Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels

by White, Gwynn

  I flashed a panicked look at the men whose magic sustained me, and all three of them moved closer to hold me.

  “If we can send him through, we can follow him,” Rafe said.

  “I go where you lead,” Azar added.

  Zehr nodded. “Our paths do not diverge yet.”

  Within the Rift, Coit’s image grew smaller and smaller as he moved away—but another figure moved toward me.

  By the time Brodric stumbled through the Rift and into my arms, I was sobbing—with pain, with relief, with hope.

  The Rift had traded me one brother for another.

  But I intended to get him back, too.

  Epilogue

  I dreamed of Coit that night.

  At first I knew it for a dream, even within the dream itself.

  Then I wasn’t so sure.

  I stood behind a group of people in a room full of beeping machinery—the kind that only rarely works on Tehar any longer. These people took its continued functioning as a given.

  That was my first hint that I was no longer in my own world.

  When they first spoke, it was in some strange, garbled language.

  And then the Rift rapped against my mind, tapping to be allowed in.

  “…what you saw?” one of the men said. Like several others in the room, he wore a white jacket over his other clothing. A marker of rank, I suspected. Others wore blue pants and tunics. And some wore no distinctive clothing at all.

  “I’m sure of it. I know I can get back to it if I simply concentrate.” The group shifted and I saw the woman who spoke.

  The snake-woman I’d seen through the Rift. Not in her serpent form now, but definitely the same person.

  Had she crossed over to Tehar?

  No. I was on the other side.

  I glanced around with renewed interest at the artificial lights above me, the machines, the people with their shoes, like Coit’s, not meant for questing.

  I reached out with one hand to touch one of the beeping machines, then watched it slide through my hand as if I were made of mist.

  This room was real—but I wasn’t.

  And as surely as I’d known the Rift and I were bonded, I knew in that instant that these moments had already passed.

  This was merely a memory.

  Why had the Rift brought me here in my dream?

  A promise, the Rift whispered. No matter where you go, no matter where you travel, my love travels with you.

  Murmuring among themselves, the people around the snake-woman shifted again, and this time, I caught a glimpse of a Rift in her world.

  Not a huge one—nothing like the one on Tehar.

  But a Rift, nonetheless.

  The snake-woman stood in front of it, eyes closed and hands extended, power surrounding her not in threads, as it did me, but in sparkles.

  As the sparkles grew brighter, she shifted into her serpent shape. No one around her seemed surprised. But no one took notice of the shadowy form within the Rift, even as it grew larger and larger.

  When Coit stumbled through into that room, everyone there gasped.

  The snake-woman, startled, flashed from her serpent form back into her human one.

  Coit froze in place, staring at her.

  “Ah, hell,” he said. “I don’t think I’m where I’m supposed to be.” He crossed his arms and settled back on his heels. “I’ve got just one question for y’all.”

  When no one responded to him, his eyes narrowed and his jaw tightened as he glanced around at the other inhabitants of the room.

  “Are any of y’all werewolves?”

  THE END

  * * *

  Want to read more books in the Riftverse? Check out Margo’s Shifter Shield and Blaize Silver series!

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  About the Author

  New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Margo Bond Collins is a former college English professor who, tired of explaining the difference between "hanged" and "hung," turned to writing romance novels instead. (Sometimes her heroines kill monsters, too.)

  http://www.margobondcollins.net

  The Zoo at the End of the World

  Samuel Peralta

  A young girl, one of the caretakers at a private zoo, looks after her charges in the weeks before a comet destroys humanity.

  They call it Gabriel’s Comet, an asteroid fifty times the size of Mount Everest, on a collision course with Earth. Time is running out—and it may already be too late to escape the apocalypse. But is there still time for humanity to find redemption?

  I don't have any idea of who or what God is. But I do believe in some great spiritual power. I feel it particularly when I'm out in nature. It's just something that's bigger and stronger than what I am or what anybody is. I feel it. And it's enough for me.

  – Jane Goodall

  If nothing saves us from death, may love at least save us from life.

  – Pablo Neruda

  Prologue

  This is the way the world ends.

  If the Comet hits ocean, it ends in thunder. The enormous mass of the comet will rupture the water’s surface and send shock waves through the ocean as it hurtles toward the floor. When it hits, it will trigger a seizure of the Earth’s tectonic plates, flinging wave after wave of towering tsunamis to sweep against the continental shorelines, crashing against the walls of our cities and bringing them down like dominoes.

  If the Comet falls on land, it ends in fire. Its hammer fall upon the Earth’s soft anvil will spark an eruption in flames, spreading from a crater of molten soil like a locust swarm. The inferno will burn everything in its wake, civilization’s towers crumbling under the weight of burning concrete on burning steel, a conflagration consuming everything in its path.

  Near either pole, the Comet would obliterate the ice, sending a plume of snow and destruction raining far, like a hailstorm of judgment.

  And whether on water, or land, or fire, the Comet’s destruction will not end with its fall. Unless the effects were softened by water, the Comet would exhaust from its impact an avalanche of gases to poison our atmosphere, first sulfur dioxide, and then carbon dioxide.

  Swirling up into the stratosphere, to where the Earth’s ozone layer enfolds us in a swath of protection, these gases will bring about a great cooling, a new ice age, and then a full and irrevocable transformation of the planet’s climate. Nearly all the plant and animal life that survived the first wave of death with the Comet’s impact will not survive. There would be an extinction like no other.

  At sea, on land, in the polar ice: Where will you be when the Apocalypse comes?

  All around me I hear the sounds of animals, the call of birds, the roar of lions. All this will be gone, silenced.

  Earthquakes, tidal waves, wildfire, a poisoned atmosphere, and a winter that might as well last forever… Unless the Comet misses the Earth, it all ends the same.

  But the Comet will not miss.

  Its passage has, in the distant past, held back from cataclysm. Perhaps as little as a few tens of millions of miles separated it from a collision with the Earth—whisper-close in the grand clockwork of the Universe.

  Instead, the Comet swung out again on its grand elliptical path, out and away from us, away again into the darkness.

  Not this time.

  So this is how it ends.

  Part I

  Dragonfly

  For Immediate Broadcast M2 80 52

  Asteroid and Comet Identification Project Continues Run of Discoveries

  The Deep Ecliptic Multi-Object Survey (DEMOS) at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, has released a new calendar year of data from the project, with the survey discovering 147 previously unknown celestial objects in the last year. Of those, 36 were near-Earth objects, 84 were main belt asteroids and nine were comets.

  The project has now characterized a total of 858 near-Earth objects since the project was initiated
over the course of its inception. Of these, 217 are new discoveries. The DEMOS team has released a video simulation depicting the new characterizations and discoveries for the current year of operations.

  “DEMOS is not only identifying asteroids and comets that were previously uncharted, but it is providing excellent new characterization data for many of those objects that are already in the catalog,” said Dr. Colin Gabriel, project director and principal investigator. “DEMOS is proving to be an invaluable tool in in perfecting current techniques for near-Earth object discovery and characterization by terrestrial and space-based facilities.”

  NEOs, or Near-Earth objects, are asteroids and comets whose orbits allow them to enter Earth’s vicinity, due to the gravitational forces of the planets in our solar system. Of the objects discovered in the past year by DEMOS, thirteen of them have been classified as potentially hazardous asteroids or comets, based on their orbits and sizes.

  More than 5.8 million multi-spectral images of the sky were collected in the current year of operations by DEMOS. Combined with data from earlier years, the team has created an archive that contains approximately 14.7 million sets of images and a database of more than 116.4 billion source detections extracted from those images.

  The DEMOS images also contain glimpses of objects, like comet C/21B9 M2 DEMOS, which may be of particular interest to researchers because its orbit allows for the possibility it entering the Earth’s vicinity.

  "Comets with such orbits are not commonly found," said Dianne Patrick, a Postdoctoral Program Fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and one of the lead authors of a paper on the DEMOS survey. "So when one is found, it’s a real opportunity for astronomers to be able to view and collect its orbital data.”

  A paper detailing the orbital analysis for Comet C/21B9 M2 DEMOS and the other objects classified for monitoring as potentially hazardous was published in the February volume of the Astrophysical Journal.

  One of the primary missions of DEMOS, in addition to its general survey, is to assist efforts to identify the population of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects. DEMOS is also identifying and characterizing asteroids and comets that are more distant, in order to obtain information about their sizes and compositions.

  1

  White Crane Spreads Wings

  My mind can’t trace how it begins—the end of the world, the end of my world—to the day we first learned about the Comet.

  Five years ago, it was just another fleck of light in the sky, subtle and faint, invisible except to the perturbations in the calculations of our astronomers in their observatories, or the multi-spectral cameras on deep space satellites, which beamed its existence back to us in false-color images.

  Life went on as it always did, in its routine of peace and war, of marriage and separation, of birth and death.

  On the day scientists discovered what they first described as an anomalous comet just beyond our system, the world went on as it always did, nations rising and falling, their borders ebbing and flowing between them depending on religious vagaries, the whim of a dictator, the collapse of a currency.

  Beyond Earth, a great Colonial War raged among the outer planets and their satellites, that continued to drag in Earth and the inner colonies, an unending war that had been continuing for over fourteen years. When we concerned ourselves with matters beyond our Earth, it was always about the Colonial War: about the outflow of men and women to distant posts whose names we couldn’t pronounce, the constant need for funding and resources, the sensational dispatches on the news, the statistics, the politics, the lies. Otherwise, we were unmoved.

  In the cities, parents dropped their children off at kindergarten, sat at computer screens, attended meetings, broke for coffee, unpacked lunches, or ran off to pick up a sandwich from the nearest Whole Foods or Gateway Automat, read the paper through the afternoon commute as their spinner made its way to pick their children up again from extended care.

  Joggers made their way across the boardwalks, while their headphones repeated pre-recorded admonition—to go further, to push harder, to be better—interspersed with readings of their heart rates, blood pressure, glucose levels, oxygen intake, steps made, kilometers covered, and whatever minutae of bodily function they cared to monitor.

  On beaches and in parks, groups of enthusiasts progressed in unison through the deliberate stances of T‘ai-Chi—Grasping the Bird’s Tail, the Single Whip, the White Crane Spreads Wings—or the Five Rites of Rejuvenation of Tibetan Yoga.

  Across the cities of the world, the sun rose, lights flickered off. The Earth rotated around its axis. the sun set, lights switched on. People laughed, they cried, they loved, they dreamed. They lived, they died.

  As did my father, on the day they discovered the Comet, five years ago today.

  2

  The Year of the Dragon

  I was born in the Year of the Dragon, as was my mother before me. The Chinese Zodiac is a twelve-year lunar cycle, and I was born just before her forty-eighth birthday. She had my brother Paul first, but it was four more years of trying before she and my father were able to conceive again.

  I was the stubborn one, so they said. Even from birth.

  “Zara!” my mother would say in exasperation, arriving to fetch me from middle school, and finding me in one scrape or another. Or, if I was really in trouble, she’d use my full name—“Emzara Elizabeth!”—with an emphasis on the beth!

  Once, when I was nine, it was Emzara Elizabeth! time when she discovered the after-school teacher from Meadow Green Academy pulling me away from pummeling a boy a head taller than I was.

  “He was throwing stones at the rabbit!” I’d said. The Eastern cottontail had been munching clover in the playground grass, and had frozen in the middle of the yard when the kids came out for playtime, hoping that no one had seen it, pretending it was part of the landscape.

  Everyone else—the girls giggling, the boys open-mouthed—had stood still at the teacher’s urging. Nathan had picked up a handful of pebbles, and before anyone realized what he was doing, launched them at the unfortunate thing. All the teacher could do was gasp. I yelled, livid, and meted out justice with my nine-year-old fists.

  I had no dinner that night. It was stir-fried shrimp and tofu, one of my favorites. As my father and mother ate, I sat in one of the ladderback chairs, facing one of the dining room’s corners. I remembered the rabbit twitching its ears as I yelled, and before the stones hit the ground around her, the white puff of its tail as it scampered clean away. Yes, I smiled.

  The next day, I found Mom had packed me last night’s leftover dinner for lunch.

  * * *

  Like the Zodiac year that I was born in, my mother bequeathed me a love of animals.

  We lived by woods near a ravine, close to the Credit River in eastern Mississauga near the lake, and there were all manner of creatures that would make their way across our lawn and backyard.

  “See, there’s a fox peeking at us from that bush!” she’d say, as we took a walk around the neighborhood. She’d point up to the sky and exclaim, “A falcon! Look at those wings!”

  Mom would help get animals through the winter, buying walnuts and almonds and pistachios; she’d put them out on our backyard porch, which faced the woodlot bordering the Cawthra Estate. She’d get me to help, taking the bulk bargain nuts she had in the bag and scattering them far and wide so that everyone in the backyard could get a share.

  At first, we had squirrels, brown, black and red, and the occasional chipmunk. Birds began to discover the bounty, mostly blue jays and cardinals. They would swoop down from the rooftop, and carry away nuts in a flash of blue or red.

  Smaller birds would also try their luck, but the nuts caught in their beaks, far too large. Instead, we hung feeders filled with suet and seeds on the branches of the birch trees and Manitoba maples in the backyard.

  * * *

  My mother read me a poem once, from an old poet she knew. It was supposed to show how different bird
s can symbolize different things, and it went like this:

  Fourteen Birds

  1

  A solitary blackbird wings away in the backyard,

  ringing the rim of a metal fence post.

  Hollow, like my heart without you.

  2

  A red-breasted robin wings away in the backyard,

  ringing the rim of a metal fence post.

  The bright, clear chime of spring.

  3

  A dark-cloaked owl wings away in the backyard,

  ringing the rim of a metal fence post.

  Night tolls a savage premonition.

  4

  A ricebird wings away in the backyard,

  ringing the rim of a metal fence post.

  Your bamboo flute replays a gentle harmony.

  5

  A hummingbird wings away in the backyard,

  ringing the rim of a metal fence post.

  The calla lilies quiver, a delicate carillon.

  6

  A starling wings away in the backyard,

  ringing the rim of a metal fence post.

  Lost in the verge, a single, cerulean egg.

  7

  A golden-cheeked warbler wings away in the backyard,

  ringing the rim of a metal fence post.

  The memory of your smile.

  8

  A hill robin wings away in the backyard,

  ringing the rim of a metal fence post.

  In the hedgerow, the tail flick of a siamese.