10,000 Bones by Joe Ollinger Book Tour and Giveaway :)
10,000
Bones
by
Joe Ollinger
Genre:
Science Fiction
On
the planet Brink, calcium is cash. The element's scarcity led the
world's government to declare it the official currency. In the
decades since, the governments of other colonized worlds have
suppressed shipments of calcium in order to maintain favorable
exchange rates, while Brink's Commerce Board has struggled to
negotiate importation quotas to keep the population alive and
growing.
Taryn
Dare is a Collections Agent, a specialized detective tasked with
finding black market calcium and recovering it, so that the Commerce
Board can recycle it and distribute it as currency. Taryn is fueled
by one goal: to save up enough currency units for a one-way ticket to
a better world. But when a job recovering a human corpse uncovers a
deadly conspiracy in the system, Taryn is drawn into an investigation
that may threaten her life, and the very fabric of her society.
In the middle
of a pursuit, it’s easy not to think about what I’m chasing.
Remembering it, reminding myself how it all works and why, connecting
all the dots that add up to a picture of a society that needs
someone to do what I do—that’s the hard part. That comes later.
Right now, I am focused. I need to be as inescapable as the harsh
realities that put me here. I’ve followed the busboy since he left
the restaurant, first from a distance on my quickbike, then another
three blocks on foot, into this crumbling, stripped-bare tenement in
the Dust Pit. He’s glanced back at me twice. He sees me, sees my
blue-and-black Collections Agent uniform. I’m closing in on him as
he enters the stairwell, and the tension is palpable in his stiff,
quick pace, in the sweat stains on his white shirt, in how tightly
he’s gripping the to-go bag he’s carrying. So far he’s been
smart enough not to break into a run. I should have stopped him
sooner, but I wanted to see where he was going. He’s gone far
enough. Peeking
into the stairwell, I don’t see an ambush, just the busboy’s feet
hitting the stairs fast and light. I bolt after him. By
the sixth floor I’m closing in. At the seventh, he throws open the
door for the hallway. And then I’m on him. I
lean a shoulder in and hammer him into the wall. He deflates and
falls in a crumple, but he’s still clutching the to-go bag, trying
to keep it and its precious contents away from me as he struggles to
squirm free. I hit him with a deliberate but hard right elbow to the
nose. There’s a crack, and his nostrils are smeared with blood. The
fight goes out of him. I whip a zip-cuff out of a pouch on my belt,
slip one end over his wrist and the other over the door handle, and
pull them tight. Suddenly
he’s not a fleeing criminal any longer, just another poor,
malnourished kid who took a bad risk. Rising to my feet, I snatch the
to-go bag away, open it up, and look inside. Just what I expected.
The restaurant’s manager was right. The busboy was stealing. Inside
the bag are little gray bones. Probably from chickens, or maybe
ducks. Money.
Joe Ollinger grew up in a small swamp town in Florida. After graduating from USC, he worked for several years as a reader and story analyst for Academy Award Winning Filmmaker Oliver Stone. Currently residing in Los Angeles, he was a semifinalist in the Nicholl Fellowships in screenwriting. He works as an attorney when he's not writing.
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