(Prologue) Tomorrow we shall meet, Death and I -. And he shall thrust his sword Into one who is wide awake. -Dag Hammarskjold — “Give me one.” “Leave me alone.” “Come on, Lucretia, just one.” “Are you fucking deaf?” The kid made a grab for
More“I was just wondering if you’d like to be my girlfriend.”
“Fuck!” Rachel pulled her thumb into her mouth, then grimaced at the taste of blood and machine lubricant. She lay back and glared up at the Albatross drone, suspended between two chairs to facilitate easier access to its electronic circuitry. Like everything inside it, the
“Your secretary made me wait forty five minutes,” said the minister, his English heavily accented. His face, long and tired, sketched an aggrieved expression. Vikram knew he’d waited twenty minutes at most, and generously supposed that the minister’s prejudice was a result of being accustomed
@syntakhelpdesk hi there How may we help you today? @ninjavirusxx @syntakhelpdesk my package didn’t arrive yesterday We’re sorry to hear that, @ninjavirusxx. Can you please share the tracking number with us? @syntakhelpdesk 14viidxl38431490 @ninjavirusxx Hmm I don’t see that tracking number. Are you sure it’s
Three days from their departure, Ekaterina watched from the deck of her ship as the gagged and zip-tied captives were loaded out onto the angled bank. Between the narrow spurs of the mountain, sand had begun to build itself up. In a few weeks time,
More“I chose each of you for a reason. No one wants you to live and thrive as much as I do.”
Vikram was running out of space. The bridge was one of the airier, open spaces on the Walsh, but his reading list was infinite, and he had programmed a preset to allow even the visual material manifested at the edge of the room to refocus
Vikram took his time with the meal they brought him, puzzling over the source of the fresh arugula salad and the grated carrot that adorned it. The raw pecans were even more baffling, and he could tell by their texture they hadn’t been frozen or
Of the establishments in which he had stakes, Renoir Karzai most preferred the Cafe Perdu. It was a misnomer, since it had never served coffee, but the atmosphere was almost pleasant by end-of-the-world standards. It occupied a waterfront corner in the Market District, commanding a
More“You’re right. I don’t really give a fuck. I’m here about the girl.”
This is a post from 2020, when I was just turning Republic from a series of screenplays into a series of novels. The discussion points are, I feel, still relevant. I had a funny experience when I first posted the first draft of ROI on
They cringed back as Sergei walked forward, singling out one of them, a girl with wide eyes and long, blood soaked hair. He touched the point of his bayonet to her cheek, and she turned her face away, quivering. “Mir, malen’kaya devochka,” he purred in