(An Oren Gray Mystery · Book Two)
Persephone Rising.
The dead don’t stay buried. The truth does. Until it doesn’t.
Oren Gray believes truth can save people, yet every truth he uncovers threatens someone already wounded. In a city that sells counterfeit consolation, he must decide when exposing a lie becomes another cruelty.
Coming December 2026
(Opening lines)
Talia’s Nightmare
Six months after he dragged Orpheus and AfterKind into the light, Oren Gray had begun to hope the dead and the people who sold versions of them to the living had lost his address.
Post-Collapse London still had technology. What it had lost was the society and infrastructure that kept it dependable. SmartScreens returned by neighborhood when crews coaxed power into them.
Forty years earlier, when London had nearly four times as many people, reliability had been ordinary. Now it was conditional.
At the university, Oren still taught comparative civilization. He distrusted tidy endings, especially those announced before anyone had checked what was missing. He also refused to start a day without coffee, a rule the dead had already made difficult to keep.
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The call came before dawn. Oren ignored it.
The second call came thirty seconds later.
He ignored that too.
The third call carried enough persistence to suggest either catastrophe or bureaucracy. Experience suggested bureaucracy was more dangerous.
He rolled over, found his SmartVision glasses on the nightstand, and put them on, then he accepted the call.
From Persephone Rising by Stephen Mayo Grass
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