The bells of the Badia were ringing the hour when Vittorio Calandra ground his three hundredth disc of glass and finally understood that he had failed. He set the lap down on the bench, rubbed the grit from between his fingers, and held the lens to the window. Through it, the rooftops of Florence swam … Continue reading The Grinder of Light
Something I Made Up
The Watch That Wouldn’t Keep Time
The pocket watch sat at the bottom of a shoebox marked "ESTATE - MISC," and Nora Quill almost didn't notice it. She'd spent three hours sorting through the contents of a storage unit her great-aunt had left behind, mostly old letters and a moth-eaten quilt, when her fingers brushed cold metal beneath a layer of … Continue reading The Watch That Wouldn’t Keep Time
The Last Version of You
Margaret had been awake for thirty-one hours when they finally told her it was time. She sat in the waiting room of the Synapse Institute with a cup of terrible coffee going cold in her hands, watching the second hand on the wall clock make its slow, indifferent circuits. Around her, the room hummed with … Continue reading The Last Version of You
Could Back to the Future’s Time Travel Actually Work?
Everyone knows the rules by now, even people who haven't watched the trilogy in years. You need a flux capacitor. You need 1.21 gigawatts of power. And you need to hit exactly 88 miles per hour at the moment it all comes together. Say those numbers out loud to almost anyone and they'll nod, maybe … Continue reading Could Back to the Future’s Time Travel Actually Work?
Stone Watch
The rain came down in cold, slanted sheets the night Mara Osei discovered the city's oldest secret. She was eleven, small for her age, and had no business being out after midnight. But her cat, Ptolemy, a patchy orange stray she'd rescued from behind the bodega on Alcott Street, had slipped through a torn window … Continue reading Stone Watch
The Question I Couldn’t Stop Asking (And the Book It Became)
I was five years old the first time I saw Back to the Future, sitting in the back of my family's car at a drive-in theater. I didn't understand half of what was happening on screen. I definitely didn't understand the science, or the lack of it, behind a souped-up DeLorean hitting 88 miles per … Continue reading The Question I Couldn’t Stop Asking (And the Book It Became)
The Assigned
The letter arrived, as it always did, on the morning of a child's eighteenth birthday... printed on government-issue cream cardstock, sealed with the blue wax emblem of the Bureau of Productive Placement, and slid under the front door at precisely 6:00 a.m. by a courier who never knocked and was never seen. Nora Calloway found … Continue reading The Assigned
The Crown Remains
The broadsheet had been nailed to the post office door since Tuesday, but Elias Holt didn't stop to read it until Thursday morning, when the smell of old blood had finally faded enough from the square that he could stand to linger. By Order of His Majesty's Pacification Commission. All persons who bore arms against … Continue reading The Crown Remains
The Space Between Us
The thing about small towns is that everyone knows your name — and your family's name, and your grandfather's grudges, and the particular shade of bitterness your people have carried for three generations. Nora Callahan had grown up knowing two things as absolute truth: that the Callahans made the best bourbon peach jam in Harrow … Continue reading The Space Between Us
The Weight of Silver
The trail went cold three miles outside of Ashby, and Lewis Hale was bleeding again. He pressed two fingers against the gash on his forearm — a hunting knife, close call, closer than he'd had in years — and kept moving through the pine forest at a pace that would have broken a younger man. … Continue reading The Weight of Silver
The Confusing Middle 