I'm working on a sequel to The Breath of Rapture. Like the first book, I'm just writing away, winging it, and a little shocked it's turned into a kinda sorta who-done-it. Here's a preview. (Don't worry, Kendra's OK!)
Kendra dreamed. She ran down a city street. She was anxious, and she knew she was nearly out of time, and though she wasn’t sure where she was going in this dreamscape of shining towers, she ran as quickly as the crowded sidewalks would permit.
“I feel like spawning salmon,” she thought.
Sunlight slanted between the high buildings and patches of light and dark, sun and shadow marked her progress in a slow, rhythmic strobe. The buildings and the street and sidewalk before her all merged on the horizon in an unwavering line of one point perspective. It looked surreal, an endless vision of infinity, but nevertheless she knew she had a very long way to go, and she knew she was running out of time.
“I forgot!”
She stopped dead in her tracks and turned to go back and retrieve whatever it was she’d forgotten, and in one of those peculiar details of vivid dreaming, she saw the irritation of the specter pedestrians around her. She’d interrupted the flow and impeded their progress. Kendra paid them no mind as she hurried back to retrieve that terribly important and misplaced icon of her sub-conscious.
Then the dream faded. It fled as if startled and vanished, completely and utterly veiled in a sanctuary of deep, cranial fissures. Like an errant coin that slipped between the cushions, the dream was currency to be retrieved from the depths only by her fastidious id, cleaning house, in her next deep sleep. A small sound had changed everything.
“Now I’ll never know what I forgot,” she thought.
Her eyes peeled open begrudgingly to the hum of a soothing but insistent tone. A barely perceptible brightening of ambient light helped coax her to wakefulness. Her apartment was ever mindful of her schedule and incapable of over-sleeping, and so by default, was she.
The morning was like any other. Her rooms were quiet and fragrant with the bouquet of brewing coffee. Though she had much to do, she allowed herself a few extra moments of haven. She luxuriated in an imagined lover’s embrace of smooth linen and warm, downy blankets. She did so fully aware that this romance with her bedding was doomed, destined to be nothing more than a brief and teasing fling. Duty supplanted lethargy and so with a grunt, and a groan, and a grumble, she rose and padded to the bath and the slap of chill water on her sleep-creased face.
She returned to the living room and dropped heavily into her desk chair, half awake and fully engulfed in an early morning stupor. She didn’t feel rested. She’d stayed up way too late the night before with friends, so there she sat, little on her mind but that first cup of coffee.
Then, the air was ripped from her lungs and a scream caught in her throat.
