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Her Suffering, Pretty and Private

There were two out-of-towners gawking at Adalène’s window when she sat down alone at the table in her shop. She’d had a pair of seamstresses to work for her, once upon a time, to do all the fussier piecing and hand-sewing. Sacred seas, she’d had customers once, too. A hundred years’ sleep had changed those […]

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Sea Wolf

1. The Voru Throughout the four years I had photographed the Voru shapeshifter, Cuzwast, I never knew that he had another family across the galaxy or how they got word of his death. But they came looking for answers while I, on the other hand, had been looking for a way out of the rain. […]

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Once Measured, Twice Cut

“They are so handsome, these soldiers, it’s hard to keep away from them.” “Well, see that you take precautions next time,” George Morris washed his hands as his patient buttoned up their shirt. “You don’t need a lecture on sexual health. At your age, no less!”       “Perhaps I might need a remedial course. The […]

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Fell Our Selves

Content warning: death and suicide ideation Here Dustin “And this is the control room!” Dustin stifled a yawn. His new employer bounced on her toes, sprightly for a predawn start. Her coily hair bounced along with her. Akeza, her name was. “Do you like it?” she asked. “Looks like it’s in functioning order.” “Killjoy.” The […]

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Old Seeds

When the ship restarts my newly thawed brain, the first thing I do is panic. I open my eyes and see the star-spattered void, and I pinwheel and tumble, trying to swim in microgravity like an idiot. I drift out of the open lid of the stasis bed, dizzy and nauseated. I finally manage to […]

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Patterns in Stone and Stars

Szkazy forced her attention back to the candle, the flame weak and flickering in the breeze from the ship’s air duct. Somewhere in the computer bowels, the clock was ticking away her allotted minutes for kindling an open flame. She’d had the dispensation renewed last month—and yet it still felt as if the ship itself […]

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Little Gardens Everywhere

The wind-chimes of my heart prelude Jerry’s arrival. “There’s two of you,” the man says over the slinking bassline. City people don’t believe in fairytales, but they like stating the obvious as long as they can make a pick-up line out of it. Jerry digs her chin into my glitter-coated shoulder. Her auburn hair has […]

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Begging the Moon

I’m pulling the wok off my bike and setting it on the butane when I spot Emilio standing in the shadows like a vulture. He’s still wearing that trench coat, all waxy on the bottom from years of wading through Diyu’s deepest calles. Emilio is the reaper he looks like, tall and gaunt, neuros creeping […]

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A Conspiracy of Cartographers

Whatever path you seek, the map will show you. The cartographers mixed their ink with the light of the stars and the infinite possibilities to which the heavens have borne witness. Their quills have drawn every possible route a life might take. The parchment is blank now, but you need only state your desire, and […]

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Elsewhere, Elsewhen

In the city at the heart of time, with its spires of lapis and its foundations of coiled brass, where death is a whispered legend and the sun itself stands motionless in the sky, the Grand Harvester saunters to her execution. The air is finely scented with the sharp bloom of ice florets at dawn […]

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