Fool’s Run

The vision was light…It stared down upon a shifting landscape where blurred shapes were bewilderingly, hauntingly familiar. The sand, pale, barren, ran suddenly hot, glazing into molten glass. Under the yellow stare even the oval melted. It became a child’s face, screaming silently in terror…

She is the Queen of Hearts, the stellar performer whose ability to beat out the timeless rhythms of the universe has earned her acclaim as the best cuber in the galaxy. And she wears the golden smile, the gilded face-paint which masks her true identity. Yet as the band, headed by her old friend the Magician, closes in on the orbiting penal colony known as the Underworld, the Queen of Hearts knows that this will be more than a one-night gig. For in the shadow of dark prison resides the one remaining link between the masked musician and her forgotten past.

Incarcerated in the depths of the Underworld is Terra Viridian, the hollow-eyed visionary of apocalypse—and the murderer of more than fifteen hundred innocent people. Encased in the bubble of the experimental mind prober known as “The Dream Machine,” Terra projects onto a screen the nightmarish sequence of images that make up her haunting future vision: molten red sun, an oval turned inward, a desert of amethyst sand. But as scientists scramble to decode Terra’s devastating message, yet another image appears on the screen: Hearts…red hearts…the red hearts that licked at the golden skin like tongues of fire.

In a stunning turnabout, Terra Viridian will have the opportunity to once again pursue the vision that has haunted her, a vision that hides a secret and a mystery vital to the lives of everyone on the Fools’s Run.