The Colossus Collection

by Nicole Grotepas

  I sat across from Brock. Meg stood on the far side of the room, hovering, her arms crossed over her chest. She’d taken off her blazer and her face looked a bit haggard. She kept catching my gaze with hers. She was tough, but I knew that this part was hard for her. Just watching the fallout from a thoughtless, rash action, it was sobering. The ripples spread forever.

  “Those are your fingerprints. Thought you’d get off-moon before we could bring you in? Is that why this was such a rush job?”

  “I didn’t mean to kill him,” Brock said, his chin quivering as the rest of his face crumpled in horror and regret.

  I believed him. It was the second ugliest part about the job—the surprise over how fragile bodies are, how quickly something can turn into a nightmare when rage or anger propels an act. The pity I inevitably felt always fooled me into guilt. Because a part of me thought it was unfair to experience sadness for a person’s life spiraling downward, especially when they’d killed. Yet the sorrow I felt wasn’t just for the perpetrator, but the entire messy situation.

  “It just happened so fast. I showed up, thinking I’d just threaten him, tell him to back off. Stop cheating. Stop ripping off my code. I knocked on his door, and it opened, like maybe he was expecting someone. Inside he was standing there, oblivious to me, in Utopia. It looked like he was stocking virtual shelves, the way he was moving. He was also talking to someone. He even said something so kind—‘your baby would be my baby, see you soon’—but I was fucking pissed at that point. He’d been slowly ruining my life. He’d said goodbye and I knew he was alone in the game. Before I knew what was happening, the statue was in my hand. I hit him in the back of the head. I didn’t know it would really kill him. I just wanted to hurt him the way he’d been hurting me.”

  “You cleaned up everything that would point to a Holo-R set up. Included the room generators that hang on the walls to help create the holograph world.”

  He nodded and buried his face in his hands. His voice came out muffled and horrified. “Yes. When I saw what I’d done, I didn’t know what else to do, but hide it. And run. I’m sorry. So sorry. I didn’t meant to kill him.”

  I exchanged a look with Meg, glad to have the confession, but burdened by it all the same. We finished the interview and let a desk officer process the arrest.

  Back in our little wing of the precinct, I sat down. My desk was a mess. It was the one place I let a mess pervade. If I put things away the way I wanted, the way I obsessed at home, I would forget things. I left them out so I remembered.

  I rubbed my eyes and looked across the room at Meg, sorting through papers, taking down the suspect photos. We would file this case away for now, keeping all the evidence together to prosecute Brock. And then we’d put a new case up, because murder was a business of which humans couldn’t let go. As she worked, Meg seemed to have a spring in her step. She always got more upbeat when she solved a case. She caught me watching her and smiled faintly. “That bad?”

  “You know it. This job.” I shook my head.

  “At least it’s not going to go cold. If Brock had gotten off Kota, we may have never solved it.”

  “I know. I just sometimes think the Centau are right about us.”

  “The Centau aren’t even right about themselves,” Meg said, hinting at some of the cases we'd dealt with that had no resolution. The investigations would proceed normally and then out of nowhere a case would go off on a tangent and slowly come to a dead stop. It was happening to too many cases to be a coincidence. We'd only seen the tip of the iceberg, but there was something or someone preventing us from delving deeper into solving them. It was unspoken between us but I could tell we were thinking the same thing. Namely the possibility of a mole.

  I fidgeted with a stack of crumpled taco wrappers on my desk. “That girl. She’d had something, maybe something better. A Druiviin that wouldn’t beat her up. And now she’s got nothing.”

  “I know. Don’t get me started. I’m blaming myself. And after my interview with him, I’m certain he’s hurting her. But that’s not our job.”

  “It never is. We let women stay with abusive men and expect them to figure it out.” I was thinking of Meg’s sister, Holly. I was thinking of an officer in our very own precinct, Holly’s husband. Fucking Graff. Holly had never told us for sure. We’d just seen the vestiges.

  “We let women? Women are free agents. They have to do what’s right for them.”

  “While living with abusive partners who hold them in terror, who emotionally manipulate them so that they can’t even trust themselves.”

  “Gabe, come on. Parts of the job suck. Life is shitty in a lot of ways. But, look, we’ve got to take care of our own. Speaking of, it’s your day to go pick up Lucy. You better get out of here if you plan to get there before she’s already out and waiting.”

  I stood up. At least we’d caught Brock. Meg was right about that. I stretched and sighed, trying to shake the weight of the human condition, which was clearly not just a human problem. All the races suffered.

  Seeing Lucy would lighten my heart. “I’ll take her back to my condo. You can pick her up when you’re done here.”

  “I’ll finish the paperwork and swing by. At least I’m letting you get out of the paperwork, right?”

  “I’m such a lucky detective,” I said, grinning at her. As I passed her desk on my way out, I gave her upper arm a squeeze. It was damn lucky I had such a decent partner. Even if she didn’t want to stay married to me. Maybe someday I could convince her to give me another shot at it.

  ~~~~~~

  END CONTENT

  EYE OF THE COLOSSUS NOTES

  A Note from Me

  So thank you, a million times over, for reading all the way through to the end. If you’re here and you’re reading this, I feel incredibly lucky.

  A few years ago, I put out my first book. I sort of knew what I was doing because I worked for a few years in the publishing industry. I put out a couple books. Then I made two babies, and life got more complicated.

  And in the interim things changed a lot. I saw some of my indie writer friends keep on working on and publishing, and now they are super successful and amazing. They keep on inspiring me.

  I’ve figured out what I want to do and what I value as I’ve been working long hours these past few months to do what I love and catch up to where I want to be. The first thing I had to do was finish my Fooko series, the one I started clear back in like 2013. The second was learn everything that helps me write better stories and find fans (marketing and promotion). The second one is the hardest and takes the most work—can you believe that? Writing a book is a bit easier than all the other stuff. Who knew?

  One of the things I’ve done differently for Eye of the Colossus and the ensuing books is outline. I’ve never done that. I typically would have an idea of where a story wanted to end up, but I generally just went with it. For my example of how to outline, I imitated a super successful indie writer named Russell Blake. His outline is posted on his blog and he’s great and I’m thankful he shared his methodology.

  Another thing? And this is so weird to me that in all my years writing and adoring books, I NEVER KNEW ABOUT THE THREE ACT STRUCTURE. If you read or watch films, you know this structure almost intrinsically. Because nearly every successful story follows it. It’s practically built into you as a person if you grew up in Western culture.

  What’s crazy is that the best writers and storytellers do it on purpose. They know the structure and they follow it in order to make readers feel complete and like they got a good story. It involves setbacks and triumphs and it uses those to make the story feel right—it’s like how a decent song follows a fairly set chord progression (there are many of these, but the idea is that chord progressions work to cause emotional responses in the listener).

  In any case, I think I followed it for this story. And I now outline all my stories—it’s actually one of the best parts of the process now.

  So, to me writing is a journey
. Publishing my stories is a journey. And you being here with me, you’re part of this journey, whether you know it or not, whether I know you specifically or not. And I’m thankful that you’re along for the ride.

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  HANDS OF THE COLOSSUS NOTES

  A Note from Me

  So, here you are. You have finished book 2 of the Holly Drake series. How do you feel? I hope it felt amazing. That was my goal. If it didn’t feel that way, damn!

  Well, honestly, this was a hard job for me, so I’m immensely grateful to you if you got all the way to the end.

  Why a hard job? I mean, I love this book. I love Holly, Odeon, Charly, Shiro, Darius, Cosma, Meg, Gabe, Lucy, Trip…I mean, I really do. Writing the story isn’t a chore and when I’m doing it, I’m in love and it’s a blast.

  But this is a new pace for me. As you might notice, there are mistakes in the book. A few . . . or a LOT depending on which version you get. I hope you get the version with the least number of mistakes. But you might have gotten the version with the most and yet you still finished the book! I definitely apologize for it if that happened to you (and know that you can always email me at grotepas [at] gmail and ask for a replacement version and I’ll send you one—just let me know what your purchase date was).

  This is a new method for me and I’m still ironing out the scheduling and preorder dates. So I’m bumping into deadlines and it’s too late to change them. So I persevere and keep working hard and I’m not giving up. Even if it means I make some mistakes. My hope is that you’ll stick with me through the rough patches because the good shit is so damn good.

  And if it’s not, that’s totally OK. It just means we weren’t meant to be together. No hard feelings.

  But if we’re meant to be BFFs and we’re MFEO, hell yes!

  Because I’m going to keep going. And soon I hope to have dates better solidified so that I’m not submitting my “final” upload to Amazon before I’ve been able to fix all my proofreader’s edits. And then you’ll get a near perfect manuscript emailed to you and we can both be as happy as two birds on a rhino’s back.

  That’s my goal. So stay with me. I’m so glad that you’ve been with me this far.

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  HEART OF THE COLOSSUS NOTES

  A Note from Me

  If you’re this far, you might have noticed that there isn’t a preorder link for book 4. That’s because I need to take a break (of like a week or two haha).

  Since before the release of Eye of the Colossus, I’ve been pushing myself incredibly hard to produce, produce, produce. I love to write and work, so this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

  But then summer came and my kids got out of school. They’re really young right now, but they won’t stay that way forever. And as summer progresses, I’m faced with decisions to either work or be with them. With the kind of schedule I’ve been keeping, it has been work most often. Summer is now half over and I’ve been stressed and unable to spend quality time with them. And . . . they’re only young once. Plus, I made them and they’re awesome. So I want to hang out with them without feeling guilty about it.

  So, for two weeks I’m going to not make it about work. It’s going to be about them. I’ll still be releasing the fourth book in this series, but it will be in two to three months. I’ll also be working on a four to six book series about some of the other characters in the 6-moon universe (probably? Let me know what you think by leaving a review!).

  If you love this series and want me to write more in it, consider leaving a review. It’s the only way I know that readers love it! xo

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  SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS NOTES

  A Note from Me

  So I know what I want to say here before I have even written the book.

  This time, my note to you contains the best of me, because I’m not exhausted from a very tight publishing schedule and from pouring every ounce of my energy into the marketing and publishing of this book. Or maybe it’s the little break and the long roadtrip I inserted into the middle of my summer.

  Last evening I was sitting in a local climbing gym while my kids took their classes. They’re still quite young, but that’s the best time to help them hone their basic instincts when it comes to rock climbing. You know, like ballet on a vertical wall, there’s music and rhythm in the forms and the practice. Before they out-think themselves and get too scared or decide that the best way to get up the rock is to muscle their way up, they’re learning how to finesse the routes.

  I like to think epigenetics is a real thing and that they have absorbed some good, cool parts of me rather than just the bad choices I made—like smoking for a few years, and . . . Wait, that’s the only major mistake I made in my twenties.

  Kidding.

  The point is that due to my culture and heritage, when I got married and moved to the Phoenix area, the bouldering crash pad that my friends gave us as a wedding present immediately began to collect dust.

  I worked a lot at that time as Stoker went to school for recording engineering. I tried to merge into the local climbing scene, but most of the people at the gym were guys. And as a newly married girl and due to the influence of my religious upbringing, it was frowned upon to fraternize with a bunch of dudes while my husband was at home.

  Oh, and my skills were a bit rusty because during the time that I dated Stoker, I had zero time to climb—I was working full time and my climbing friends were as well.

  Then we moved to Nashville, and I didn’t climb there either. I tried, but same thing—the gym was full of males and I am female. Etc.

  This isn’t to blame anyone. The idea is that, as I sat there last night watching everyone else climbing and the poetry of the sport, I realized that I have constantly shed the things that mattered to me in order to make other people happy.

  This story has a good ending, after I dish out my advice to anyone who wants to read it: don’t give up what matters to you to make other people happy. Find out what you love and stick with it. Because that is what’s beautiful about you. That makes you interesting, unique, and valuable to the people around you.

  Change is inevitable. Circumstances influence what we can and can’t do. And if you have to cut back for a while, that’s not the end of the world (like for me and buying books or music when it isn’t financially feasible).

  I just think that eventually, what is left? Me. At the end of the day, I can’t continue to blame my past for influencing my present. Yes, it has some influence. But it doesn’t have to have all the influence.

  So, my kids are stellar at rock climbing. I see just small bits of myself in them, but they’re good at what they love because they love it. Not because of me.

  And last night, I found myself sorting through the problem: how the hell am I going to get on the rock again?

  I have an answer. And I hope that you too can always stay true to yourself, to who you are. And embrace it. I’ve watched myself adapt to make others happy around me, which makes me less happy. I see my friends doing it and I know that it’s not sustainable.

  Writing is like this. Sometimes I think it’d be easier to just give it up. But it’s the ONE thing I have never given up, from the time I was twelve.

  And I never will.

  And the next “Note from me” will perhaps be about how goddamn hard it is to rock climb at THIS age. Wink

  Thanks for being here. Now go kick some ass till the next book comes out!

  If you love this series and want me to write more in it, consider leaving a review. It’s the only way I know that readers love it! xo

  To get updates from me as well as a free ebook, sign up here! xoxo

  SIX SHADOWS NOTES

  A Note from Me.

  Hey! Thanks for checking out “Six Shadows.” It was my first venture
into crime fiction and it has been a learning experience. I watch a lot of crime procedurals. The Scandinavian-influenced types. BBC on PBS style. BBC on Netflix style. BBC ANYWHERE. Wallander, River, Broadchurch, Hinterland, Shetland. Are there more? Should I know about something not mentioned here (let me know!)? Anyway, so I wanted to write a story like these shows. I love that the stories are real. That the characters, like Kurt Wallander, feel something. The work gets to the detectives. That’s what I go to those dramas to experience. Also, in Hinterland and Shetland, the landscape is a character, like the heath in Return of the Native. I love that. It’s phenomenal.

  Though I’m not sure I captured the elements I love about that style of drama, I think I’ll keep trying and I think I’ll get better at it. In the meantime, I hope you kick around with me as I keep working. I have plans to write more about Gabe, Meg, Lucy, and the whole team. My hope is that I can tackle another book about Gabe and Meg in the autumn. For now, I’m just about to launch the first book in the Holly Drake series, which is sort of a spin-off of Gabe’s story. Holly is Meg’s sister (mentioned briefly in “Six Shadows”). When the story starts she’s in prison. I’m offering a preview here, after this note. Holly isn’t a detective like Meg. She’s the black sheep of the family—well, you’ll have to check it out.

  For now, I just want to tell you that I’m very pumped about these stories. I hope that translates into the stories themselves and that you get into the Holly Drake books, because I have two more coming out in the next few months. And then after that, the sky’s the limit! Stick around. I’d love to have you along for the ride.