A Post–July Post.
Haha see what I did there? Not posthumously, just an afterthought on July and the coming challenges ahead
Are you writing yet?
So many people I’ve spoken to say “they’d love to write a book, but who has the time?”
There’s only one answer, nobody. No one has the time to write a book, but anyone that has written a book has made the time. Ie. it’s 9pm, I’m at home writing a blog post and in another ten to fifteen minutes I’m going to move on to writing a chapter of False Ignition. A three year old who demands my attention most days, all day, my beautiful wife who obviously deserves (not demands) my attention, and not least our ten month old who both demands and requires my attention. Life’s busy. I have this hour to write and I’m taking it. So can you.
So get writing and send me your stuff, I’d love to read it
July
“July is hollyhocks and hammocks, fireworks and vacations, hot and steamy weather, cool and refreshing swims, beach picnics, and vegetables all out of the garden.”
— Jean Hersey
Except there was no mint at the cottage! Drowned, I understand, under the heavy rains from lake Huron this year.
Not to be dissuaded, the swings at Tom Tiddler’s Ground saw heavy use this summer. I set up shop on many days, a comfortable chair, a stable platform for my hot/cold beverage of choice depending on the time of day, an occasional glance at my phone and the endless squeak of steel against steel, a hypnotic and rhythmic cadence affecting both old and new. We managed both boys in the swings simultaneously for the first time ever, photo in the gallery below.
And Then I Wrote
The following is copied and pasted from an Expand Summit email. Likely not AI generated but that entire scam-market is for another post. Here’s what I enjoyed:
What if you could start telling the story now?
Piece by piece. A serialized podcast. A sequence of vertical video episodes. An illustrated story released one scene at a time. A newsletter serial. An audio drama. A short-form video series built around your characters or ideas. A community that follows the project as it develops.
Instead of disappearing for two or five or ten years to finish a book and hoping an audience appears afterward, you could begin sharing the story while you’re creating it.
You’d discover which characters people care about. Which scenes they remember. Which ideas create a response. Which language resonates. Which parts of the story deserve more room.
And as you tell the story out loud—episode by episode, scene by scene—something else happens: you’re making progress on the book too. You’re developing the world, testing the premise, finding the voice, clarifying the structure, creating scenes, learning what holds attention. And building an audience that already knows the story exists.
By the time the book is finished, it’s not launching into silence. It’s arriving as the deeper, more complete version of a story people are already following.
I’ve hinted at this before. Certainly when I learned that serial releases were in fact, reality. None of False Ignition has seen an editor, yet. But I’d hate to give away so much content for free, long before it will ever see the light of day in print. I’m on the fence. Behind the paywall maybe. The problem is that I am forever haunted by the first season of Californication, where Hank is seduced and then robbed of his as yet unpublished manuscript. Seduction notwithstanding, I feel like the process of ripping off someone else’s work in today’s age is far more simple and accessible than it was when that show was produced. So it’s a maybe. Five chapters? Ten? #shrug. I dunno yet. I like the idea of reading a chapter in between posting print versions.
Tom Tiddler’s Ground.
To the material then. The brass tax. The real deal. How much do I release? The answer is some.
I think without going too far back in the blog (should I say the Substack?) I believe that I’ve previously released some of this early material, but I’ll do it again because I’ve moved some things around and I feel like I’m close enough to completion that generating some early interest is in my best, umm interests.
Here’s the goods, first two chapter’s are free, the rest are behind the paywall. Use your free subscriptions as you see fit. There will be more to come, and remember this content has not been past my editor. Think third draft quality.
False Ignition (early release)
Lucien Telford
PROLOGUE
The America.
Prohibitions and Laws on the use of artificial intelligences.
Article 86.
Prohibition.
No agency belonging to the United Nations may deploy or use in any way, an artificially created intelligence, neural network, or quantum intelligence for the use of duplication, replication, or creation of any likeness of any individual that holds a position in government or military institution of any kind. Furthermore, in the event that an entity, living or not, is discovered in the use of such context, the intelligence is to be deleted, its source code destroyed, and any humans involved in the creation of such entity prosecuted under the Artificial Intelligence Act, Section 86, Article 86, Non-Human Prohibitions and Laws.
Apophis I
The People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Central District
HK Police Department Special Crimes Division
Johnny Woo
“What do you mean, we’re letting him go? He’s got no legs, he’s not going anywhere.”
“What the boss wants, Woo.“ The Super shook his oversized, shaved and lumpy head, sitting behind his shining metal desk from when the British ran the place, hands behind his back. ”My hands are literally tied.”
Was bullshit was what it was. Woo paced. “I spent weeks on this case, and did specifically what you requested, brought in Chen Rong to remove the head from the snake.”
Behind the superintendent, pixels woven inside glass darkened their tint in a silent horizontal cascade, fighting to dim the incoming beams of late afternoon sun. He imagined the super’s boss, whoever that was, recording their conversation via some undisclosed lens buried in the window’s framework, waiting for him to snap, documenting his behaviour for a future discipline that for now remained a Woo-Created-Fiction.
The super reclined. Thick, ropey fingers interlacing behind his freshly razored head. With visible effort, he lifted his legs atop the empty, polished-aluminum desk, sighing as he crossed them.
“This goes way above you and me, Woo. Let it go. This is no snake. This is the head of the Dragon we’re talking about here.” Superintendent Lee’s eyes surveyed his office, a complete sweep, though his head remained perfectly still. A non-verbal message that told Woo there was active surveillance operating in the room.
“Heard that before.”
Woo never figured the super for a cop on the take. Meant Woo needed to be careful. Investigating the Wo Shing Wo was ill advised and rarely spoken of within the precinct. Triad lenses drifted on the wind, catching whiffs of gossip, whispers of data, recording conversations just like this one with synthetic ears far too small for any human senses to trace.
Behind the Super, through the darkening tinted pixels of his office window, a flash high in the sky, brighter than daylight, the glass immediately blackened by the tiny light sensitive pixels embedded in the window. Woo ducked, concerned there may have been a bomb blast outside the precinct. Later, learning that a large asteroid named Apophis had, as had been widely predicted though not generally believed, slammed into the moon.
Woo considered the super’s words, the flash outside. Dragons breathed fire, and while he was no believer in superstition, he took heed of the warning, let the conservation die, and closed the superintendent’s office door behind him. As he’d been told once by a member of the Order of Nine themselves, they knew him now. And to be known by dragons was a dangerous thing indeed.
Chapter ONE
Cryptographical Angst
Cali, Colombia
Orlando
Orlando Ortega cruised the datastream like she always had, undetected. Her aging Miichisoft glassware’s worn leather straps, the colour of dried tobacco, notched tight to her face. Sony beads slotted into her ears, magnetic piercings kept them in place. She surfed free, her digital contrail swept up behind her in a perpetual state of disassembly, courtesy of her cipher’s encryption. She’d been eyeing up a Unity Hardware augmented reality set, but was finding the decision to go non-Japanese for her hardware a difficult jump. The Japanese gear was just that far ahead.
She lounged deep in the gaps between the corduroy cushions of her charcoal-coloured sofa, dragging freshly chewed fingernails along the upholstery’s aging ridges, hunting for small jobs she could solve, low-hanging fruit, easy pay checks. She paused, inspected the damage to her nail-beds. Tweety-Bird Yellow nail-polish flaked and peeled with each fresh nibble. She needed a manicure. First thing she’d get done after the next hustle paid out. Then, with an impossibility up there in the range of technical, her cipher’s digital protection cracked and disappeared from view, somehow rendered obsolete, exposing not only her hardware but her actual physical location to any roving police algorithms adrift amongst the datastream, hunting for a criminal exactly like her.
A pair of deep-set and time-jaundiced eyes shimmered into her glassware’s holographic interface. An Asian male, possibly Chinese. Age spots peppering freckled olive cheekbones wrinkled themselves into a smile while his bright pink lips parted to reveal impossibly well-organized and glaring white teeth. In her synthetic vision’s lower peripheral, a hexadecimal contact number scrolled like a news feed, repeating itself in horizontal sans-serif.
“Orlando. Please forgive this intrusion, but I am in need of your services. Contact me on a secure tunnel via the hex provided below and I can provide you with a substantial signing bonus. I have significant financial resources which I am prepared to place at your disposal.”
The face de-rezzed. She was left staring at the same police data-feeds she had been meandering earlier, scraping the barrel for easy cash. Now, without the protective security of her allegedly unbreakable cipher, any further navigation through the ‘stream would generate a traceable and locatable packet of data pointing directly at her current location. Not, she thought to herself, ideal.
So she’d been head-hunted. Well, fuck. Her cipher blown open as though the Quantum that wrote it had never existed. Quantum encryption required quantum decryption, but Quantum Intelligence had been globally outlawed for decades. Meant someone still had one, possibly Cartel, which would be less than ideal if it was true. After her last job, a protection gig for a mob-affiliated teenage family member, she’d taken a slight monetary indiscretion with some of the child’s less encrypted bank accounts. A move her employers had taken a dim view of, a move she had made under the premise that she was untraceable, invisible behind her cipher’s crypto. A random asian male, however, asking her for help after rendering her online identity public was an unlikely candidate for a genetically multigenerational and local Cali Cartel. The genes just didn’t fit.
She had one remaining option.
Run.
She shut down her glassware, pulled the batteries, zipped the frames into a faraday-case on loan from her bestie, Ireland. From inside her single item of luggage, a long grey duffel containing only the strictest essentials; a memchip containing digital currency, tampons, clean underwear and a thin black lace bra, she took a roll of metallic tape, tore a strip with her teeth and sealed the glassware’s case. No signal from inside could escape, her glassware now properly untraceable. If she was going to be followed, it’d need to be physical. She grabbed a pair of NORECOG glasses from the bag, infrared privacy visors that would buy her precious minutes of anonymity, briefly confusing any loitering government Facial Recognition lenses, then slung the duffel over her back, gave the apartment in which she’d spent months of safety a final once-over, locked the door and ran down the stairs two at a time. Was a twenty-minute walk to Ireland’s, but with no private way to get there, she needed to hustle. A wanted thief, whether by law or the mob, didn’t go unnoticed for long beneath the heavily surveilled streets and alleys of Cali, Colombia.
Chapter 1a
Internally Mounted
China Ferry Corporation Vessel
Victoria Harbour
Cam
D-3
Cam sat alone in one of the China Ferry’s brightly lit cafeteria booths, his back pressed against the seat’s Corporate green padding. The smell was all damp carpet and diesel. He’d had no contact from Dallas since he and Kit had jumped off the boat, all those months ago. He’d kept busy moving product, hauling the same bioengineered tissue from questionable labs in West Africa they’d always carried. DNA ripe for augmentation to be distributed into an insatiable underground industry hungry for the stuff. Even the route was the same, over the African continent and across the Indian Ocean to the same triad facilities in Southern China. Except now he did it without a mob-owned stealth jet and his own personal fighter pilot. Dirty work, as it turned out, but it paid the same dollar, top. Solitude, as was required by the job, had become routine. So when a tall black man in a spotless white dish-dash sat down opposite him, Cam physically shook. There were no strangers in this business. The stranger kept one hand on the table, the other beneath, concealed.
“Camerica Hughes,” he said with an American accent. “Got a minute?”
Just below his shorts, a whiff of air breezed past, followed by a sharp pinch. Warmth spread briefly down his leg.
“The fuck?” Cam mumbled, scratching at his knee where a dangling syringe fell limp, having already delivered its payload. “Was that?” He removed the needle, felt it under the table, found no obvious distinguishing marks. He lowered his head to look underneath.
The man leaned across, heat radiating from his clean shaven head. “I wouldn’t do that.”
Cam straightened up. The man smiled, leaning back, his one hand still under the table.
“Mostly, it’s a trace algorithm. Autonomic viral nanites. Right now they’re braiding themselves around the nerve endings in your knee, digging deeper into your nervous system. An engineered mRNA molecule that will embed itself where your immune system can’t reach. Once they’re stable, they’ll replicate, spiralling themselves up inside your spinal cord, turning it into an antennae. You won’t feel a thing. They’re nanometres thick. Practically invisible.”
He leaned in, whispering, “but you know this mister Hughes. You designed it.”
Cam inhaled slowly. Shoulda jumped with Dallas. Should have fucking jumped.
He knew what it was: weaponized nanotech he’d built for the military. The kind that had lost him sleep. A “neuro-replicon.” A delivery system that rode a Blood Brain Barrier (BBB) trojan nanoparticle into the brain, copied itself only once it was inside neurons, then slipped circuit to circuit in exosomal whispers. Potent. Precise. Control was the problem. He didn’t have it, not back then and certainly not now. In the lab it had happily recombined itself with wild viruses, mutating into a horrific combination of virulence and lethality. And now here he was infected with it, by agents of his home country. In the military, he’d been forced to sign non-disclosure agreements for most of the work he’d done back then. Penalties included indictments of treason, which carried a death sentence. A law that had been etched into all fifty-one states. That this repatriator had access to the deployable nanotechnology, tech he himself had never been allowed to leave the lab with, terrified him. And now he was a carrier. Worse, he was on a timeline. He’d designed it as a delivery system, but the military had chosen to weaponize it, using it to to deliver breed-able biological pathogens. His test subjects had became paralyzed in hours and died in less than a day. Like all good engineers, he’d developed a a functional replicon inhibitor alongside the weapon, but did these mercenaries have access?
“Look, I’ve got nothing going on in here,” he made circles around his belly with one hand, taking a good look at it, surprising himself with its sizeable bulk, “that would interest Special Ops, not anymore.”
Then a man in a New York Yankees baseball hat strolled towards them and sat down beside the man in a dish dash, his fingers interlaced on the table, his eyes never leaving Cam’s. He wasn’t sure if the man blinked, or if he ever had. Something in those eyes reflected silicon, faintly observable metallic latticework deep inside his pupils, glinting off the halogens. His skin tone was ambiguous: somewhere between olive and pale. Dark hair, familiar. He wore a navy suit jacket, grey patches on the elbows over a plain white t-shirt. Cam’s gut twisted. He’d seen him before. The same guy, same jacket, the same fucking t-shirt he’d bumped into when Dallas was still here, trying to talk him into jumping off the back of a ship just like this one into the swirling wake of the South China Sea.
Shoulda jumped.
Should.Have.Fucking.Jumped.
Cam counted things. The augment had rewired him that way. He counted the ship’s lights—forty-eight LEDs in the room, two flickering. He counted his heartbeats from the moment the man spoke: four, then eight, then the ache in his jaw that told him he was clenching again. He counted doors and exits and angles. He counted how many seconds to stand, to pivot, to use the table as blunt force. He also counted the gun up the man’s sleeve and abandoned that plan. Baseball cap gave him a strange stare with that electric eyeball, pointing a finger. “He say something?”
The American stood, his coat a moving wall. “Doesn’t matter.” He looked down at Cam. “We’re watching you. Bring us to Kit, then things get better for you. That bug you’ve got, the one replicating inside you right now, it’s got a nasty little secret.”
“The fuck does that mean?”
Ball-hat grabbed Cam by the armpit, lifted him off the ground with a single arm. His face wrinkled, folding into itself, oblivious to the room of eyes suddenly jerking towards them. “It means you won’t like what happens, and it doesn’t happen slow.”
The American got between them, sliding an arm between the two men. He was the biggest of the three, taller than baseball-hat and built like a brick shit house. “Enough,” he said. Baseball hat dropped him. “Good news is there’s a cure. Hard to find. Like, you-won’t-be-able-to kind of hard.” The American smoothed Cam’s jacket with a gentle swipe.
“You’ve got a couple weeks, maybe less. The package inside you, when it happens and I mean like when it good and takes, you’ll know. There’s no turning back after that.”
“So what do I do?”
“You find Kit. We’ll take it from there.”
Cam considered calling the ship’s captain, or security, even filing a report with the Ferry Corporation. But nothing they offered could reverse what had been released inside him. Wasn’t even a virus, he thought, just a straight-up extortion.
Fuck you, Kit McKee.
Needing Dallas was the last thing he wanted, but if he wanted to find Kit, he needed to find Maneli. And if he wanted contact with the Israeli special forces woman, Dallas was the only person he knew with her direct line. That he was a pilot was in Cam’s favour, pilots were all the same – creatures of pure habit. Dallas was no exception. But he had no phone, no holo, no traceable contact, which was probably the smartest move he’d ever made. Cam could call their shared employer, but asking after another mercenary was bad juju, and he’d burned though a lifetime’s worth of that already.
Still, he knew where Dallas would be. Not a maybe, not a guess, he knew. If he was going to find him, it would be in a bar in Hong Kong.
The Feather Boa, or Nailing Thieves.
Bottom line, he needed Dallas to find Kit, which meant Hong Kong and another ride on this shitbox boat, only next time there might be someone different waiting for him. A pulse of heat flickered in his kneecap. the entry point for this, his absolute worst Very Bad Day and a reminder that his life depended on this next job, as it had ever been.
Chapter TWO
Junk Bay
China, The Greater Bay Area, Hong Kong District
Woo
Johnny Woo despised graveyards, always had, and this one was just so much worse.
“How many did you say we’re digging up?” he asked Fong.
“All of them, boss.”
High-intensity beams of Police Department halogen sliced through the evening’s sub-tropical mist, illuminating the swirling humidity with the burning blue tint of hot tungsten. Fong’s bot hovered above, cataloguing victims, his gaze defocusing into the night’s darkness from behind department-issued glassware, his irises glittering with pastel neons, refracting the lens’ projected holographic light. He tapped a single finger against his thigh with an almost imperceptible tick, an operator’s tell, the movements directing the precinct’s hardware. Woo avoided the tech, felt he did better work with a pencil than a pixel.
“You get any hits off FRECOG?” he asked Fong.
“Not even a partial match.”
Rare thing, Woo thought, for government-provided facial recognition software to give up and shrug.
“Hands and feet were on the first two vics. They’re genetically identical. FRECOG even tagged them as the same J. Doe.”
“Zero history,” Woo said. Clones had none, and while highly illegal, the practice of cloning human beings continued in black market trade. Though growing them into adulthood only to have them killed and buried seemed an unlikely enterprise. Wasn’t any money in death, none except murder.
Above, a faint buzz and whir. Multiple camera-toting drones dopplered towards Woo with an asynchronous mewl, unmanned paparazzi tech following Fong’s small, remotely piloted aircraft as it descended for a closer look at the grave below his feet. Woo ran a thumb slowly along one eyebrow, wiping away beads of accumulating sweat.
Pre-existing gravesites jack hammered open. Bodies dropped on top of old caskets, the holes then filled and resealed. This was no minor job. Poured cemetery concrete, the kind designed to keep the dead from washing into storm drains during summer typhoon deluges, didn’t crumble easily. He hadn’t seen it happen, when decomposing bodies would clog the city’s sewers, but every grandparent had stories. Made him wonder how many of these graves contained actual corpses, or what their families might have done when whole graveyards simply washed away in the howling wind and chaos of a roiling tropical storm.
That it hadn’t happened in decades showed that the system of burial pours worked. What it also meant was that the act of digging through the cement and aggregate required significant mechanical resources and access. Woo strolled the graveyard’s perimeter. Three meters of high voltage razor wire rose from the paved, terraced hillside encircling the grounds. That access was looking more and more complicated. He walked the fence line, looking for gaps, for any sign of machine tracks. He stopped as he approached the entrance gate, stared up into the rolling mist. There was a vertical option he hadn’t considered. High-powered drones could have drop-shipped diggers and egressed the area on a night like this, unnoticed. Unless there was camera footage, there’d be no trace. Criminals had modernized their craft. Remote piloting or worse, letting an algorithm with autonomous criminal intent loose gave the legal system fits. Tracking down the authors of dirty algorithmic code fell outside of the authority of Special Investigations Detectives like Fong and Woo, but somehow figuring out those sorts of details found its way into their operation. The writers of bots intending to break the law were as criminal as the bots that carried out the crime. Woo’s job involved providing the facts, nothing more.
“Fong, have you considered the possibility that the entire operation was airborne?”
Fong turned, his eyes still distant, his iris’ backlit with incoming data.
“No, boss I hadn’t. There’s lots of terrain around here, could be some hardware left behind.”
“Inadvertent contact with the ground?”
“Or trees, towers, power lines.”
“Not very bot-like.”
Triads communicate with symbolic violence.
Woo took a step back, widening his view. Forensic investigators wearing powder-blue paper Tyvek suits kneeled alongside freshly exhumed bodies, their outfits crinkling as they bagged evidence. Illuminated, fire-engine red, self-propelled biohazard buckets followed them between graves, their spinning propellors silenced by active noise reduction broadcasts, their wake leaving an eery spiralling glow dissipating into the mist. Amongst the organized busyness of the crime scene, robotic Hong Kong Police Department diggers continued undoing these alleged triad burials in the very graveyard where his parents, his sister, and a lover who to this day remained undisclosed, also lay.
The operation seemed complex. No simple task. Cloned bodies hand picked and placed to send a message, but what message? And to who?
Black cat or white cat. If it catches mice, it’s a good cat.
They were behind. A pair of detectives that had caught no mice, now playing catch-up. It had been a long time since Woo had seen such a dark criminal gesture. Dead ends were all they’d found so far. No clues yet, but the scene was still fresh. Woo moved to the latest dig, fidgeting with the tobacco pouch buried deep inside his trench.
“This victim the same as the last two?” he asked, hands in pockets, leaning over a recently dug hole. The smell of hot metal wafted up from the darkness. A folded white plastic card with a scrawled number “three” sat on a pile of crumbled concrete beside the grave. Forensics doing their job, methodically recording evidence, emotionally unattached. He envied their disposition.
“Yes, boss. Down to the DNA. The drone’s found something interesting, though. It’s circling a grave near that crypt.”
The crypt cast a shadow, unlit even by the HKPD lights. Easily missed. From where he stood, he could barely distinguish the hole from the night.
Woo drifted, thinking back on Chen Rong, on the bullshit meeting with the Super, on their lack of progress on the case. He’d been making an effort to not smoke ever since. Twenty-four hours was the goal. But graveyards made Woo want to smoke, specifically this graveyard.
He followed Fong past a team of diggers, Coradyne Technologies emblazoned along each of their multi-axis appendages, simultaneously jack hammering and removing chunks of irregularly shaped aggregate from the ground. Like metastasized fossils, he thought. Growths of humanity’s discarded garbage jutting from balls of hardened binding agents, now chiseled apart by robotics. Aggregate could be anything, as long as it occupied space between the binding agent. Could be human, in fact. Could even have been still alive during the pour.
Detritus to fill the voids, synthetic glue to bind the whole obscenity together.
Woo coughed, opened the tobacco pouch in his pocket with one hand.
The machines moved with an unnatural synchronous motion, like human arms attached in series, double-jointed against themselves, the corporate logo blurring from their speed. As Fong and Woo approached the crypt, Fong’s drone came into view, hovering over the freshly dug hole. Woo did a slow turn, a full three-sixty, casing the site. The graveyard tiered upward into the Junk Bay hillside, a winding switchback road obscured by mist, hiding the graveyard’s peak from sight. Fencing topped with razor wire surrounded the facility. It hummed as Woo approached, high-voltage electric current coursing through razor blades that surrounded the facility, a locked gate, a security booth. How often the booth was manned remained a mystery.
Moving machinery in and out would have been no joke. Their HKPD gear had rolled in through an open gate earlier in the day with ease. Anyone without access would never get this much gear inside. Not without staff or security noticing. Though Triad’s had money, and money opened gates like these.
“What’s it looking at?” Woo asked.
“There’s a note. Looks like it’s been stabbed to the victim’s forehead with a stir stick. It’s handwritten,” Fong said.
“Show me.”
A holographic image beamed from Fong’s glasses onto the grass at their feet. The note clearly run through with a short brown piece of tightly folded plastic.
“Fong, am I looking at a stir stick in this man’s forehead?”
“Appears to be so, boss.”
“Like for coffee?”
“Yes, boss.”
“What’s the note say?”
“I’m working on it. Need to clear some dirt off the paper.”
Fong descended the bot into the grave, slowing as it approached the body. As his fingers moved in a language understood solely by his glassware, purposely directed downwash from the drone’s whirring propellors cleared loose soil from the victim’s face.
Fong stopped, looked at Woo, shook his head. “You’re not gonna like it, boss.”
“What’s it say?” he asked again.
Fong double-tapped one arm of his glassware, projecting the bot’s visuals so that Woo could see. He squinted at the holographic image of the hand-written note.
“I can’t read your holo from here, Fonger.”
Fong zoomed on the writing, a thumb and forefinger splay.
The text enlarged. There were only two words.
Look Inside
Words he’d been told before.
“S’not funny.”
“What I’m thinking,” Fong replied, steering the drone out of the hole.
Woo stood over the grave, peering skyward into the darkness. Someone had guided them here. Taken the time to plant this singular corpse with a note intended specifically for him. He took another look around the cemetery, a terraced mountainside of gravestones disappearing into the night. Fong hadn’t noticed the name on the headstone, obscured by the pile of broken concrete. None of the officers had, or at least, no one had mentioned it. He’d lain many bouquets of flowers on this very spot, where a simple, inexpensive, black granite rectangle read, Woo.
He felt his mother’s eyes staring up at him from her grave.
Long dead eyes that begged him for help.
