Novels by Julie mosco

Eastern Cape, South Africa – January 2027The summer rain came down in sheets, turning the red dirt roads into rivers of mud. Thunder rolled over the hills like distant artillery. Jax stood on the porch of their small house, watching the storm lash the peach grove they had planted in Umkhonto's memory. The trees were heavy with fruit now, branches bowing under the weight.Two years.Two years since Dubai. Since the tower fell. Since they crawled out of the rubble mortal, bleeding, and—against all odds—alive.Kenji was inside, sharpening tools with methodical precision. Elias—still strange to hear him called that—was in the village, helping Nomsa with the school lessons. The kids adored him. Called him Bhuti Eli. He had a gift for it, turning old war stories into fables about clever foxes and brave lions. Never the truth. Not yet.Jax's shoulder ached where the clone's blade had gone in. Regeneration was gone. Scars stayed. Pain lingered. Mortality was a slow teacher.He pulled the sat

Salalah, Oman – Three Weeks After the FallThe sun rose slow and brutal over the Arabian Sea, turning the water into hammered bronze. The café was little more than a tin roof and plastic chairs, but the coffee was thick as tar and the old man who served it asked no questions of burned men who paid in crisp dollars.Jax sat with his back to the wall, eyes on the street. Old habit. Kenji sat opposite, scarred arms folded, watching the horizon like it might try something. Prime—they had started calling him Elias, a name he picked from a dog-eared English novel in the safehouse—sat between them, turning a glass of mint tea in small circles.None of them had slept more than a few hours at a stretch since Dubai.Regeneration without the network was sluggish. Wounds closed, but slowly. Pain lingered. Bones ached. For the first time in years, Jax felt the weight of his age—whatever age he actually was. Forty-nine deaths had blurred the calendar.A fishing boat chugged into the harbor, nets em

Somewhere over the Arabian Sea, April 2027The cargo plane flew dark no transponder, no lights, no flight plan. It was an old Ilyushin Il-76, bought on the black market in Karachi and repainted with the faded livery of a defunct relief agency. Inside the cavernous hold, the engines throbbed like a dying heart.Jax sat on an ammo crate, sharpening a knife that was already sharp enough to split hairs. The rhythmic scrape of whetstone on carbon steel was the only sound besides the engines.Across from him, Kenji “Oni” Sato cleaned a disassembled Type 89 rifle with the absent focus of a man performing religious ritual. Every part laid out on a tarp: bolt carrier, gas piston, magazine spring. His hands moved without looking, muscle memory deeper than thought.Between them, wrapped in a thermal blanket, sat Prime.He had not spoken in six hours.Since Tokyo, Prime had become quieter with every mile they put between themselves and the lab. The innocence Mori had preserved in him was cracking

Tokyo, March 2027The city burned in patches.Not the apocalyptic inferno Jax had left behind in Chicago, nor the surgical firebombing that had erased the Paris facility. Tokyo’s wounds were older, uglier.riots that had started over food prices six months ago and never quite stopped. Whole blocks in Shinjuku had been abandoned to squatters and gangs. Neon still flickered, but half the signs were dead. The air tasted of ozone, smoke, and the copper tang that never quite left Jax’s tongue since the forty-ninth death.He stood on the roof of a derelict love hotel in Kabukicho, watching the street twenty-three floors below. Rain fell in sheets, turning the gutters into black mirrors that reflected the red lanterns and the muzzle flashes of another distant firefight. Somewhere down there, Kenji Sato Zero-Tokyo, call-sign Oni was still alive. The intel Jax had bled for in three different countries said so.Forty-nine deaths had taught Jax patience the way a hammer teaches an anvil. He could

Elena staggered back into Warehouse 12, soaked to the bone, river water streaming from her clothes. The alarms had stopped; only the rain hammered the tin roof now, a relentless drumbeat. Floodlights still burned, casting long shadows over the bodies sprawled across the concrete.Mia was on her knees, zip-ties cutting into her wrists, eyes wide and disbelieving. Reyes and Harlan were beside her, hoods ripped off, faces pale but alive.Elena dropped to one knee in front of her sister, pulled the knife she’d retrieved from the dead operative, and sliced the ties.Mia lunged forward, arms wrapping around Elena’s neck so hard it hurt.“You’re bleeding,” Mia whispered, voice cracking.“I’m fine,” Elena lied. Her ribs felt cracked, her cheek was swelling, and something in her left shoulder grated with every breath. But adrenaline kept the pain at arm’s length.She cut Reyes and Harlan free next.Reyes stood slowly, rubbing circulation back into his wrists. His dark eyes—always too knowing—l

The train rocked violently as it hurtled through the tunnel. Elena’s knuckles were white on the overhead rail. Rainwater dripped from her hair, mixing with blood from the gash on her forehead. Four rounds. That was all she had left in the magazine, and one spare mag tucked against her lower back—fifteen more if she made it that far.The voice on the phone still echoed in her skull.Twenty minutes.The drive reaches him in twenty minutes.Come alone, or everyone you ever cared about dies next.She knew exactly who “him” was. Viktor Kane. The man who’d burned her old life to the ground. The man who’d turned her into this—ghost, hunter, weapon.The train screeched into the next station. Doors hissed open. She stepped out into the fluorescent glare of Central Plaza station, one of the busiest hubs in the city even at this hour. Bodies surged around her. She melted into the flow, hood up, head down, moving against the current toward the northern exit.She needed a vehicle. She needed weapo