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

by Gwynn White

  Sunny backed into the pedestal. Stiff white cards sprayed over the bamboo floor, some sticking in small puddles. Random black lines bled across the backs of them. She ran onto the sidewalk before the South African woman insisted she clean them up.

  The rain soaked her once again.

  Sunny dialed as she ran down the sidewalk. First for a car to pick her up, then Donny. When he didn’t answer, she called the police. She would take them to the apartment; she would show them her son and the punch.

  The symbol that would betray them both.

  She was ready for that, prepared to accept the consequences, fines that left her homeless or a stretch in jail. She’d take the police to her apartment, give herself up for her son. Only they wouldn’t find him when they got there.

  There’s more to risk than legal trouble.

  3

  Sunny

  After the Punch

  The bed was empty.

  The room was still the same—dirty clothes and tipped boxes, the desk buried beneath papers, the tin box where she left it. The pillow was fluffed, the corners tucked in as if no one had ever lain on it, no one had ever slept in it. No one had used a punch.

  The second she walked in her apartment, she knew it. It felt different. Smelled odd. It was the same scent that had wafted out of the back room of 511, the nasty sting in her nose.

  The kitchen was still a mess. The orange juice was on the counter, the empty box and velvet bag. She thought, for a moment, this was all a joke, that Grey had woken up to peel that thing off his head and together he and Donny went for breakfast. Maybe they’d left a message or sent a text she never received.

  Donny still wasn’t answering the phone.

  This is a dream. She propped herself in the doorway. A fucking nightmare. The seconds fell around her like radioactive snowflakes, stripped her of hope, and left her naked and exposed.

  Grey’s phone was on the desk. His phone never left his pocket or his hand, and there it was on the desk, squared in the corner, screen black. She thought she’d left it in the kitchen. Maybe Donny put it there. It requested a passcode when she touched the screen.

  How long have I been gone? Hours felt like days, even years. Already the memory of her son was fading, the details of his face dusty with time.

  “Ma’am?” Officer Blake stepped into the room. “Is there anything else?”

  Sunny couldn’t even shake her head.

  “You need to understand the severity of filing a false report—”

  “It wasn’t false. He was here, in his bed. This is all…”

  “Okay. We can still file a missing persons report, but you’ll have to come back to the station. Unfortunately, the rest of your story just doesn’t hold up. There’s no evidence your son was tampering with the Maze.”

  Sunny scrambled to the bed. The computer beneath it was gone. No lights, no cable. No evidence.

  “Maze activity is a felony. If your son was involved in any way, he can be prosecuted. You’ll be held accountable, too, Mrs. Grimm. This is your apartment.”

  She leaned on the bed, unsure if she could stand.

  “Mrs. Grimm?”

  “I understand.”

  Officer Blake looked at his partner then back again. “You want to file a missing persons report?”

  “No. No, he might be at a friend’s house. I’m… I’m sorry. I panicked this morning. I work a lot of late shifts and…” She rubbed her face. “Maybe I wasn’t seeing things right.”

  “You sure it wasn’t a VR headset?” the partner called from the kitchen.

  “Yeah, maybe,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  “We’ll have to include this in our report,” Officer Blake said.

  “Of course.”

  “Sunny Marie Jones?”

  “What?”

  “That’s your name.” His thumbs were poised over his phone.

  “No, Jones is my maiden name… I gave all that information at the station.”

  Officer Blake cleared his throat and nodded at his partner. He said something, maybe it was goodbye or his contact information. Sunny didn’t process anything but the front door closing. And the crushing silence.

  The apartment spoke loud and clear.

  She knew what she had seen that morning. She wasn’t dreaming, wasn’t hallucinating. She didn’t need a note to explain what had happened since she left that morning. The ominous warnings were clear. There’s more to risk than legal trouble.

  And now Donny was involved.

  She wouldn’t forgive herself if something happened to him. She didn’t know much about the Maze, just that it was a black-market sport that dealt with virtual realities that destroyed the losers and sometimes the winners, a virtual game of Russian roulette.

  Grey’s phone vibrated. The screen lit up. It was a text.

  You all right? It was his girlfriend, Rachel.

  Sunny swiped the text. She didn’t need a passcode to reply, but her thumbs hovered in place. Where is he? Do you know about the Maze? Did you break up? Is he okay? What the hell is happening?

  The phone went blank. The text vanished. Her opportunity to reply had passed. She didn’t know Rachel’s phone number, didn’t have it in her phone. And Rachel was his only friend.

  That she knew of.

  Sunny tried to grab her hair. It was why she had started shaving it, to keep from pulling it out on bad days. She began pacing. The floor rocked with turbulence, as if the building was hitting air pockets. She needed food. Needed sleep. Needed a moment.

  There was no time for any of that.

  The window was cold. The spatter of rain rattled in her head. The cops were still parked at the curb, standing at open car doors.

  Grey’s phone vibrated again.

  She ran to the bedroom, would answer Rachel this time, write all the questions in one long text and hit send. But it wasn’t from her. An unknown sender’s message was simple.

  Leave the apartment now.

  She almost dropped the phone. Who is this? she texted back. Before hitting send, she added, Where is my son?

  Sunny waited for an answer. The logo suddenly appeared. The phone spontaneously shut off. She pushed the button, held it down, and shook it. It had plenty of charge a minute ago, but she plugged it in anyway.

  It was dead.

  She had to call Henk. She was an incompetent mother, a head case, an emotional plane crash. Fine. She just wanted her son back, wanted him safe. Even if her ex-husband claimed a victory, let him have it.

  But her phone was dead, too. “What the hell?”

  The police were in their car now. Turn signal on, they merged into traffic. Another car quickly filled the empty spot. A black umbrella emerged from an open door.

  Sunny paced again, her breath coming in short stabs. The floor continued to sway, the swales deep and mysterious. She was going under a wave of panic, drowning in a sea of dreaded emotion. She just needed a moment to think, clear her head, see a direction. The police were no help. Micah and 511 weren’t either. And Donny. Where are you, Donny?

  A soft rap on the door.

  She stopped too suddenly and almost crumpled. There was silence and rain. Then another knock.

  Sunny tiptoed to the door, she didn’t know why, and peeked through the eyehole. A short old woman was getting ready to knock again. She was hunched over from a lifetime of gravity, a floral silk scarf around her head and dark sunglasses the size of coasters.

  Sunny looked around the chain lock. “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, dear, but you have a call.”

  “What?”

  “There’s someone on the phone.”

  Sunny didn’t talk to her neighbors much. This wasn’t the sort of building where people mingled. But in all the time she’d lived there, the apartment across the hall was always quiet. She’d always thought, for some reason, it was empty.

  The door was ajar. A Siamese cat watched from inside the dark apartment, a little bell around its neck.<
br />
  “Did you see anything this morning? Did anyone come to the apartment while I was gone? Did you see anyone leave?”

  The old woman’s cheeks turned a paler shade. “Um, no.”

  She seemed unsure if the old woman understood the question or just didn’t hear it. She shuffled a stack of mail and dropped an envelope. It fluttered into the narrow slot of Sunny’s open door.

  She picked it up. “You’re Mrs. Jones?”

  “I am.”

  “Have you seen anyone strange on the floor?”

  “There’s someone on the phone, dear.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Someone called for you.”

  Sunny swallowed a knot before it broke open. She opened the door and looked in both directions, placing the fallen envelope in Mrs. Jones’s knobby hands. “Someone called… for me?”

  “They want to talk to you.”

  Mrs. Jones tightened the scarf around her head and pulled it behind her dark glasses. Sunny held onto the door and looked down the empty hallway, half expecting it to shrink.

  “Who is it?” Sunny asked. “A man or a boy?”

  She was afraid to let go, afraid the door to her apartment would slam shut and never let her back in. Everything was about to change. Her life would be completely closed.

  There’s nothing back there anyway.

  That was what it felt like. Someone had turned her life inside out. She could move on now, start a new life.

  If they just didn’t take my son.

  Mrs. Jones scooped up the Siamese and waited. Sunny started across the hall, a sneeze greeting her inside the thick air. Heavy drapes blocked the sunlight. What little light seeped around the edges was diffuse.

  Half a dozen lamps shed yellowish light on the clutter. Cat hair floated through the brightest spots. The couches were hidden beneath discarded magazines and old newspapers, boxes of empty tissues and piles of knitted scarves. Somewhere a vanilla-scented air freshener was battling a litter box.

  “The phone is in the kitchen.” Mrs. Jones scratched the Siamese cat. “It doesn’t stretch in here.”

  It was a phone as vintage as the old woman. The spiral cord was knotted worse than a ball of yarn. Sunny held her face near the receiver.

  “Hello? Grey, is that you?” The silence was final. “Hello? Who’s there?”

  Only her voice answered back. She turned to Mrs. Jones and asked, “Was it a man that called?”

  “It was someone.”

  “Like my son?”

  “It was sort of soft but short. I think you were calling from far away.”

  You? Mrs. Jones was the cat lady they wrote about on postcards, the one with an endless selection of scarves to wrap around her head. A person that wasn’t quite in touch with the world outside.

  “Far away?” Sunny said.

  “The voice was small. It used to be that way when I was little, when someone called from across the country. Their voice was very small. I used to pretend it was someone calling from the future.”

  The Siamese purred as she stroked her belly, the bell jingling on its collar. Two more cats entered the room, rubbing beneath the old woman’s robe. She told them to be patient, it wasn’t their turn.

  There was a knock on the door.

  Mrs. Jones didn’t hear it, her arthritic fingers crawling through the Siamese’s fur. Once again, Sunny walked on her tiptoes and stood near the door. The knock came again, but not on Mrs. Jones’s apartment. Looking through the spyhole, a man was at her apartment. His overcoat was black and beaded with rain. A hood was pulled over his head.

  His shoulders were broad, the gloved hand thick; he rapped on apartment 300, Sunny’s apartment, where the door would swell in the summer and the bottom was scuffed from kicking it open.

  She assumed it was a man.

  Sunny’s hand rested on the doorknob. He might know something about Grey. Or maybe he took him and was here to offer a way to bring him back. She was about to open the door—

  “They said to stay.” Mrs. Jones had fallen on the couch.

  “What?”

  “The one on the phone. They said to stay here.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that?” Sunny whispered.

  Despite the claustrophobic apartment, Sunny’s mind had cleared. When she walked back to the door, the floor didn’t teeter. The man was gone. Two damp footsteps faded at the foot of the door.

  “Did they say anything else?” Sunny repeated the question while spying on the empty hallway. She thought the old woman might have fallen asleep.

  “Find me.”

  Sunny turned. “What?”

  “That’s what they said. Find me.”

  Ice water flooded her legs. She made it to the empty couch before collapsing on a heap of knitted scarves. She would wait a few minutes on the couch. Maybe the person would call back. The dregs of third shift caught up with her. The room entered a cycle that spun her into a dead sleep.

  She dreamed of needles.

  Big dull needles prodded her to run on legs too fat, too numb. If she could reach up and pull the needle from her head, the one that pierced the frontal lobe, she could wake up.

  Or maybe leave the needle in. Because that’s where he is. He’s inside the needle. And I need to find him.

  Sunny rolled into the pain and stared at fatigued green fabric, breathing through a coarse blanket filled with dust mites and a layer of shed fur. Knitting needles were driving into her side. They clattered on the carpet.

  The lamps were off.

  A nightlight drove shadows across the littered floor. The pale light of early morning slipped past the thick drapes, the patter of rain against the window. Sleep still dusted her mind, blotting out the past and sun-bleached memories. She was steeped in dullness as cats stirred somewhere. There was a distant memory of the digital watch beeping in the middle of the night, the masking tape pulling at the hairs on her wrist.

  As the pale light faded around the window to become fully gray, the details of the cramped apartment reminded her where she was.

  And why.

  A clock sat on a bookshelf loaded with DVDs and empty picture frames. It was three o’clock, but the diffuse light looked more like early morning. She’d slept through the night.

  She’d missed her shift.

  Her supervisor would have called her phone, which was in her apartment. And dead. His message would go straight to voicemail, where it would wait for eternity. Maybe he would ask Donny what happened and he would tell him and they would forgive her.

  But Donny won’t be there, either.

  Hopelessness smothered her. Mrs. Jones would find her corpse when digging for her needles. She would call the police and they would bury her without a tear.

  “What do you want from me?” she said.

  She didn’t believe in an all-seeing entity, not Greek or Roman or Christian, because if there was a God, then she had no reason to bend a knee to his cruel sense of humor. She didn’t deserve this. Still, she was talking.

  So she must believe in something.

  She could call Henk, find Grey’s girlfriend or try the police again. But none of that would explain the phone calls, the prescient demand to come to Mrs. Jones’s apartment when someone came looking for her.

  She dug into her pocket and opened a wadded piece of paper. Micah wasn’t available and the South African woman wasn’t about to speak with her again. But Sunny knew where she could get more answers. With the right amount of prodding, someone could tell her who Micah was and why she needed to find him.

  She peeked through the spyhole before opening the door. She walked through her apartment, where everything was exactly the same, the hopeful glimmer this was all a dream going to its final resting place. Sunny left nothing behind that mattered. Grey was out there.

  A short, little man was going to help find him.

  4

  Hunter

  After the Punch

  A white-haired woman sat in the office.


  The detective was typing, taking her statement or just flat out ignoring her.

  Hunter shook his umbrella and tucked it into his leather bag. He checked the time, ignored the unread emails and scrolled through the weather back home, where it wasn’t raining.

  The plane ride had been bumpy; the seat wouldn’t recline. He felt he’d been away from home too long, even though he’d just arrived in this sad city. His phone buzzed.

  Who is this? was the text.

  The number seemed familiar, but there was no texting history. He was about to respond (You texted me. Who are you?) but then decided to block it. Spammers knew how to bait a conversation.

  “Help you?” an officer asked.

  “Waiting for the, uh… for him.” Hunter gestured at the office. The old woman was gone. She’d slipped out without notice.

  “He expecting you?”

  “Probably.”

  Hunter hiked the leather bag on his shoulder and made his way to the open door. He lightly knocked.

  “Yes?” the detective answered.

  “Hunter Montebank. FBI, cybercrime.” He cleared his throat. He’d been doing this job forever, but sometimes he just didn’t know how to start or what he was doing. Like it was day one. “We, uh, spoke this morning.”

  The sign on the desk said Fred Billingsly, but he liked to go by Freddy. Hunter wasn’t sure how he knew that, must’ve overheard a conversation when he arrived, one of those details he absorbed and couldn’t remember.

  Freddy pointed at a chair while he cleared a space on his desk. A yellow envelope fell on the floor, one that appeared to be a birthday card. It was addressed to Fredrick Kaleb Billingsly in big loopy cursive. The same handwriting was in the upper left corner. It was from Mom.

  Hunter was about to wish him happy birthday, but instead he said, “Lovely city. Does it ever stop raining?”

  An awkward minute passed. “Do you know where you are, Mr. Hunter?”