Renata Cole had watched four hundred hours of stolen memory, and none of it belonged to her. That was the job. As lead investigator for Halcyon Dynamics' Continuity Division, she spent her days inside other people's heads, sifting the backed-up minds of executives who'd paid a fortune to have their memories archived against death, dementia, … Continue reading The Locksmith
Original Fiction
The Believer
The first time I heard the name Mr. Pockets, I was folding laundry and only half listening. "He doesn't like it when you fold his shirt like that," my daughter said. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor of her room, arranging a tea party for exactly one visible guest. "He likes it folded in … Continue reading The Believer
The Ledger Will Burn
Mara Okafor had eleven minutes before her Provision score reset, and she was going to spend every one of them somewhere she wasn't supposed to be. The maintenance shaft beneath Sector 12 smelled like ozone and old rain. She dropped the last three feet onto the access grate, boots silent on the metal, and checked … Continue reading The Ledger Will Burn
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
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
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
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
