Fool’s Run

To Galactic Patroller Aaron Fischer, the gilded and golden musician known as the Queen of Hearts had been a single lucky draw in a loser’s lifetime. But for the Queen herself, whose ability to beat out the timeless rhythms of the universe had earned her acclaim as the best cuber in the galaxy, there was only one way to win at life’s gamble. She would free her deadly alter-ego from the orbiting prison known as “The Underworld” and play the hand fate had dealt her – then let the consequences scatter across the milky way like exploding stars…She is the Queen of Hearts, the stellar performer whose ability to beat out the timeless rhythms of the universe has earned her the 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 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 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 .