Serial · ongoing
NINE OF TEN
NINE OF TEN opens with a man on a concrete floor, a brass clock that won't strike, and a room with no door. Wes Corrigan is a liar by his own account, a man who prices a room before he decides what to say in it. None of that helps him here. What helps, sometimes, is arithmetic. What helps more is other people—their hands, their first-aid kits, their nerve—and Wes has never been good at needing other people. He wants out for one reason: his wife, Nora, isn't answering her phone. This is a locked-room survival novel with a calculator in one hand and a first-aid kit in the other. The rules are spoken aloud, tested, and revised. Alliances are made in plain terms and hold only as long as the terms do. No system. No levels. No chosen one. I wrote it for readers who want the puzzle and the people, and who don't need a hero to make the arithmetic work.
Chapter 1: Nine Names
CHAPTER ONE Nine Names A note before you start. No harem. No chosen one. No system, no levels, no helpful blue boxes. Nobody here is invinci…
Chapter 2: Ten of You
He got to ten. The clock struck twelve. Twelve strokes, quick and even, in the same voice it had been ticking in all along, and when the las…
Chapter 3: We Make Gods
The girl in the hoodie stopped screaming. Nobody told her to. It ran down on its own, one long note thinning into a hum and then into wet br…
Chapter 4: One Minute
The Ram raised one finger. "Before the first story," he said, "a courtesy. One minute. The nine of you may talk among yourselves — to each o…
Chapter 5: A Name Said Once
The Ram turned away from the clock and laid his hand flat on the table, fingers spread. He left it there until nobody in the room was lookin…
Chapter 6: Billboards
The man with the tattooed arm put his hand up. Wes saw the hand before the question: flat on the table, forearm down, the ink running out fr…
Chapter 7: Terms of Art
The white coat looked down at himself — a smear down the left side, brown going black at the edge — and pinched the fabric away from his che…
Chapter 8: No Card to Give
The blood found the seam at the corner of the table, ran it to the edge, and let go. One drop. A pause long enough to be a decision. Then an…
Chapter 9: The Red Line
The Red Line “Ray Whitlock.” He said it like a man reading off a form he'd filled out before. “Detective. Eleven years. Eight of those in ma…