For today’s A to Z Challenge, I am sharing an excerpt from an excerpt from WIP, The Scent of Memory, which is book 2 of my SFR series Green Rising. (You can check out book 1 Race to Redemption (Green Rising Book #1 which recently won 2 SFR Galaxy Awards.)
The excerpt centers on our heroine, Marisol, who’s life is driven, or perhaps stopped, by memories she can’t move past.
Excerpt
As she did every night, Marisol Martinez loitered in the shadow of her daughter’s bedroom door, sinking into the blended smell of watercolor paints, dog hair and greenhouse-sugar. A maelstrom of grief and anger punched through her chest, threatening to break through the wall of stoicism she built around her barely beating heart. Ariana carried Aren’s scent, was his last impossibly beautiful creation and the only remaining piece of the man death ripped violently from her life. Marisol inhaled deeper, shoving the sorrow back down and using the air to navigate through the tendrils of aroma the way Aren taught her. Seconds later, she honed onto the unique floral trace that distinguished Ariana from Aren. A small gift, but enough to calm the angry tremor in her hands and allow her heart to pump enough to be with Ariana.
The negative emotions forced back into their box, Marisol gave a quick knock on the door, then walked in. Ariana was stuffing something under her pillow, her unruly black hair bobbing as she moved. “What was that?” Marisol asked, managing to keep her voice light, as a whiff of Ariana’s sweat flicked on her worry light.
Her daughter flopped on her back and sat up. Those unique, cobalt blue eyes, like crushed sapphires, widened with fabricated innocence. “Is it time to say our secret vows, mama?” Eleven-year old Ariana sidestepped conversations like a pro
Marisol nodded, letting the action go for now. “Let’s say them together.” Her daughter’s return smile triggered a rush of love so tender it filled the dark empty places Aren left inside her. She wanted to wrap Ariana in cotton and steel and keep her safe forever, but her clever baby would never allow that, so she started the vows. “We envision a world… . .
“Of abundance for all, want for none,” Arianna added her voice. “A world of compassion, justice and integrity. A world where we can say these vows openly, and not in hidden whispers.”
Ariana’s tone lowered near the end of the recitation. She wiped at her eyes, then stuck one hand under the pillow, pulled out a picture and handed it to her. Marisol’s heart thudded wildly in her chest as she reached for the photo with clammy hands and a head bursting with warning screeches. Gripping the cool, glossy paper so tightly it buckled from the pressure as she slowly turned it over. When she saw that crooked smile and laughing cobalt eyes holding the albino puppy with a golden bow tied around his neck out toward the camera, her heart broke all over again. Aren Dougherty. The father Ariana never knew. The love Marisol could never move beyond. She thought she destroyed this photo of her last birthday with him, a week before he died, two weeks before she learned she was pregnant.
“I look at it every night and wish him into my dreams.” Ariana’s confession dragged her back to her daughter.
“He’s never left mine, Tesora.” She pulled her daughter close, stroking her untamed curls, swimming in that floral scent to keep the sorrow at bay.
“Is that why you work so hard, why I never see you?” Her voice crawled out small and scared.
Marisol’s heart shattered, the pieces painful and disfigured. Her commitment to the Gren an Dane, the rebel coalition looking to create a more democratic intergalactic society based on abundance not scarcity, was the only thing that allowed her to survive Aren’s death.
“I work hard because of the vow we just made, because I want a better world for you and justice for your father, the man I will never stop loving.”
“All I want is to see you more, mommy. That would be my better world.” Tear filled eyes looked up at her. “Am I selfish?”
Marisol crumpled, the last vestiges of the stoic veneer ripped away as she let herself fully see the cost of her choices, the price her daughter paid for her commitment to the Gren, her unwavering drive to find justice for Aren. It got her out of bed when she wanted to bury herself in dreams, to have a purpose when her life had been destroyed beyond recognition. She owed them. As she wiped her daughter’s tears, and looked, really looked at her baby girl, softly blooming into womanhood, she swore to owe them a little less. If she didn’t let some of the anger go, she’d lose this last part of Aren and the beauty that was Arianna herself.
“No, mi… Cara.” She struggled through the words, her voice catching on the cocktail of emotions churning through her body. “It’s not you. I’m the selfish one, trying to avenge your father, when you needed me. We’ll spend more time together. I promise. Tomorrow we’ll make a plan.”
Ariana snuggled into her arms. “I love you, mama.”
“I love you, beyond words and vows, Tesora. Always and forever.”
Sketch, a seventy pound Nordikan mush-dog, struggled onto the bed trying to insert
himself in the family hug. At twelve, Sketch had lost most of his agility, wheezed and farted through the night, and his once bright pink eyes hazed over with glaucoma. The puppy he had been helped Marisol survive the mining accident. He moved onto Ariana’s bed once she came into the world, and was her daughter’s constant companion. If he was a bit loud and smelly in his final years and needed extra help, he earned it. She ruffled his white fur, and Ariana opened an arm to invite him into the circle.
Marisol held Ariana until she slept, then slipped out of her daughter’s arms, patted the snoring dog, and went to her own bedroom. The festive red blanket covered with black and white mushdogs, now threadbare, draped on the back of the chair provided the only color in her cell of a room. She only kept that because it had been Ariana’s baby blanket and permanently held her unique floral scent, something that energized her when she got tired, kept her going when she could no longer keep her eyes open. She wanted no distractions, no memories here in the room she should have shared with Aren, that was now the center of her search for justice. Almost monk-like in its lack of personal effects, only a picture of Ariana, in a frame her daughter decorated herself, held audience on her grid interface. The little girl looked lost next to all buttons, keys and toggles, needed to maneuver clandestinely around the intergalactic grid.
She parked herself in the white seat, wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and attached the grid interface into the port installed at the base of her skull, hidden under her own mass of wild curls. As plug and port connected, slivers of pleasure shuddered through her system, until the boundaries of the woman and the data universe blurred into one. After checking and double checking the layers of security she devised to cover her nightly forays on the grid, she followed the data stream into the personal logs of Deba Allara, one of the few survivors of a tenement disaster on the planet of New Caledonia. One building blew, and the fire raged through eight others. It occurred during daylight hours when children were in school, thank the gods, but it took the lives of over forty adult casino workers who worked the night shift. Deba was only one of three who escaped, and the only one who kept an audio journal.
Once, she never would have entered anyone’s personal grid space. That Marisol died with Aren as did her naïve belief that the world was fair and that boundaries mattered. She never planned to snoop. But once she got used to hacking Terragov security files, technical assessments and disaster witness accounts, the jump into personal records simply flowed into the next step. It’s not as if she was using the information against these people, it’s just that intergalactic federations were too good at covering their tracks. Official data was empty data. Frankly, most personal journals were boring and revealed no useful intel. Folks either pined for love, or bitched at their boss, their neighbors, their partners for hours on end. Deba was a bitcher.
Marisol had also discovered that memories of trauma dripped out haphazardly, in blips of memory and drops of insight. So, night after night she searched for the scent—a unique blending of sulphur, pine and vanilla—that marked certain disasters, like the one that took Aren from her. The Gren was sure these weren’t accidents. That distinctive aroma marked mishaps across the federations that governed the known universe, but were associated with only six corporations. After collecting and analyzing data for twelve years, they still could not fathom why they happened nor prove sabotage.
But she would never give up until she figured it out and had a perma-steel case against Nordicorp for the Odin mine disaster. Aren and his mining team deserved justice. Ariana deserved to know why she never met her father.
Marisol wanted blood.
Draft Blurb
STAR DATE 1.1.0.9.2.3.4.5, the collapse of the Odin Mine on the Terran planet of Nordika.
On that day, Marisol Martinez lost Aren Dougherty, the love of her life. Suspecting sabotage, she never forgave and she never forgot. To gain her revenge, she clandestinely joined the Gren An Dane, the rebel coalition looking to overthrow the corrupt corporations running the Terran Alliance.
Twelve years later, a starship explodes in Nordikan space, sending escape pods full of 
cyborg soldiers to the planet’s surface. When the helmets come off, true identities are revealed. The captain of the Gold Cyborg squadron is Aren Dougherty—who has no memories of his life before becoming a cyborg.
As a skilled coder, Marisol throws her talents into figuring out how to reprogram a cyborg to retrieve memories. She will stop at nothing to bring Aren back to her.
Gold captain reports to the alliance, and he is ordered to assassinate all Gren operatives on the planet.
Here’s information on the start of the Green Rising Series
Race to Redemption Blurb
Intergalactic storm racing champion Elaina Carteret had it all – fame, wealth, men – until a horrific accident took it away. To get it back, she agrees to pose as Lainie Carter, medical transport pilot and corporate spy. Her risk-taking attitude infuriates Dr. Erik Johansen, who runs the outpost with an iron hand, a permanent scowl and the tightest bod on the planet.
Unable to forgive himself for a past tragedy, Erik works himself into an early grave. He has no patience for the insubordinate Lainie Carter, who can’t take an order, disrupts routine and flames his body to ash.
When the outpost is attached, they’re thrown together in a race across the desert to stop a deadly biogenetic weapon As a fragile trust blossoms between two damaged hearts, their pasts resurface and threaten their growing bond.
Be warned: Heat level 5, gender neutral and bi-gendered characters.
Buy Links
Evernight | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | All Romance