Istanbul Cabin lights flicker; I jolt awake. Descent has begun. Outside, the sky bruises itself into day: bars of pink, slashes of blue, and new gold. My hand drifts to Asdar’s note—a nervous relic, its shape bitten into my palm—as the city unfurls below, vast and split by water and empire. IST is fever-bright, sharp-edged….
Tag: literary fiction
The COMC Files: The Sting
The King’s Gold — 10:54 p.m. The pub is packed, South London voices rising beneath battered beams, pints gleaming amber under yellow light. Roger stands behind the bar, posture loose but watchful. I’m nursing my gin, scanning the crowd with my fieldworker’s eye—noting every shift in tension, every too-loud laugh that might mean trouble. Harry…
The COMC Files: King’s Gold
Old Foxes and City Spring I set the burner on the counter beside my forgotten groceries. Two hours. The old Fox doesn’t waste time. I strip off my coat, catch my reflection in the hall mirror—hair still wild from travel, shadows under my eyes that haven’t lifted since Romania. My body carries the toll: months…
The COMC Files: Blue light
Trust Amellal, Zurich Headquarters The command centre is flooded with blue light and sleep deprivation. Tarmo stands above three monitors—one cycling through riverbank thermal images, another frozen on a grainy satellite view of the Carpathians, a third pulsing with encrypted alerts from half a dozen agencies. His broad, pale face—so often unreadable—now bears twin crescents…
The Chronicles of a Memory Cartographer: Estonia
Synopsis When anthropologist Elena is summoned from her research in Dahkla to snowy Estonia at the urgent request of Tarmo Amellal, she expects an inconvenient detour. What she walks into is a collision of academic purpose and personal entanglement. Leaving the oral histories of Marrakech in the care of Mrs. Henderson, she travels toward the…
The C.O.M.C. Files 