Novels by Emeka

Interview Room Two smelled of burned coffee and old fear.Gideon sat at a steel table with his cuffs locked to a ring in its surface. The woman across from him was not what he had expected. Inspector Nell Quill was in her early thirties, with cropped dark hair, a cheap gray blazer and the tired eyes of someone who had been the only honest detective in Harlan's division for far too long. She couldn't be bought, and that was exactly why she got the cases nobody else wanted.She spread six photographs across the table. "Talk me through these, Mr. Mercer."Gideon studied them the way he would study a painting someone swore was an original. He looked past the blood and the fog to the edges and the light. After a minute, he tapped the shadow of a crane stretched across the concrete."There was no working light at that end of the dock," he said. "This shadow comes from the moon, and look at the angle. It's long and low. The moon only sat that low over Corran around four in the morning." He m

Selene drove them home herself.She sent the security team ahead and took the wheel of the lead car without a word. Pippa fell asleep in the back seat within minutes, wrapped in a guard's jacket, the rope burns still raw on her wrists. The city slid past in the dark, wet and empty. Gideon sat beside his wife with blood drying on his shirt and the crimson ticket in his pocket, and neither of them spoke for twenty minutes.At a red light on Canal Street, Selene finally turned to him."Are you going to tell me what you are?"Gideon thought about it honestly. "Someone your mother trusted."She studied his face in the red glow of the signal for a long moment. Then she nodded once, as if that answer would hold for now, and reached across the console to take his hand. The light turned green. She drove the rest of the way to Rustline one-handed, and she didn't let go.By seven a.m., the city had a new story.Pippa brought the Valemont Courier in from the doorstep and laid it on the kitchen ta

Gideon was already moving when the cable ran loose.He snatched an iron mooring hook from the nearest bollard, felt its weight once and threw. It spun through the fog and struck the crane's control box dead center. The steel housing burst open in a shower of blue-white sparks. Forty feet overhead, the brake slammed home with a shriek of metal, the cable jerked taut, and Pippa stopped with her bound feet an arm's length above the black water.Every head on the dock had turned toward the sparks. Gideon used that half second to grab a second hook and hurl it at the junction box on the floodlight pole. The cables tore loose, the lights died with a heavy thunk, and the shipyard dropped into darkness.Then he moved.The first man never saw him. Gideon found him by the sound of his breathing, took his wrist and turned it until the shoulder left its socket, and the pistol was in the river before the man finished screaming. The second fired at the noise and hit nothing but fog. Gideon came at

The key around Gideon's neck had never looked like much. It was plain black iron, a little longer than his finger, with a worn bow and three blunt teeth. Anyone who noticed it assumed it opened a garden shed.It opened the iron door in the basement, and it opened something far more important beyond it. Deep in the Vault, behind a wall of stone with no handle, lay the innermost chamber, and only two keys in the world could unlock it. Amos had worn this one for forty years. He had never told Gideon where the other one was.Gideon sat at the workbench behind the counter with the sign turned to CLOSED. Upstairs, Pippa's breakfast bowl was still in the sink. He had been sitting there for an hour.One phone call would end this. He knew the numbers by heart. There was a general in the capital whose career rested in box 1640, a supreme court judge in 0912 and three police chiefs scattered through the third corridor. If he called in a single one of those tickets, every road out of Corran shipy

For a long moment, neither of them spoke.Gideon knew exactly what the rules allowed. She had opened the iron door, and the contract was written on a pawn slip in his own hand. He could tear it up tonight, put her in a taxi at dawn and never see her again. The Vault had survived three hundred years by keeping people like her on the stairs.Instead, he turned the box so she could see the writing.Selene came down the last step slowly. When she saw the faded blue ink, she stopped breathing. She knew that handwriting. She had kept every birthday card it had ever written to her."What is this place?" she whispered."It's where the powerful leave what they can't afford to lose," Gideon said. He chose each word with care, the way he would set a stone in a ring. "Confessions, promises, proof. They leave them here because nobody can take them from here. Your mother left something too."Selene reached for the box, and he gently drew it back. "It can't be opened yet. A Vault seal breaks only wh

Selene's clothes were already on the driveway when her taxi pulled through the gates.It had started to rain again. Silk blouses, tailored suits and cashmere coats lay in sodden heaps across the gravel of the Hartwell mansion, and two maids were still carrying armfuls out of the front door under Lydia's direction. Her stepmother stood on the top step beneath an umbrella, perfectly dressed and perfectly calm."You made your choice at the altar," Lydia said. "This house isn't a shelter for the wives of pawnbrokers."Selene looked past her into the hallway. Her father stood there in the shadows. A stranger in a borrowed suit had saved him from handcuffs only hours ago, in front of the whole city. He met his daughter's eyes for one second, then looked at the floor and said nothing at all.Bianca appeared at her mother's side, glowing. "Oh, and the board has called an emergency meeting. Nine tomorrow morning." She smiled sweetly. "The Sorrell directors are all with me. By ten, I'll be the