You smile as William rips the Sold sign out from the too-long grass of your new home. Your smile falters, but he does not see. William runs inside, shouting for you to join him, to come meet your son, but instead you stand out in that too-long grass and survey the estate. Every line is…
Movies always get this part wrong. In real hospitals, nothing beeps. Beeping means something bad is happening; your body is failing at some integral task and needs help before it collapses into chaos. But in the ICU med bay of the Starbound, the second largest vessel this side of the Rift and the crown of…
Moll broke the news to her husband in the neurology visitors lounge on the fifth floor. “He’s rallied,” she said. “Rallied?” “He’s going to pull through, George.” “Thank god,” he said. The cherrywood casket, he thought, and the catering. And we’ll have to do something about the eidolon. George left his wife at the hospital…
The bell chimed as the front door swung open. My head snapped up from my crossword to find a man about my age with the most striking face and killer jawline. Fuck, that’s a shame. He wore a bomber jacket, jeans with a distressed knee, and black Chucks. From what I could tell, he bore…
The Grove of Knowledge benefitted from an accord with the fungi underground. The fungi spread far and wide, with eyes and ears in every corner of the realm, allowing them to provide the trees with all manner of news. “There’s a pirate queen docked in the castle’s main harbor.” “Lady Greyton has been missing for…
I did not invite the Tongue Takers to dinner, but three extra chairs have found their way to my kitchen table. They returned early this morning. News of their arrival oozed through town like a pox, spreading across the marketplace in a wave of moaning and wailing. The cleverest of us had fled inside, locked…
I craft my face each morning, coaxing the bees into the perfect alignment. Or, most mornings, into the good-enough alignment. Friendly takes extra effort, and the bees aren’t having it this morning. I settle for less and head to work. The bees, once aligned, give a semblance of human skin, and they fill out my…
Emma understands that the world might be ending. Wormholes. Soft spots. A parallel universe that’s starting to leak through a hundred different holes in a hundred different cities. One of which happens to be just outside her house, right next to the mailbox, at the end of the driveway. How much longer do we…
“I am not a necromancer,” I repeat, blood dripping off my chin with patters of splat splat splat onto the reports spilling across the interrogation table. “I’m a doctor. Just a doctor.” “Mm,” the interrogator purrs. Red flecks from the events of the past half hour speckle the words on her badge: Necrohunter Tess Belmont,…
There is a robot on Mars. This is a problem. It was put up/down there, initially, by itself, just a tangle of cement-printer nozzles on a cluster of all-terrain wheels, a slapped on sticker with the designation “RVR-1,” and pre-programmed instructions to extrude an entire village worth of habitat domes. And so it did, sending…
