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
Short Fiction
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
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 Weight of Ash
The summons came at the third bell of the night cycle, when the Celestine Throne's corridors were empty and the great ship hummed to itself in the dark between stars. Maren Solís had been awake anyway. She sat at her desk in the cramped antechamber adjoining the Chancellor's private quarters, pretending to review trade manifests … Continue reading The Weight of Ash
The Most Dangerous Substitute
Gary Pullman had spent seventeen years teaching seventh-grade history, which meant he had developed an almost supernatural ability to look completely unbothered by chaos. This skill, it turned out, would become his greatest liability. He was in Lisbon for a reason that could not have been less glamorous: the International Symposium on Middle School Curriculum … Continue reading The Most Dangerous Substitute
The Passenger
The first sign was my coffee cup. I remember it clearly because I had been thinking about nothing in particular — the weather, maybe, or whether I'd remembered to pay the electric bill — when my hand simply set the mug down on the edge of the counter. Not dropped it. Set it. Deliberately, almost … Continue reading The Passenger
The Confusing Middle 