to hold up a human body. The chances that Jill could have pulled it off were something akin to one in six hundred and seventy thousand.
Sometimes magic looked like that.
Maybe the story would have ended differently if—if—if—
But it hadn’t.
The story read the way it read and it ended the way it ended.
(you will never be free of this)
Zoe pushed herself up, wavering on whiskey-legs. “It isn’t that we’ve gotten old,” she muttered to herself. “It’s that the world stays young.” She snorted and took a slug of whiskey from a paper-bagged bottle. A group of people half her age passed her on the crosswalk. One of the men glanced at her overshoulder and she glared back. Say something, she thought. Go ahead.
He turned away a half-second later, talking to one of his friends.
Zoe headed east. Why?—hell with it, why not?
The walk felt right-now familiar but the landscape had transformed. Everything became something else, eventually.
Passing Tomkin’s Square Park, she saw a ragged, chewed-up man pacing frenetically around the playground. Every few steps he stopped and turned toward the buildings crowding around the park’s fence. “Fuckin’ yuppies!” he shouted. “Fuckin’ yuppies pulled the rug right out from under me. Pieces of shit. Pieces of fucking shit yuppies. Hey, fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
He howled at the brownstones, at the apartments, at the pedestrians. His voice had the feral quality Zoe associated with people who had suffered homelessness so long that they’d forgotten civilization entirely.
Taking another slug of whiskey, she watched him scream for a while. Where else was she going, anyway? She wondered how many addicts roved the surface of the Earth searching for thread to keep themselves stitched together even as reality razored them apart.
She kept walking. A dozen college-aged kids wearing outfits that could never be mistaken for rags muttered to each other by phone light, standing outside of a bar.
Beyond the bar, Alphabet City reasserted its crusted heritage. Beyond Avenue D, the indigent reigned. Would she drift into that heavy darkness? Would she seek out the trouble so easily found in the crevices of its dilapidation?
She didn’t see why not.
Until she saw a row of phone booths.
It shocked her, this bygone monument. Three phone banks waited, garbed in graffiti and reeking of piss, like the statued legs of Ozymandias. Zoe stood for a long time, weight wavering from one leg to another, brown-bagged bottle hanging loosely from her fingers. Taking another gulp of whiskey, she walked over. She tried not to breathe through her nose.
She fed the machine some quarters and dialed a number. The number lived inside her head. She’d thought about punching it into a keypad so many times she’d memorized it. Setting the brown bag and its contents aside, she put the grimy handset to her ear.
“Hello?” Shoshanna Winters mumbled, sleep-voiced.
Zoe felt like her mouth was a loaded gun and she had to empty the mag all at once. “I think, last year, when you said your brother made all the political decisions, that you’d given that up for science, I think you lied to me. I know you did.”
A pause.
“This is Zoe, by the way. Zoe Briar.”
“Yeah, I know. I only gave this number to three people.”
“My sister is dead. Nobody set her up, nobody did anything besides follow SOP and she’s dead.”
“You sound drunk. And you know how stupid it would be to look for revenge.”
“I’m not.”
“Or justice.”
Zoe snorted. “I’d have as much luck hunting Santa Claus as I’d have looking for justice.”
Another pause.
“What is it you want, then?” Shoshanna asked.
“I want in.”
“In on what, exactly?”
“Whatever you’re doing. Whatever you’re doing while the world thinks your brother is still in charge.”
“There is no ‘in.’ I’m sorry.”
“Don’t hang up on me,” Zoe snapped.
“Tell me what you want. If it’s not justice or revenge, then what?”
“Come on. You know.”
“Tell me.”
Zoe peered behind her. A scarecrow vagrant shuffled down the sidewalk.
“I have to be up early tomorrow,” Shoshanna said. “I’m sorry, Zoe. Goodb—”
“I want to change the world,” Zoe confessed.
(look at me)
(and he did)
(I don’t c—)
“Call me when you’re sober.” She could almost hear Shoshanna’s grin. “Use a different payphone—but use a payphone, not a burner. Maybe we can set up a meeting.”
Zoe opened her mouth to reply but couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Good night, Zoe Briar.”
Shoshanna hung up.
Zoe put the gross handset back on the receiver and picked up her whiskey from the ground. Turning around, she saw the scarecrow vagrant again only a couple yards away. “Hey,” she upnodded to the lanky man, approaching. “Free whiskey.”
“Huh? Wha—oh, shit, thanks.”
He said something else but she’d already continued walking.
“As above, so below,” she whispered to the night.
Turn Back
What's Next?: Teasers
Table of Contents
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twenty Three, Pt. 1
Zo’—
I’m sorry. I tried.
I never really belonged in this world, anyway. It’s too cruel; too content in its cruelty. The fact that I made it this far, I owe it to you and Darnell. I know Sung-ho helped but I was never close to him the way you were. It was all you and D.
I miss him so much, Zo’.
I miss all of them so much. I just can’t keep missing, anymore.
Do you remember when you first pledged to Hammer? Or whatever it was called back then, or whatever they like to call it now? Dad was so proud of you. He got us drunk on champagne even though we were both underage. He cooked a whole three course dinner. Even mom liked it, ever the discerning consumer…
I always think about the look on his face that day when I think about the look on his face the first time he sent me to rehab. Christ, my best friend hanged himself. My best friend hanged himself and heroin was the thing I stumbled into because I didn’t have the coping mechanisms to process that.
Since I imagine this will be my Last Confessional, there’s something else I’ve been meaning to tell you.
One night, after I’d defected to Winters but before I disappeared entirely, we crept away from our respective camps to get drunk together and you mused out loud, “I wonder whatever happened to the Summoner? Do you remember that case?”
At the time, I shrugged it off. It was one case among ten or twelve I’d helped you with over the years so I let you tell me the tale again and I pretended not to know the ending.
Want to know how the Summoner died?
I killed him.
Did you not think I could find him? You’d invited me into all the spellcraft, all the matrices you’d used and all the ones he’d used, too. We had radio contact during the raid. I knew exactly where he was.
So I bought heroin for the first time in a long time and I gave it to him. I never used, except for my relapses, but you’d be surprised how often I ended up knowing where to get some. Or maybe you wouldn’t be surprised: it was always. Within a few months of living anywhere, I always knew where to get some.
I drove up to the slaughterhouse and put him under. I held him and caressed his forehead.
Before he nodded off, he told me that all he’d wanted to do was change the world. I told him I was sorry. I was sorry it didn’t change. I was sorry he couldn’t change it.
After he passed out, I put a small derringer behind his ear and squeezed the trigger. The bullet never came out the other side. I guess that’s the point. Sometimes I still have nightmares about the sound—about the sound and the long, terrible quiet that came after it.
I dosed him because I didn’t want him to be awake when I did it.
And, to be honest, I didn’t want your people to do whatever they were going to do to him to learn whatever they thought he might know. I thought you’d already done enough to him, yourself.
Maybe he was right. Maybe magic can change the world. He might’ve acted in bad faith or approached the idea with the incorrect methods, but I don’t think the fundamental concept is wrong. Do you? I mean, fuck, we know magic, right? Shouldn’t we be able to save some people? Isn’t that what you pride yourself on doing? So what, now?
I love you, Zoe. Everything you’ve done for me, for my kids…
Just remember: under all the cases and assignments and gigs, under all the Intel-A reports and personnel dossiers and operations, under everything, there’s just me. There’s just people like me.
Stay safe. I love you.
May the secret and sacred energies connect us always.
Jill.
Turn Back
Keep Reading
Table of Contents
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twenty Two, Pt. 3
The weekend after the ritual, Sung-ho invited everyone to the summer house. The Park family arrived first, of course, on Thursday, with a nine-year-old Hyun-jung buried in a fantasy novel. Leo arrived Friday morning, a case of mid-range whiskey in his trunk, and Tanisha followed that afternoon, fresh from Decomp after a run in Texas. Valley, a gargantuan white guy with bright blond hair whose real name Zoe could never remember, arrived last, after sunset on Friday when everyone else—except for Jill and Hyun-jung—had already started drinking. Valley didn’t drink anymore, for reasons unexplained, but he did smoke weed. Sung-ho clarified that the smoking of anything, weed or otherwise, would only happen on the deck and in his den.
Daniel Briar-Smythe, their father, never made an appearance. For their mother’s part, Sylvia Briar projected a multi-sensory pseudo-hologram of herself into the kitchen. Whatever she’d used to fuel the complicated arrangement of spells to make it happen, she’d only given enough fuel to keep things stable for six minutes. Sylvia hugged both of her daughters—extra labor spent to make her illusion tactile—and congratulated Jill on pulling off such a difficult and dangerous spell.
Sylvia offered to move Jill into a small guest house on her property in Short Hills. “I don’t mean any offense,” she’d said, “I’m just not sure Manhattan is a good place for you, right now.”
Jill’s face had fallen, but she’d nodded. “Yeah. Maybe not.”
Nobody else knew how to reply. The moment passed. The celebration continued.
Night went on. Seo-yeon managed to get Hyun-jung to bed with minimal help from her husband. Everyone drank until buzz became sloppiness; everyone excepting Valley and Jill, at least. Even Leo imbibed more than usual, never quite becoming drunk but veering broadly in that direction.
At some point between one and three in the morning, as the party began its natural decline, Zoe walked through one of the halls she’d barricaded for the purposes of the ritual and passed through a glass door onto the deck. Behind her, Tanisha and Leo laughed at something. Ahead of her, Sung-ho sat alone on a lawn chair, a scotch in his healing hand and a cigar in his other. He turned slightly as she approached, revealing the moon reflected in sunglasses.
“You’re just wearing those to make me ask why,” she observed, sipping her own mid-range bourbon.
“Pffft,” Sung-ho snorted in reply, turning back to peer at the trees, the sky, the moon.
Zoe walked up to one of the other five empty lawn chairs lining the railing of the deck. “This seat taken?”
“You think I’m out here partying with ghosts? Go ahead, sit.”
She sat, leaning back. “How do you feel?”
“Eh, my hand still hurts. You?”
“Back still hurts. Other than that…”
“Other than that, I feel good,” Sung-ho said.
Zoe followed Sung-ho’s shaded gaze out to the night. Insects chirred and sang in the woods. The moon glimmered between skinny clouds. Swirling her bourbon in its glass, she took a deep breath and sank into her seat. Her mind wandered back to the Manifestation’s trap, the way Jill had found the strength within the spell and within herself to take control of things. With Jill having over one hundred days clean, Zoe wondered if she should give up smoking, at least. The nic fits had subsided and the lingering impulses had weakened almost beyond notice.
She didn’t, of course. But she wondered about it.
Sung-ho puffed the cigar cherry back to life and exhaled rings of smoke. Chasing the cigar with the scotch, he angled his face to look at Zoe over the rim of his sunglasses. “Want to know what’s up with these shades?”
Zoe laughed. “I get the feeling you want to tell me.”
Sung-ho smirked. “It’s ‘cause the future’s so bright.”
Zoe laughed again.
But nothing stayed bright forever. Just as nothing stayed dark.
Turn Back
Keep Reading
Table of Contents
