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
Flash Fiction
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
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 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
What the Dark Remembers
The dig site smelled like old rain and copper. Christina Reyes had been told to expect that — the mineral tang of deep earth, the particular damp of soil that hadn't seen sunlight in centuries. What Professor Aldrich's textbooks had not prepared her for was the silence. Not the comfortable silence of a library or … Continue reading What the Dark Remembers
The Weight of the Eagle
The aqueduct hummed. Marcus Varro had never noticed it before — not in fifteen years of service, not through three postings across the empire. But standing here in the pre-dawn stillness of the Virginian hills, listening to the ancient water channels feeding the sprawling city of Nova Londinium below, he noticed it now. A low, … Continue reading The Weight of the Eagle
The Confusing Middle 