The Marigold had been drifting for six hours before anyone noticed the signal had stopped answering back. Dessa Cross noticed first, because she was the one who'd been arguing with it. She sat hunched over the comms panel in the cockpit, headset askew, repeating the same hail into the void like a woman haggling with … Continue reading The Silence Between Stars
Short Fiction
The Interdimensional Complaints Department
Dr. Wren Halvorsen had built a machine that could see into infinite alternate universes, and the only thing it had shown her all week was a version of Earth where everyone communicated exclusively through jazz flute. "Turn it off," she said to her lab assistant, Leo, who was recording everything on his phone. "Turn it … Continue reading The Interdimensional Complaints Department
The Locksmith
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
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 Grinder of Light
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
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
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
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
