The Running of the Tyrannosaurs

"Wielding elegant prose and tightly-focused characters, Stant Litore cuts deep into the science-fiction realm of bio-engineered dinosaurs and high-tech bread and circuses with a physically enhanced female gladiator whose personal tragedy is as powerful as her victories in the arena. Her story echoes in the heart long after it is told." - Richard Ellis Preston, Jr., author of Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders
On a far future space station, once each year, nano-engineered young women run genetically engineered tyrannosaurs in a race as brutal and bloody as any witnessed in the Roman Circus 3,000 years before.
Egret thinks she is ready for this day. She has been brainwashed for it, trained for it, shaped and reshaped into a sacrificial model of beauty for the entertainment of millions. Her world is one of strict regimen and fierce competition, one in which others can only be competitors or worshippers, never friends, where lack of perfection is punished by burial beneath the red sands and the thundering feet of tyrannosaurs.
But Egret can't imagine how this day might change her. How the scream of a tyrannosaur and the cries of the other sacrifices running beside her might break open the steel surface of her world.
It is not a day you will forget.
"Like all of Stant Litore's first-in-series stories, The Running of the Tyrannosaurs hints at a vast and unique world roiling behind the setting of the story itself, which nevertheless stands alone as a complete, wholly satisfying, and blisteringly original tale. I finished it with same sense of vertiginous anticipation that accompanied my first reading of Death Has Come Up Into Our Windows (The Zombie Bible) and Ansible 15715." - Jason Kirk, author of Reverb and The Other Whites in South Africa