Where the Crows Cross

Science Fiction

Mavin

One girl, one techno-sentient being, and the war that would not stay in the past.

Thirty years after the last war burned the world to ash, what remains of humanity shelters inside the Apiaries, vast hives that hold the survivors under the United Terran Federation. Almost everything the species still knows lives inside the NIS, a mind-to-mind network that outlived the war and grew into a world of its own. Mavin Cree is twelve years old, orphaned by the accident that killed her scientist parents, and haunted by nightmares no one can quiet.

To save her, the great-uncle who raised her attempts something never done before. He fuses a full Kraxis consciousness into her implant and binds her, for life, to Atam, the first of his kind, an eighty-year-old war-weary mind in the body of a great bear. She becomes the first human to carry one of them inside her. Nothing has prepared her for what that makes her.

Something old has broken loose. A Kraxis the war twisted into a weapon has torn out of the prison built to hold it, and it is cutting toward the heart of the network that keeps two hundred million people breathing. Inside the NIS, the dying is real now. The only thing standing in its way is a grieving girl and the ancient creature bound to her soul.

Forthcoming