Ashbourne, Georgia doesn’t forget. It just buries things deeper.
Two years after the Route 9 disaster tore the lid off Ashbourne Research & Defense and put a name, unofficial, unconfirmed, unforgettable, into the mouths of every reporter and beat cop in the city, Myra Jones is still running her PI office on Decatur Avenue. Dark Strike is still the shape people see in the rain when something in this city goes wrong. And Ashbourne is still exactly what it’s always been: a working city with a rotten foundation, and a woman standing on top of it who refuses to let it swallow anyone else.
Broken Ground picks up the thread two years later, and pulls.
RETURNING CHARACTERS
Myra Jones / Dark Strike: Two years removed from the accident that rewrote her biology, Myra isn’t fighting the compound anymore; she’s fluent in it. The violet lines under her skin, the high-contrast vision, the three-hundred-pound armored form that used to terrify her in her mother’s living room, are simply her baseline now. She still runs her cases the way she always has: methodically, patiently, like an investigator first and a vigilante second. That discipline is about to be tested by an opponent who doesn’t play by the rules of a normal fight, or a normal city.
Clay Pritchard, Myra’s tech anchor and closest ally, hasn’t slowed down. He’s still the one cross-referencing shell corporations at two in the morning, still the voice in her ear when a job goes sideways, still the only person who can talk to her like a partner instead of a headline. In Broken Ground, his research is the difference between chasing a rumor and naming a name.
Sharon Jones: Myra’s mother remains her anchor to the world she almost lost, the one person who watches what her daughter has become without flinching, and asks the questions no one else will.
Renata Cross: The Independent Ledger journalist who helped break Project Phoenix to the public is back, still building the paper trail that keeps Ashbourne’s institutions honest, or as honest as this city gets.
Chief Jerry Milton, Ashbourne PD’s top cop, is navigating a harder game this time: political pressure from a mayor who wants a headline, and an investigation he can’t officially acknowledge is running in parallel to his own.
Willie Payton, the corridor’s information broker, returns with his usual currency, leverage. Payton doesn’t do anything for free, but when Ashbourne’s underground economy gets disrupted by outside money, his interests and Myra’s start pointing the same direction.
Dr. Xavier Walton: officially defanged, stripped of his ARD clearance, sitting under administrative leave in a quiet house in Decatur. Unofficially, the question at the center of Broken Ground is exactly how far “officially” goes.
NEW TO THE STORY
Vincenzo Stalls: A freight and logistics operator running a clean-looking company out of Boston, until his money starts showing up in places a legitimate freight company has no business being. Stalls didn’t come to Ashbourne to run trucks.
Tommy Richards Stalls’s operational architect, the man who keeps the machine running, the routes clean, and the ledgers exactly as untraceable as they need to be. Richards is the kind of careful that makes him dangerous, and the kind of careful that eventually becomes a liability to the man he works for.
Michael Hughes: a name that means nothing on paper, which is exactly the point. Hughes spent seven years erased from every public record in New England before resurfacing in Ashbourne as something the city has never had to face before: a second host. Not an accident of exposure like Myra was, but a weapon someone built on purpose. Where Myra’s compound gave her speed and precision, what runs through Hughes’s veins gives him something else entirely: mass, and the kind of durability that doesn’t care how hard you hit it.
THE STORY
It starts with a warehouse that shouldn’t be interesting.
A break-in on Freight Line Road, the kind of case that should close in a day. Except the physical evidence doesn’t add up to any burglar Myra’s ever tracked: a scorched, stone-hard residue spread across the concrete floor, a steel wall bent inward by a force with no visible point of impact, and a handprint driven six feet up a cinder-block wall with enough pressure to crush the aggregate underneath.
It isn’t damage. It’s a signature.
The trail leads Myra and Clay out of Ashbourne’s usual criminal ecosystem and into something colder: a freight company with a spotless Boston pedigree, a shell corporation with a name one letter removed from a man everyone thought was finished, and evidence that whoever built this operation didn’t just study what happened to Myra on Route 9. They engineered it.
Somebody in Ashbourne’s underground wanted a weapon. Now they have one, and it’s walking the same streets Myra swore to protect.
As Myra and Clay build the case, they’ll need every ally the last two years have earned her: Milton’s badge, Cross’s press, Payton’s leverage, and her mother’s steady hand, because the deeper the investigation goes, the clearer it becomes that this isn’t a corporate cleanup job like Project Phoenix was. It’s a business model. And business is expanding.
Broken Ground is a story about what happens when the thing that made Myra Jones unique stops being unique, and what she’s willing to do to make sure it never happens to this city again.
READ IT FIRST
Dark Strike: Broken Ground launches exclusively on the Strike 7 Network Patreon before it ever reaches free platforms like Royal Road.
For $5 a month, our one and only Patreon tier gets you:
- Early access to every new chapter of Broken Ground, before anyone else sees it
- A direct line to the world of Ashbourne as it expands
- The satisfaction of knowing you backed this story from the ground up
Free readers will get Broken Ground eventually. Patreon readers get it first.
[Join the Strike 7 Network Patreon — $5/month — Become an Early Bird Reader]
The compound made her something new two years ago. Ashbourne is about to find out it can happen twice, and you can be there when it breaks.
