Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Novels from Top Fantasy and Science Fiction Authors

by Gwynn White

  “A new beginning. How very exciting,” I exclaimed.

  Bess hugged her hand to her heart. “It’s been a very odd day. Just out of the blue, he asked me to marry him. Can you believe it? And the weather. Have you noticed? It was so strange today. Thunder. Lightning. Some sort of odd eclipse. There were falling stars in the middle of the day.”

  “A good sign, perhaps?”

  Bess smiled, squinting her eyes closed. Her face was radiant. She turned and looked at me. “Oh, Alice! You look just awful. Get that off at once. But what’s this expression on your face? You look so…so, I don’t know what!”

  “Relieved? Elated? Happy?”

  “Why? What’s happened?”

  “William.”

  Bess squealed. “What a wonderful day.”

  Dinah, who was observing us both from her perch on the window seal, meowed at us.

  Bess laughed. “You see, even Dinah agrees. And what about you, Chess?” Bess asked, turning to my clockwork cat.

  From his position on my cot, the Cheshire cat flashed us a toothy smile.

  We both laughed.

  “Now, get cleaned up. We’re going on a picnic. Oh, Alice, why do I get the feeling that everything will be different now?”

  “Because it will.”

  Bess signed happily. “A wonderland of opportunity awaits us.”

  “Indeed. How very curious.”

  25

  Epilogue

  Your move,” William said.

  I picked a pawn and moved him across the chest board. “Check.”

  “You think you’re so clever,” William replied, moving his king.

  “Don’t you?”

  “Don’t I what?”

  “Think I’m clever.”

  “Of course I do. Stop trying to distract me.”

  “Me?” I asked, tilting my head sideways and looking him over, my eyes radiating desire.

  “Oh, now you’re really playing,” William said. He slipped out of his seat and onto the loveseat beside me. He moved my hair aside and kissed my neck.

  “Now who is playing?” I whispered.

  “After a look like that, how can I resist?”

  The grandfather clock struck six. The last chime had just sounded when I heard a knock on the front door of the guesthouse.

  “Henry and Bess?” William asked.

  I nodded. “They returned from Bath today.”

  William kissed me on the forehead. “No wonder Maggie has been cooking all day. I thought perhaps the Countess had returned.”

  I shook my head. “I had a letter from her this morning. She’s still abroad.” In fact, the situation with the Queen had rattled the Countess in a way I didn’t understand. She’d been quiet and thoughtful. Despite her peculiar reaction, she’d still done everything she could to help us. She’d situated Henry into a shop in Twickenham and paid for Bess’s and Henry’s wedding. William and I, who were more wed in spirit, had taken up residence in the guesthouse at Strawberry Hill. The Countess, quite rightly, suspected that I would be able to make something of the old printing press that had sat cobwebbed since her uncle’s death.

  “I’ll go welcome them. Why don’t you show Bess what you’ve been working on?” William said, motioning to the stack of papers I had sitting on my desk.

  I nodded, kissed him quickly, and then rose. William exited the room, closing the wood panel doors behind him.

  On my desk near the fireplace, I had a stack of papers. Notes, illustrations, and outlines covered the pages. I picked up my writing tablet. I was just about finished. I smiled when I thought of Bess’s reaction to my news.

  “Wonderland by Alice Lewis. Subtitled, Imaginative Tales for Children. How does that sound, Chess?” I asked, turning to my clockwork cat. The little creature, who’d been grooming his paw, looked up at me and blinked his wide, aquamarine-colored eyes.

  I laughed then kicked a ball of yarn toward him. Excited, he crouched, his gears clicking, then pounced.

  Grinning, I looked at my reflection in the mirror over the fireplace. I pushed my hair behind my ears and straightened the black headband I was wearing. In the mirror, I saw the reflection of the yard outside. The lights inside Strawberry Hill House glimmered through the windows. But then I noticed something odd. A hooded figure carrying a lamp moved toward the castle. I turned and looked out the window. It was dusk, but not yet entirely dark. I peered through the window. No one was there.

  I looked back at the mirror once more. This time, to my surprise—given it was autumn—the mirror reflected a wintery scene outside my window. The grounds were completely covered in snow, squalls of white whipping across the landscape. And at the center of the grounds, I saw a woman dressed in all white. She carried a lantern and wore a crown of ice on her head.

  Gasping, I turned around and looked out the window once more. Again, no one was there. The leaves were hued sunset orange, ruby red, and gold in color. They swayed in the breeze, shimmering softly in the dying sunlight.

  “Alice?” William called.

  I looked down at my manuscript. Imaginative Tales indeed. The first tale in my collection was none other than the tale of the Snow Queen. I grinned. Strawberry Hill was certainly an odd little castle, built by the Countess’s odd uncle, and filled with odd fixtures, like the odd mirror above my fireplace. As it turned out, it was the perfect place for an odd girl like me.

  “Coming,” I called, casting a glance once more at the mirror. This time, it showed only its true reflection.

  Surely, I was dreaming.

  But the question is, can a person dream while she is awake?

  Perhaps, if she has the right looking glass.

  THE END

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  Melanie Karsak is the NY Times bestselling author of The Airship Racing Chronicles, The Harvesting Series, The Celtic Blood Series, and the Steampunk Fairy Tales Series. A steampunk connoisseur, zombie whisperer, and heir to the iron throne, the author currently lives in Florida with her husband and two children. She is an Instructor of English at Eastern Florida State College.

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  The Waking of Grey Grimm

  Tony Bertauski

  Awareness leaping is all the rage.

  Grey isn’t sleeping.

  Sunny Grimm finds a strap around his head with an embossed symbol between his eyes. This is the mark of awareness leaping, where players launch into alternate realities and anything goes. Investors make millions. Critics, however, refuse to call it a game. They argue that reality confusion will end humanity. Labels aside, there are many who play and many who lose.

  The consequences are steep.

  Sunny goes on a mad search for her son and the people responsible for allowing him to play. The only way she will find him is to not lose herself in the search.

  The Maze is more than a game.

  Interview With Grey Grimm

  He wants to talk to you,” Andrew says.

  Freddy drops his pen. The feed on his monitor shows a kid in a hard-backed chair. He’s got shaggy brown hair and a smooth chin that hasn’t been shaved a day in his life. Eyes cast down, Grimm appears to be meditating. Freddy would’ve guessed the kid is fifteen years old.

  He knows he’s eighteen.

  “Why’s he in there?”

  Andrew taps his forehead.

  �
�What?” Freddy says. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “He was in it, Freddy. Said he escaped the Maze.”

  It’s probably bullshit, but anyone who mentions the Maze gets a free conversation with Freddy in the interrogation room. Ten-year-olds, grandmothers, or paraplegics, it doesn’t matter who you are.

  But this kid especially deserves a talk.

  His mom was fished from a submersion tank six months ago. The stink of the thick bubbling goo was as bad as a summer corpse—like oil scraped from the skull of a beached whale. Six months and the smell is still up Freddy’s nose. Kid’s mom was just another corpse donated to the Maze, a puckered human shell in a giant egg jar, her eyes half open.

  She was in the high-rent district, an abandoned warehouse with amenities. All the tanks were empty except for Sunny Grimm. It was the biggest bust in quite some time. No telling how long they’d been operating. Then again, no one ever did. Maze operators were like fire ants: kill the mound and another pops up.

  Feds flew in to photograph her pickled husk; they pulled samples, led interrogations, confiscated equipment and went home. Nothing came of it. Never did.

  “Kid says he wants to talk to you,” Andrew says.

  Christ. The longer Freddy stares, the longer the kid is there. Another Maze mess. Why don’t they just legalize the thing? Prohibition didn’t slow down booze. Weed laws only filled prisons. The Maze and all its promises are here to stay. Freddy is sick of the resistance. He just wants it to stop. They all do. If Sunny Grimm wanted to skinny dip in a vat of whale jizz, that was her right.

  It’s a free world.

  Freddy opens the interrogation room, sips bubbles off the top of an energy drink and stares. Grey Grimm wakes from his reverie, eyelids heavy.

  “Close the door,” Grey says.

  “You’re being recorded.”

  “Indulge me.”

  Kid looks like he should be tagging brick walls, not confessing to Maze activity. The heavy door latches behind him. He sits in the hard chair across from him and sighs, reaching deep for the politically correct opener. The kid’s waiting for it.

  “Sorry about your mother. Why people do these things, I’ll never know. Money? Fame? You’re a kid; this isn’t fair. You don’t deserve this.”

  It came out partially hollow, mostly rehearsed. Given his level of frustration, it deserves an award. Freddy sips his drink.

  “She’s gone,” Grey says, “because of me.”

  “Who?”

  “My mother.”

  “All right, your mother. She’s dead because of you. Did you kill her?”

  He doesn’t shake his head. Doesn’t acknowledge Freddy’s game, simply waits him out. Fine, let’s get this over with, Freddy thinks.

  “She’s gone because you were in the Maze, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So somehow you murdered her in the Maze?”

  “I was the one that called you, Freddy.”

  An anonymous caller tipped off the warehouse operation, leading them to the tanks and Sunny Grimm’s marinated corpse. The place was unlocked when they arrived. The evidence waiting. There was no trace of who called or why. It didn’t matter.

  “By confession to the Maze, you’re admitting to a felony, kid. You realize that.”

  Grey doesn’t nod. Doesn’t blink. There’s no proof of involvement, none that Freddy is aware of. He stares at the kid’s forehead. It’s not a sweeping glance or polite gander. He lets him know he’s looking for a dot or a hole where a needle might slide into his brain.

  “Did you punch in?” Freddy taps his forehead. “Take a needle to the head, or did you dive in one of those tanks of spoiled lube?”

  “I didn’t say she was dead.”

  That’s accurate. The kid said she was gone, not dead. “I’ve got a pale, shiny body that looks like your mom. I’m not a therapist, kid, so I’m not going to go easy. She’s not waking up. So if you got something to confess, I’m not a priest.”

  Freddy has seen a lot of gruesome shit since joining the academy, heard just about every horror story, true or false. He once saw a man cut his wife’s throat with a pruning saw, had seen an old man jump from a ten-story building, wearing only socks and a scarf. It had been many years since he’d been surprised or shaken. But then Grey Grimm says this next thing and reminds him what that first dead shiver of shock feels like.

  “I was in the Maze, Kaleb,” he says.

  Kaleb? Freddy looks around the interrogation room. He was being punked. No one knew his middle name. Not even Andrew.

  “All right,” he says. “You’ve got skills, found my middle name. Is that it?”

  The kid follows up the jab with a knockout. “You were there, too.”

  “Where?”

  “You were in the Maze, Kaleb.”

  “First of all, stop using that name. It’s Detective to you from now on, all right? Now, I’m sorry about your mother. She got mixed up with some bad people and that’s not your fault. But you’re walking a wire, kid. I’ve never been in the Maze. You just confessed to a felony and that’s a long tail to drag around. You sure you want to do this?”

  “Are you familiar with parallel worlds?”

  “Parallel…”

  Freddy should know more about the Maze; he is law enforcement, after all. All he knows is that it’s like virtual reality with weapons and bosses, the sort of shit his kids did when they glued their eyes on video games. Only the Maze was hard to distinguish from real life. People made money doing it. They also went insane.

  Grey Grimm doesn’t look wealthy or crazy.

  Andrew enters the interrogation room to deliver a glass of water. Freddy asks what the hell he thinks he’s doing and he says the kid is thirsty like he’s a goddamn mind reader. Grey takes a sip, runs his finger through the crescent of condensation on the table and flicks tiny droplets on his phone. Freddy watches the kid play with his water.

  “Parallel worlds… what does that mean?” Freddy says. “The Maze is a parallel reality, is that it?”

  “More like a reflection.”

  “A reflection of what?”

  “This world.”

  The conversation is making less sense. The kid was saying that he entered an alternate reality of the Maze that was a parallel universe of this world. Freddy wants to walk out of the room. Every day was a long line of crazy and the train was getting longer and slower. Twenty years is too long to retire.

  “A parallel universe is an alternate reality that looks exactly like this city. It has this desk, these walls, this building and the streets outside. All the same people are living similarly dull lives and frustrations. Including you, Kaleb.”

  “If you say that name again, I’ll let you sleep it off in the back. Maybe you’re shell-shocked about your mom, I don’t know. If you’re going on record about the Maze, then I’ll call the feds and let them tuck you in, all right? You can learn their middle names, too. I wasn’t in the Maze, Grey. I’m right here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know because I know.”

  “You know because of… memories? That’s not the best proof, Detective.”

  “Whatever you think happened, kid, didn’t. Your mom didn’t make it back. You’ll have to work that out on your own, I’m sorry.”

  Grey looks at the water droplets he flicked on his phone and takes a sip of water. He sits rigid, looking thoughtful.

  “We live in a networked world,” he says. “Satellites, security cameras, electronic eyes are everywhere nowadays, no corner left alone. It’s all uploaded somewhere, collated and stored. I suppose the Maze builds a parallel world with this data, a virtual environment that simply pieces together a three-dimensional reality indistinguishable from this one.”

  He knocks on the table. A private grin breaks out.

  “But I suspect the Maze is more than that,” he says. “The details are so… precise. You know what I mean?”

  “No, I don’t.”

 
“Every speck of dust is accounted for, every mannerism, every piece of litter and drop of dew. Maybe it’s some sort of quantum absorption, an essential snapshot of this world of flesh and bone and everything in it—you, me, our thoughts and beliefs.”

  The grin widens. For a moment, he looks like a kid filled with wonder, seeing the world for the first time, like he knows how such an impossible feat as creating a parallel world could be accomplished, knows how something could know all things in this world.

  Or he’s making it up.

  “I think you’re full of shit, Grey. The Maze I know about is guns and monsters and video games. It’s not parallel worlds, kid.”

  “There are all kinds of Mazes. This one was an experiment, like watching a mouse finding its way out of a trap.”

  “And the point?”

  Grey shrugs. “Will the mouse find the cheese?”

  “Before he dies.”

  “There’s no dying in the Maze.”

  The weird thing is this eighteen-year-old kid just lost his mother. Instead of cursing God or running away, he’s nodding along like death is just a doorway to a room full of virgins. He doesn’t look like a Christian, although Freddy’s not sure what a Christian is supposed to look like.

  Just not that.

  The childish joy fades. Grey stares off and continues nodding.

  “If you don’t die,” Freddy says, “then what happens when your face is ripped off.”

  “You start over.”

  Freddy waves his hand. He doesn’t care about the details. He really cares about going home, cares about his wife, his family. Not some… some video game.

  “You have survivor’s guilt?” Freddy says. “Is that why you’re here? Listen, I’m not a psychologist, Grey. I’m not a therapist or a priest or a bartender for you to spill your troubles to. You appear sane, at the very least normal, as far as I can tell. If you entered the Maze and came out that way, then I’m guessing you won, so congrats. Take your winnings and drown your sorrows. Your mom would apparently be proud. Given that the Maze took her life, I’m willing to let this conversation slide. The feds don’t need to know about it. Go visit your local church. I’m sure there’s a better soul than me you can tell your tale to.”