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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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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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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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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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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Chapter One I drove into Deepcalm, the single small town on the edge of Lake Caill, peering through veils of rain for my hotel. Then my tires left the ground and the world fell away. It was rainy. I had been driving too fast and with no thought for the rain on the road. I […]

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The bureaucratic white motorcar idled like cold prey amid a jungle of cargo containers on the shipping pier. Mythili warmed herself thinking of the extra money she was making moonlighting as her boss’ chauffeur. The brick came in through the back window. Mythili buckled forward, slamming her head against the car horn. She slid down […]

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To: Her prestige Navaneth Anassa, High Imperatrix & First Keeper of the Institute of Erudition [9th Ring, Inner Order] Your scholarly eminence, Even now this unworthy hand trembles with excitement at your impending arrival to the Telperi flower’s research site. Upon hearing the High Imperatrix herself had accepted my invitation to witness the flora’s deadly […]

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