Danger's Halo: (Holly Danger Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  DANGER’S HALO

  About the Book

  Copyright

  Other Books by Amanda Carlson

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Sneak Peek of DANGER’S VICE

  About the Author

  Many Thanks

  DANGER’S

  HALO

  A HOLLY DANGER NOVEL:

  BOOK ONE

  AMANDA CARLSON

  153 years in the future, Earth doesn’t look much like it used to.

  Holly Danger’s current assignment, gleaned from a set of foggy instructions and a handful of coin stuffed into a slot, is to pick up a street kid who’s about to terminate himself off a cliff. And, as a rule, she doesn’t turn down currency. Her job as a salvager keeps her fed and clothed above the norm, which isn’t saying much.

  The norm in this city is a scrape-by existence in a post-apocalyptic world, where the rain never stops, food is always scarce, and the elite have deserted the ranks in search of something better. Picking up this urchin won’t take much time, even if he’s located outside city limits. Her craft is fast, her weapons deadly, and her tech has been optimized as well as it can be for a climate clogged with iron dust.

  But things take a big turn when she decides to become the boy’s guardian instead of hand him over. Outskirts have descended on the city, and their plans don’t include playing nice. When her crew is backed against a graphene wall, it’s a good thing her Gem is primed and ready to go. It’s almost as deadly as she is…

  Danger’s Halo

  A HOLLY DANGER NOVEL: BOOK ONE

  Copyright © 2017 Amanda Carlson, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-1-944431-02-0

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Table of Contents

  DANGER’S HALO

  About the Book

  Copyright

  Other Books by Amanda Carlson

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Sneak Peek of DANGER’S VICE

  About the Author

  Many Thanks

  Other Books by Amanda Carlson

  Find all of Amanda’s books on her website.

  Jessica McClain Series:

  Urban Fantasy

  BLOODED

  FULL BLOODED

  HOT BLOODED

  COLD BLOODED

  RED BLOODED

  PURE BLOODED

  BLUE BLOODED

  Sin City Collectors:

  Paranormal Romance

  ACES WILD

  ANTE UP

  ALL IN

  Phoebe Meadows:

  Contemporary Fantasy

  STRUCK

  FREED

  EXILED

  Holly Danger:

  Futuristic Dystopian

  DANGER’S HALO

  DANGER’S VICE (Fall of 2017)

  DANGER’S RACE (Fall of 2017)

  For Billy, the tech master

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Nobody survives that jump, kid.” Judging by the boy’s ragged clothing, he’d been living on the streets for a while. He couldn’t have been more than about ten. “It’s a lie. They tell you that so they can steal from you once they discover your dead, mangled body on the rocks below.”

  I kicked the door of my dronecraft shut with the tip of a titanium-toed boot. The vehicle rocked, but held steady. I ignored the grating whir coming from the motor as I made my way over to where the urchin stood, his toes already too close to the edge. I kept the craft running to err on the side of safety. We were out pretty far, and it was getting close to dark.

  Save for the water rushing in the gorge sixty meters below, the desolate landscape was like everything around here: cold, dreary, dirty, and mostly dead.

  I flipped the visor on my helmet down to keep the slanting rain out of my eyes. Swirling gray clouds were a near-constant sight and provided ongoing precipitation on most days. The only good thing about the moisture was it kept the iron dust down to a minimum, making air masks voluntary, except for the handful of days when the drizzle cleared, which numbered fewer than the fingers on one hand.

  The kid had decided to ignore me. Couldn’t really blame him.

  Crisp wind abraded my cheeks, the only skin exposed to the elements, the temperature always on the verge of too damn cold. My boots crunched over the ground, rocks skittering and bouncing in and out of dark, red-tinted puddles as I made my way toward him. I was dressed in head-to-toe leather. The usual: pants, jacket, vest, gloves.

  Well, I wasn’t actually wearing animal hide, since all the livestock and most of the wild animals had been extinct for years, but we still called it that. Old habits. The synthetic texture was leatherlike, so the name had endured. As had many others. The consensus was that it was too hard to find new names for stuff, and no one really gave a shit what you called it anyway.

  I was almost to him when he finally decided to speak. “They…they said if I survived I could go live on the Flotilla.” His voice wavered, reeking of fatigue, but stubbornly holding on to a single kernel of hope—that leaving this wretched place for something better was possible. It wasn’t.

  “Whoever told you that was lying.” I tried to make my voice sound less like I wanted to throat-punch someone, since I was dealing with a child, but I had one dial, and it was always set to the same channel. That’s what years in this city did to you. It set your dial. I stuffed my gloved hands into my pockets. “Besides, how do you know that place even exists?”

  The Flotilla was mostly a myth for those of us who’d been born after the mass exodus. That fateful day when the wealthy took their vast resources and launched The Water Initiative, which, according to the records left behind, consisted of a massive fleet of boats and barges stuffed with most of the city’s critical supplies. The entire fleet ha
d sailed out of the harbor without so much as a backward glance, flipping the city a gigantic finger in its wake.

  I’d heard the same rumors this kid had growing up—that the water city had flourished, was clean and chock full of food, commerce, and fresh, breathable air.

  Everything we lacked here.

  Assholes.

  “The Flotilla exists,” the urchin insisted. “I heard from a runner, who heard from a peddler, who heard from a guard, that the Flotilla is running out of supplies and they need hard workers to rebuild after a great storm. I’m a hard worker.” He thumped his chest and eyed me, his face grimy and smeared with dirt.

  On second thought, he was probably more like eight than ten.

  I’d recently heard similar tales, and so had my crew, but unlike the kid, we’d written it off as gossip, like every other piece of information about that place. It ranked up there with other news I’d heard recently, like: Rain was in the forecast for this week, or protein cakes were delicious. They weren’t.

  “I’m sure there’s no harder worker.” I peered over the edge. The drop would kill him instantly. Hell, it would kill anyone. I couldn’t blame him for believing the stories, however. There were always stories. And, honestly, who wouldn’t want to trade their shitty lives to be transported to a watery haven with fresh, breathable air and food that didn’t crumble down your chin every time you ate it?

  Most of us would take the same running leap off a cliff if that were the case.

  “They said it was about time someone survived,” he said. “I’d even get a parade thrown in my honor.”

  “A parade?” Was this kid serious? “Honestly, have you ever glimpsed a parade in this town?”

  “I’ve seen pictures,” he boasted. “In the zoom tunnels. There’s a bunch of stuff on the walls down there. The photos are torn and faded, but they exist. They had lots of colorful animals filled with air, and people were smiling.” His voice held hope.

  Poor bastard.

  “Pictures you find in dank undergrounds don’t represent our world today. You should know better than to listen to street gossip.”

  He glared at me out of the corner of a soot-streaked eye, not appearing even a little bit convinced. He wanted to believe, and I was the big bad bitch who was going to stomp all over his dreams with my titanium-toed boots. “Listen, being gullible will get you killed quicker than a laser straight through the eye. Now, let’s get out of here. I’ve got important things to do today, like putting my feet up after my long journey out here.” He didn’t respond. “Today is not your day to die, kid. I promise. Get in my craft, and I’ll haul your skinny ass back to the city.” I gestured with my thumb toward my ride. A standard-issue A1 military dronecraft. “I call her Lucy, Luce for short.”

  “That thing is a wreck.” He peered around me, scoffing. “I’m surprised it still runs.”

  I arched an eyebrow at the kid, who had now decided he had some backbone. “I’ll have you know that this was my grandfather’s. He served in the militia until 2141. He handed it down to me, name and all, and I’ve kept her running ever since.”

  “It looks like your grandpa’s. A1 is ancient. The new ones are W6’s. That’s almost the entire alphabet.”

  I sighed. New was a relative term around here. They’d stopped making crafts thirty years ago, after the Flotilla left with all the remaining resources. Assholes. “Honestly, kid, if you want to live, get in the craft.” I swept a hand in front of me. “Or be my guest and shatter yourself on the rocks below. I get paid either way.” His jaw stuck out stubbornly and his skinny arms were locked in front of him. He was going to be a tough sell. “You might as well give me your tag.” I held out my palm. “At least I can give it to your next of kin once you perish in spectacular fashion. I promise not to describe to them how your broken body looked splattered all over the rocks, and I usually keep my word.” I always kept my word.

  “I don’t have a tag.”

  “What do you mean?” Everyone had a tag. They were government-issued IDs and were the only way to get sustenance and supplies on a regular basis. The food rations were crappy and came in the form of dry, crumbly protein blocks, but they kept us from gnawing our arms off or killing our irritating neighbors to stay alive. Most of the 3-D bio-printers were inactive, and those that still ran worked at limited capacity, based on their size and the fact we had few ingredients to fill them.

  “I gave it away.”

  “Seriously?” I didn’t even give a crap about this urchin, but I was floored. “Hold out your wrist.” He turned it over, and sure enough, there was a divot where the tag should’ve been. His skin was puckered and pink. “It can take up to a year to get new ones,” I warned. Tags were inserted at birth. They were a centimeter wide and less than a millimeter thick. They contained a frequency and symbol combination that was uniquely your own. As you grew, your flesh secured them. No one remembered how it felt to have them inserted, so no one complained. “Why’d you go and do a stupid thing like that?”

  “Why do you care?” he shot back, flashing me a look of disdain that was praiseworthy—if I was in the mood to give out compliments, which I wasn’t.

  “Who said I do? But that was dumb. If you live on the streets, you should know better.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Live on the streets. Well, I do now, since I ran away.” He stuck out his chin. “But I didn’t used to.”

  “Where was home?” I crossed my arms, which was an accomplishment in my vest. It was fashioned from carbon fiber and was tase resistant, but not laser impenetrable—because there was nothing on the battered face of this Earth that would stop a concentrated blast of electromagnetic radiation. It was bulky and thick because my pockets were always stuffed with crap that could potentially save my life. But I managed to hook my wrists and get them comfortably wedged between my elbows.

  “Port Station.”

  “Why’d you run?”

  “Because I hated it there.”

  “Did the city treat you any better?” Port Station was a heavily guarded community just outside city limits. “Because it doesn’t look like it to me.”

  He glanced down, likely battling back tears. Didn’t blame him. Crying here was the norm. Emotions had a way of eventually bubbling out. If not from the eyes, from the fists. “Everywhere is horrible.” He kicked a stone. It arced over the side, dropping out of sight into the rushing water below.

  “I can’t argue with you there.” Joy had been known to happen on occasion, but you had to search for it. And most of the time you were too fucking tired to go looking.

  “I want to live on the water or nowhere.” He shuffled a titch closer to the edge. “I’m not scared to die.”

  I dropped my arms, suddenly wary of watching this kid plunge to his death. Yet another casualty of this city. “Don’t do it.” I’d felt like him a dozen million times. “Come back with me and give life another try. I know people. We can try to find a boat captain. Maybe they’ll take you on as a steward, or whatever hard workers on ships are called.” It was a lie, but worth telling if the kid didn’t jump. There were no boat captains, because there were no boats.

  He shook his head slowly. “No.”

  I tried another tactic. “Do you know who I am?”

  He peered at me sideways. “Why would I?”

  “I take it you haven’t been out of Port Station long, because I’m pretty famous. That’s why I’m here. Someone paid me real coin to bring you back, and I used my honest-to-goodness tracking skills to find you.” Leaving out that I’d known exactly where he’d be from the note I’d found stuffed in my slot. That didn’t sound at all impressive. Lies were important when told well. “I’m that good.”

  “You tracked me in that rattling junk heap?”

  I suppressed a smile. “It’s not about the craft, it’s about the lady who wields it.” When he didn’t take the bait, I pressed an index finger solidly into my chest. “Me. I’m talking about
me. I’m the best salvager out there. I can find just about anything if given enough time, including runaways who give their tags away like dummies.”

  “What’s your name, then?”

  Since I had no lead-in drum roll to amp up the reveal, I settled on a dramatic pause. When a sufficient amount of time passed, I answered, “Holly Danger.”

  He shrugged. “So what?”

  “Come on, you’ve heard of me. Admit it.”

  “Yeah.”

  Okay, my not-entirely-real celebrity status was non-impressive. Good to know. “I just heard about a new initiative they’re starting. They’re talking about shuttling people down South. There’s a rumor the sun is trying to break through there. The land is supposed to become habitable in a few years.”

  “They’re always coming up with initiatives. They never work.”

  “The Flotilla worked, or you wouldn’t be standing here willing to end your life for it.”

  He shrugged his twiggy shoulders. Nothing but jutting bones popped against the thin fabric. The kid wanted to check out. Even if I could grab him before he flung himself over, and managed to haul him into Luce and back to the city, he’d likely dive out a megascraper window the first chance he got.