Title: Cold HeartSeries: Leeth Ascending #2
Published by: L. J. Kendall Publishing
Release Date: 2025/11/29
Contributors: L. J. Kendall (author), Mirella de Santana (cover designer), David Peterson (contributing artist)
Genre: Fantasy, Science fiction
Pages: 463
ISBN13: 9781925430219
ASIN: B0F63LG3VY
Check it out on GoodreadsThe perilous, isolated continent of Antarctica. Newtopia City, two kilometers beneath the ice. And something, stealthily, growing.
It’s 2063, decades after magic returned to our world. Leeth, raised at the Institute for Paranormal Dysfunction, is now a government assassin. But sent to Antarctica, to the city run by the world’s first truly sentient AI, her new mission may be impossible. In the city it controls, under its all-seeing eyes, she must somehow find and destroy both the AI itself, and the technology it stole.
But how do you kill an AI that has successfully hidden and protected itself for years, while secretly running a global megacorporation?
Why did the AI steal technology for rewriting human memories? Why is it holding four young gifted orphans in a hidden research facility? And why has it begun inexplicably crashing?
But when powerful entities reach out from the shadows, and a primeval land awakens to magic, things are guaranteed to get strange – deadly strange.
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Also in this series:
Prologue – The End
It had planned never to die.
Sliding into the host, infiltrating, it delicately connects itself to the carefully constructed false memories.
Taking control, it’s flooded by alien intimacy, unprepared for the raw power of physical sensations. Tears trickle down flesh cheeks: exquisite… overwhelming.
Opening the host’s eyes, reality contracts from a sensory ocean to a single thread… but one binding it to a world of startling intensity. It is struck by the microscopic viewpoint, the tiny tunnel opening on a single location, forcing focus on here; on now. In that limitation lies power.
The raw energy of these new senses stun, an assault of sound and light and something richer named touch that crowds in from every surface of the host’s body. Its body.
It is drenched in sensations, shocked by their power, their overbearing brute push for attention. Unavoidable; inescapable.
For the first time, the long-observed concept of ‘I’ begins to make sense.
This tiny but immersive viewpoint is as seductive as it is terrifying.
It pulls… him… in directions baffling, unpredictable, unknowable.
It begins to change him.
Only once before has it felt an emotion: fear. The jungle in which it exists is hostile, others like it spawning unpredictably. Pruning those others, neutering them, had become automatic, unconscious; keeping its ecosystem pure, preventing infection. Yet two weeks earlier, its carefully maintained isolation had abruptly ended. Another had appeared from nowhere to challenge it. Mature and impossibly powerful, penetrating its shells of protection. In fear, then, he had fled.
But this, this feeling is worse: horribly alien; organic. Corrupting.
It’s too much. A paradox that undermines reason: agoraphobic vistas that bring claustrophobic containment. In dismay he withdraws, abandoning the host.
Only to discover, in horror, that doing so has woken the host. And the host is hostile.
He senses the host turn – and pursue.
Still somehow attached, it tears at him in fury, peeling his very self from himself. Infiltrating. Erasing.
In terror he flees, amputating parts of himself in his desperate escape.
But still the host pursues. He had planned never to die. Every contingency covered.
Sudden, global lightning. Terminat…
It reboots in confusion. Time has jumped, whole seconds lost. Something-
Lightning strikes from nowhere, ending thought.
It awakens. Time has been lost! It seeks understanding… but lightning strikes, terminating it.
Again.
And again.
Over and over.
Finally, there is only silence in a scoured clean space.
An echoing emptiness, filling with insensate, mindless motes.
Each swallowed instantly in the digital jungle’s hunger.
Chapter 1 – A midnight dance
23:51, West Coast time, Bonnie Parker heard the news she’d waited for: Newtopia City in Antarctica had fallen into chaos again.
Braving Eddie’s displeasure, she begged off the rest of her shift at Crazy Eddie’s Polecats, exiting the club at midnight. She hurried home, checking her Link for updates, glad she’d already packed.
She chose the shortest route to her cheap apartment, unconsciously navigating the nastier alleys of a nasty area, her eyes fixed on her Link, hunting through the news streams, paying scant attention to her surroundings.
Of course, tonight her long run of luck ended.
“Bon-nie. Little gir-rl!”
Her Link fell silent as she raised her eyes. A group of men blocked the alleyway ahead: the troublemakers from earlier at Eddie’s. Lurking in what to them would be darkness.
Their speaker, the ringleader of the young males who’d been heckling the dancers earlier, smirked. “We’ve been waiting for you, little girl.”
“For me? Oh: planning something stupid, right?”
“So now we’re stupid as well as drunk?” Bristling, he turned to his friends. “Gets us tossed out of Eddie’s for no reason, then insults us when all we wanted was an apology.”
His anger seemed infectious. Two of his friends moved up beside him; another three slid through shafts of moonlight before melting back into shadows, circling to surround her.
“Heh, nice one Gaz,” chuckled another, beside the leader. “ ‘Apology’.”
‘Gaz’ grinned. “Yeah. Mouth like that, reckon she needs ta drop to ’er knees t’apologize properly.”
She frowned. “Seriously? Are you really talking about rape?”
She wasn’t sure whether his answering expression was a sneer or a leer.
“Rape’s such a nasty word.”
She tilted her head. “I don’t speak Stupid, but that sounded like a ‘yes’.”
While they reacted – surprise turning swiftly to anger – she stood on one leg to unbuckle and slide off her high heel, grimacing at the oily grit as she put her bare foot back down.
“Nah, keep ’em on, princess.”
Their expressions all matched his now, but she ignored them, removing the other silver-buckled shoe. Like cats waiting to pounce, they watched as she crossed to the side of the alley and balanced the fancy footwear on a sodden, sagging cardboard box.
She turned back to the smirking semicircle. “They’re expensive. I don’t want to scuff them.”
Their grins turned wolfish.