A.J. Moreno
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A.J. Moreno
by
Fausto Sterling has carried the Staff of the Emerald Oakfire for two hundred years. He carries it the way you carry something that belongs to the dead. Carefully. Knowing the weight means something.
He is the last surviving Virtue. The other six are gone, dispersed somewhere across the centuries into ordinary lives, unaware of what they hold. He has spent two centuries rebuilding the organization that might find them. He has done this with full knowledge that when the Seven Sins come back, they will come back specifically for him.
What he has not told anyone is the other thing he has been protecting.
S.P.A.R.K., Book One is the story of a supernatural detective organization working a case that turns out to be a war. It is also the story of a man who has been lying to his own daughter for thirty-one years. Not out of cruelty. Out of the specific, costly calculation of a person who walked far enough into the future to see what honesty would cost.
He is out of time. She is already in the field. And the thing she is about to learn about who she is will change the outcome of the war.
A.J. Moreno maps the fault lines between longing and ruin, delivering speculative fiction that is intellectually precise and morally unforgiving.
A.J. Moreno crafts fiction that moves like a current beneath the skin — deliberate, intelligent, and restless. Blending the speculative scale of science fiction with the intimate brutality of horror and the charged intimacy of erotic storytelling, his work interrogates the moral costs of ambition, the architecture of longing, and what it means to confront the unknown. Raised in California’s North Bay, Moreno brings a meticulous approach to research and a novelist’s ear for the unsettling detail. His prose is unsparing yet elegiac: characters are drawn with clarity, scenarios are built with technical exactness, and the emotional stakes are never theatrical. A collaborator and provocateur, he seeks out writers and projects that expand the limits of genre while demanding the reader’s full attention. If his stories do one thing consistently, it is this: they force you to see what you ignored yesterday and to reckon with what you’ll fear tomorrow.
Quick Reference Companion
The definitive desk reference for medical billers, coders, patient registrars, and healthcare office professionals navigating California's complex insurance and billing landscape — fully updated for 2025–2026.
The Elir predates every empire in the known galaxy. Born from conditions identical to the ones that produced the universe itself, it fuses permanently to neural matter at birth. No surgery separates host from particle. No technology stabilizes extraction. Every attempt on record has killed the host from inside out.
The Katar exist for one reason: ensure no single host accumulates five particles. Five is the documented threshold for a Pentamear convergence. The last one left a cosmological catastrophe still drifting through deep space. The Katar have kept that threshold theoretical for centuries by eliminating Elirian hosts before the count climbs.
Earth scientists called the particle TRACE 8489. It was the 8,489th simulation in which it persisted past three seconds. They logged it as an anomaly.
It wasn't an anomaly.
It was a host selecting itself.
The Katar have read the data. They know what the particle chose. They have one operational mandate.
Earth has never been on their route before.
Every textbook chapter has a workbook chapter to match it.
The CALHLTH Pro Medical Billing and Coding Student Workbook moves from vocabulary to application through six structured sections: Key Terms Matching, Fill-in-the-Blank, Multiple Choice, Coding Exercises, Short Answer, and Case Study. Forty-eight chapters covering the complete revenue cycle, ICD-10-CM, CPT, HCPCS Level II, HIPAA, compliance, denial management, and California-specific billing rules.
Designed for students who want to do the work, not just read about it.
Companion to CALHLTH Pro Medical Billing and Coding — A Course Textbook (A.J. Moreno). calhlthpro.com
