Novels by Dep Flair

The head looked at him.The ancient eyes, the size of his body, adjusting to find him the way they'd been finding him all night."You killed Rosanora," Xerion said. Inside his skull."Yes," Draven said."She was the most capable of the three.""I know," Draven said. "That's why I went to her first."He blazed his fists up, and threw fire at the head.It was not a good opening. He knew it wasn't a good opening before he did it. The fire was running low and the head was going to take it the way the head took everything.The fire hit the head.The head looked at him through it."Your fire has diminished," Xerion said."Yes," Draven said."You've been fighting for hours.""Yes," Draven said."And you walked up to me anyway.""Yes," Draven said. He moved right and threw fire from the new angle. Same result. The head tracked him with the slow rotation it used…"Why," Xerion asked.Draven used full might of his flames.The detonation hit the head. The head shook. A movement. A single shudder

He told them that night in the room Zephyr had arranged. All four of them, Zephyr, Kael, and Thorne, who was sitting in a chair with the particular careful posture of someone whose body had been through a significant amount and was conserving accordingly. Lyra had checked him twice more since the arena. Whatever she couldn't reach, she'd left alone the way he'd asked. Draven told them about what he'd felt in the final two feet of the portal closing. The pressure from the other side. The full consciousness of Xerion pressing back through a gap that was getting smaller. Not a fragment, not a shard. The complete thing the sect had been protecting for three centuries. Nobody interrupted. "It didn't come through," Draven said. "The portal closed before the transfer could complete. But it was close." He looked at the table. "And it's still out there. On the other side of wherever that portal was leading. The consciousness is intact. The sect's architecture for bringing it through is gon

Rage was the strongest thing Jin had ever fought.He had landed seventeen strikes.Rage had felt eleven of them.Six that landed incorrectly were simply less relevant to Rage than they were to anything else Jin had ever fought, the way light rain was less relevant to a boulder than to a piece of paper.Jin was faster. This was not in question. He was faster by a margin that should have mattered more than it did, the rerouted lightning giving him a quality of speed and he was using it. Landing strikes in positions that required Rage to absorb from angles he hadn't positioned for. Building damage.The damage was building slower than the fight was progressing.He hit Rage with a full discharge, the lightning running clean through the corrected path, and Rage stopped, looked at Jin, and continued advancing.Jin moved back.He moved back four steps, which was more steps than he liked moving back, and ran the numbers, and the numbers said that at the current rate of exchange he would be at

He had already won the fight with Rosanora.Now Draven moved toward Dahm.Draven felt him before he saw him..He turned.Dahm was standing ten feet away.He looked at Draven. He looked at the place where Rosanora had gone down. He looked at the west quarter where Jin and Thorne and Rage were, the sounds of that fight audible from here, the specific sounds of something extended and costly and not yet resolved.He looked back at Draven."I'm not going to tell you it didn't have to be this way," Dahm said."Good," Draven said. "Because it did.""You killed Rosanora.""Yes," Draven said.Dahm looked at the place where she was down. Something moved across his face. Not the grief Draven expected. Something more complicated. The expression of someone who had known something was coming for a very long time and has now arrived at it and is finding it both exactly what they expected and nothing like what they expected."She believed in what she was doing," Dahm said. "From the beginning. Everyt

The head did not join the fighting.It watched.That was the most terrifying thing about it: the size of it, the impossible wrongness of a head the size of a carriage sitting in the center of a fighting arena, and it was not attacking. It was watching. The ancient eyes moving from point to point across the arena floor, taking inventory, the way something that had been waiting three thousand years for this moment was not going to waste the arrival of it on something as simple as immediate violence.It was assessing.Draven and Rosanora were already in it.Across the arena Jin had made his own assessment. The assessment had produced Rage as the target, which was the correct assessment: Rage was the strongest of the three and the one most likely to break something critical if left free to choose his own moment. Jin moved toward him with the speed that had made the military assessment facility write him off and that had been making fools of that decision ever since.Rage saw him coming.H

Everyone started cleaning up after the battle, taking breathers and cooling off.. Draven was on one knee in the center of the fighting pit…. He breathed.He looked at his hands.His fire reserves were at the floor, the technical term for empty, the state his body entered when it had produced everything it had and needed time before it could produce more.Kael Maros was across the pit looking at him.. He asked, “Is it done.""Yes," Draven said.Then the portal started sparking.---Small at first. The air in the center of the pit, where the formation's keystone had been, where the portal had already opened and been closed, where the inscription lines were dark under years of grime. A crack in the air. Not visible exactly. Felt first, the way the formation had always been felt before it was seen, a pressure change, a wrongness in the air's texture.Then visible.Draven got to his feet.Kael moved to his side without being asked.The crack widened. The arena, which had been emptying in t

The building had no signage, just a keypad at the entrance and a lobby lit low enough to keep faces indistinct on any camera pointed the wrong way.A woman in a sharp gray suit met her at the elevator. "Ms. Bond. I'm glad you decided to come.""I said I'd think about it," Louise said. "I didn't say I'd decided anything.""Of course." The woman smiled, the kind of smile that had clearly closed a hundred deals before this one. "I'm Renata. I handle talent acquisition for Glazier US. Please, come up. It's easier to talk somewhere more comfortable."The office upstairs was minimal, expensive in the way that didn't need to announce itself, a single chair set across from a desk with nothing on it but a folder and a pen. Renata gestured for Louise to sit."I'll be direct," Renata said, settling into her own chair. "Glazier wants a face that represents growth, reinvention, someone who's already proven she can capture an audience's attention and hold it. You did that at Fashion Week. The entir

Things went crazy for Michael. In a few days he had gone in and out of a lot offices and gone through a lot of deep thinking.Buzzer Tech's HQ smelled like fresh coffee and the particular energy of a Friday afternoon when everyone was pretending to work while mostly waiting for the week to end. Michael found Louise in the design lounge, feet tucked under her on the couch, scrolling through something on her tablet with the kind of ease that made it easy to forget she'd once needed rescuing at a runway show that changed both their lives."You look busy," Michael said, dropping into the chair across from her."I'm looking at fabric swatches and pretending one of them is more interesting than the others," Louise said, not looking up. "It's a very demanding job."Michael let the small talk breathe a moment before he asked the thing he'd actually come to ask. "Glazier. Have you responded to them yet?"She set the tablet down, met his eyes, and smiled the same easy smile she’s known for. "I'

Somewhere in the city, the cabinet marked Eric took nearly an hour to get through, and by the time Michael closed the final drawer, he understood his brother in a way he'd never fully understood him across either of his two lives."This goes back to when he was younger," Michael said, staring at a photograph clipped to a report, Eric standing outside a building Michael didn't recognize, years younger, already wearing the expression of a man convinced the world owed him something it hadn't yet delivered. "My father was watching him this closely even then?""Your father watched everyone this closely," Henderson said, pulling open a second cabinet. "Eric simply gave him the most reasons to keep watching. Corporate theft, yes, you already know about that. But before the theft, there were smaller things. Money that went missing from a scholarship fund the family used to run. A business partner who ended up ruined after crossing him in college, in ways that were never quite provable but nev

Claire's office looked different in the evening light, softer somehow, the floor-to-ceiling windows turning the Hudson into a long strip of orange and gray instead of the flat gray steel it had been that morning. Michael had come back after hours, which was its own kind of statement, and he suspected Claire knew it."You didn't have to come in person," she said, not looking up from the folder in front of her. "I could have sent this by courier.""You could have. You didn't.""No." She finally looked at him. "I didn't."She slid the folder across the desk. Michael opened it slowly, half expecting numbers, contracts, something with Thornton letterhead and a lawyer's fingerprints all over it. Instead it was medical records. Scans. A treatment protocol with dates going back three years."My father had the same thing your father has," Claire said. "Same presentation. Same deterioration curve. Every specialist we brought in told us it was idiopathic, unexplainable, just bad luck dressed up

The lab beneath Buzzer Tech's east wing had no name on the door, just a keycard reader and a camera. "The cortisol-responsive weave keeps degrading past forty washes," she said, not looking up from the readout. "Liana's team can make it beautiful. They can't make it stable. That's on us." "So fix it." "I have been fixing it. For six weeks." Megan pulled up a molecular render, strands of polymer tangled like wire. "The compound holds its shape under stress the first month, then the fibers start losing their charge memory. It forgets how to respond." Michael leaned over her shoulder. "What if the base structure borrowed from the composite work we did for the solar prototypes? Different fiber, same charge-retention principle." "That's not clothing science. That's building science." "It's the same chemistry problem wearing a different shirt." He tapped the render. "Run it." Megan ran it. The simulation held longer this time, the fibers keeping their memory well past the forty-wash m

Thornton Industries occupied three floors of a downtown tower. The kind of space that didn't need to announce wealth. Michael checked security twice before arriving, which was caution more than paranoia.Claire's office was minimalist. Expensive minimalist, but still sparse. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Hudson, a desk that probably cost more than a car, and absolutely nothing personal on display. The kind of office designed to intimidate without trying."Thank you for coming," Claire said, standing to shake his hand. She wore all black today, which made her look even younger and somehow more dangerous. "I know our meeting yesterday was unconventional.""You crashed a board meeting and torpedoed my brother's bid for power. That's past unconventional into strategic territory."Claire smiled. "Fair assessment. Sit, please."Michael sat across from her, and something flickered at the edge of his awareness. A sensation he hadn't felt in months. A whisper of something that felt