Preview of CROSS//Process
Throughout RAISING HER SOUL, Joiya references the idea that she and her daughter are not inhabiting the "correct" timeline of events. This is a bit of a cheeky nod to her being aware of her place in the series' multiverse.
In fact, the "real" timeline takes place in the main series of CROSS//, including the prequel, PROCESS, which stars Sulim, Sonall… and a familiar third who goes by a different name.
This is a special preview of CROSS//Process, focusing on the prevailing romance between Sulim and Cairn, featuring moments of when they meet and when they realize their feelings for one another.
While the following scenes are from different parts of the serial compilation, they still weave a singular tale that I hope intrigues you to keep coming back for more!
You can download CROSS//Process via ebook on Amazon or directly from my signed paperback store.
The crates were only half-stacked when the sirens blared in the distance.
Manda dropped her end of the crate and stared at the sky in horror. Sulim stumbled under the weight of the crate and watched it crash to the ground, the far end spilling bags of seeds.
She wanted to curse the other girl, but Sulim heard the sirens and turned to the horizon. Five space cruisers roared in their direction.
“Oh, merciful Void!” Manda shrieked, her face covered in tears as her legs gave out and she sank to the grass. “They’re here!”
Katya was between them and the plantation house. After she saw the cruisers with her own eyes, she dashed off and screamed to anyone in the Montrael family who would listen. “It’s them! They’re coming! Run!”
Sulim could scarcely think with all the panic erupting around her. Who was coming? Why were the sirens blaring? The sirens only sounded during twister season, and the sky was clear as spring water.
Aside from the specks on the horizon.
Sprinting was all Sulim could process afterward. She easily overtook Manda and Katya in their mad dashes to the plantation house, where Lady Caramine appeared in the doorway to inspect what all the commotion was about. Sulim reached the house first, winded but not mute.
“Aunt Caramine… the sirens…”
“I can bloody well hear them, Sulim. What is everyone scattering around for?”
“The sky… space cruisers…” A stitch pulled at Sulim’s side from running so hard.
Caramine finally saw the ships for herself. “No…” she whispered in disbelief, eyes widening and face turning pale in the sunlight. “Not out here…”
It took only two more seconds for the Lady of Montrael to act.
She ordered her children to her side, summoned the farmhands and servants, and bade all the others around her to come as well.
By the time they locked up the house and made for the cellar entrance out back, one of the space cruisers defected from their formation and eyed the open grasslands for landing.
Sulim’s heart swelled with a fear she did not understand.
There were two cellars, one for food and the other for the twister season.
The latter was larger but still not large enough to house the twenty or so people running for safety.
One of the older male farmhands opened the twister cellar and motioned for Caramine and her children to drop in before counting heads to see who would follow them.
Sulim and Katya were two of them. The others were forced to take shelter in the smaller food stores.
The cellar was dank but more than adequate for hiding from raiders.
Before the farmhand could join them and close the door behind him, Caramine barked an order for one of the last people outside to push a crate over it to conceal its frame.
The door slammed shut and sent all dozen people inside into utter darkness.
The nearest crate screeched against the steel trappings of the cellar door.
Silence followed.
Sulim sat in a corner, behind her aunt and cousins, with Katya and the farmhands on the other end. Caramine hissed at the farmhands to sit up front. “Nobody is taking the children,” she explained. “I want them to see nothing but old men and a useless woman.”
“Ma’am,” Katya said, her voice shaking as much as the rest of her body. “Put your daughters between you and your son. They’re too young to be taken.”
That was how Fel came to sit next to Sulim.
Even though they soon heard the motors and boosters of the spacecraft outside, it was a long half-hour full of sweat and fear before anything else happened. In that time, Sulim found some dirt and smothered her face and hair with it—anything to make her look older than seventeen.
Soon they were all sweating, packed together in the cellar with no water or fresh air. One of the smaller girls started sobbing, and the other whined about having to urinate. Caramine shushed them both.
They all grew still as death when they heard heavy footsteps above their heads.
Sulim glanced up through the cracks in the cellar door when everyone else bowed their heads in fear. The outline of a tree swayed in the breeze, and the edge of the crate that barred their entrance remained. Nothing else stirred, aside from two feet that made slow rounds.
The boots were made of thick leather that thumped with every step upon the earth and wood. As the person wearing them turned around the corner of the cellar, Sulim caught the scent of a deep musk that perforated her crowded shelter.
No one dared to breathe while the sentry thumped around in circles for half an eternity.
Some of the farmhands started praying, and Katya was clinging to a man she did not know as he stroked her hair in a soothing motion.
Caramine’s daughters buried their heads in her breasts, and for once Fel made no comments or jokes.
As Sulim thought she could not take the suspense any longer, the boots swerved and stepped away from sight. A collective breath was exhaled in the cellar.
“No, nothing!” Everyone’s chests heaved again as a woman called across the yard. “I don’t see anything over here!”
“Then sod off,” Fel muttered in response. His mother glared at him.
A faraway voice shouted something back, but Sulim could not make it out. Soon the other woman spoke again. “I’m not going back empty-handed! Maybe the house is unlocked and I’ll get some shit. No, seriously!”
The other voice grew louder as the distance between the two raiders shortened. “Hurry up! This place is giving me hay fever. I just want to be out of here before I can’t breathe anymore!” Another woman’s voice.
“Oh, wah wah.”
As they carried on, Sulim bit her lip until she tasted blood in her mouth. Her legs grew weary, and her eyes strained to see past the sunshine outside.
Another five minutes passed in eerie silence. Then a shuddering sob rang out through the yard overhead, and the first voice struggled to shout over it. “Got something?”
Two thumps as bodies dropped to the ground. The sobbing stopped. “Hell yeah, I found where the household was hiding! There’s a cellar over here. Mostly nasty old guys, but there were two able girls in there!”
“Made short work of them, I see.”
“Hey, there’s only one of me, and you ain’t helpin’. Life’s easier when you knock them down cold and drag them through the mud.”
“Congratulations.”
“Hurry the hell up and let’s get out of here. The others are gathering food from the silos. There ain’t many more around here, and they look poor. There ain’t much in the house. Help me drag these bitches back to our ship.”
“You go on ahead. I’ve got a feeling.”
“Fuck your feelings. Just for that, you get first shift tonight.”
Sulim and the others listened as the owner of the other voice dragged Eyne and Manda away from the plantation house. She thought back to what Jasey had said only two nights before. It was too late for both girls now; soon they would be made into barbarians.
A butterfly crept through the broken edge of the door and fell into the blackened pit of the cellar.
Nobody paid any heed to it, not even the little girls, who often cried at the sight of insects.
It bumped into the dirt walls and fluttered upside down for a while until it reached the back, where it landed on Fel’s head.
He cried out and lashed at it with his hand, splattering the butterfly and making a dreadful amount of noise with it.
A dozen hearts stopped in the immediate second following, and Sulim sighed in relief when the silence passed.
The crate was obliterated above the cellar door and a stream of hot sunlight poured onto all of their faces for the raider to see.
She leaped down into the cellar, her body as lithe as a cat’s but still as noisy as a mutt’s.
The farmhands in front cowered before her as she raised her weapon, a small laser that meant death for anyone foolish enough to rise against it with nothing more than hoes and rakes.
Sulim kept her head down so nobody could see her smooth face and skin.
The ground became moist as Fel wet himself.
“Aren’t you a sorry bunch of pisstakers?” It was like the mercenary knew what Fel did. Maybe she can smell the stink. The mercenary kicked a rock and advanced forward. Sulim pointed her head down more, and she hoped Fel and Katya were doing the same.
However, not even her immature cousin could be saved by his ten-year-old brain. He displayed his teenage body as he brushed off the dead butterfly and became an instant target.
“You, boy,” the mercenary said. “You will come with me. Force, no force. Your choice.”
Many years later, when Sulim was grown and in a place in her life when she could look back at this moment with clarity, she would remember the maternal whine that gutted from Caramine’s throat as a hot white rope snapped out from the mercenary’s hands and grabbed Fel by the shoulder.
He was jerked so hard that Sulim almost thought he heard a pop in his joints, but he was too busy calling out for his mother that if there were any pain he did not notice it.
“No!” Caramine screamed, her daughters cast aside as she flung herself between the woman and her son. She attempted to grab the rope, but it was sticky and hot. She recoiled in pain. “No, don’t take my son—please!”
“Momma!” Fel was already halfway between his old family and the new. “Momma!”