The Orc’s Gift (Sunshine Valley Orcs #2)

Prologue

No one expected it.

On a Tuesday in September, eight years ago, a routine high-energy particle experiment at CERN, the prestigious European physics laboratory, produced results no one has fully explained to the public.

What the official report called “an anomalous spacetime event” lasted eleven seconds.

What it actually did was tear a hole between worlds.

The aperture opened over the Missouri Ozarks.

From the other side, it took orcs from half a dozen clans, scattered across distances that should have made any single event impossible.

There was no discernible logic to the selection.

A father, not his children. A warrior, not her clan leader.

A child pulled from sleep while her mother, standing in the next room, was left behind.

Whatever the experiment disturbed, it did not discriminate by family or clan or proximity. It simply took.

Approximately six hundred orcs emerged within a one-mile radius of each other. What the watching humans could not have known, and what took weeks and much cautious observation to establish, was that the newcomers were bewildered, not dangerous.

The humans built a compound while they sorted out what to do.

Appropriate-scale housing. A large community hall.

A perimeter that was, depending on who you asked, either a precaution or a cage.

The orcs cooperated. They had arrived in a strange world with nothing but each other, and they were practical people.

That CERN bore some responsibility for their displacement was never officially confirmed.

But it was never convincingly denied either, and that silence shaped everything that followed.

The surrounding communities couldn’t quite summon the outrage that might have come otherwise. Fault has a way of softening hostility.

Gradually, the towns decided the newcomers were permanent.

Jobs appeared: labor first, then maintenance work, then for those willing to undergo years of vetting and certification, security.

The orcs who thrived learned English. Hard and fast and imperfectly, with accents that never fully smoothed out, but functionally.

Well enough to work, to bargain, to make themselves understood.

Eight years in, Sunshine Valley and its neighboring towns have reached a state that resembles, from a distance, almost ordinary life.

It is not an ordinary life. But it is a life.

Among those six hundred is a StillWater orc who spent a lifetime running from his own stillness. He is very good at it.