Our late fee is twenty-five cents per day or a can of non-perishable food during the summer food drive. By the time the boy finally slid The Runaway Prince into the return slot, he owed $4.75. I didn’t have to swipe his card to know; any good librarian (of the second kind) ought to be able to tell you the exact dollar amount of a patron’s bill just by the angle of their shoulders.
Read MoreA Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies
The last of the fairies worked in a charnel house, taking apart the beasts that came dead under her hands. In her youth, she had been the last and least of three; now she was the only living one, and even fairies must earn their keep.
Read MoreOrigin Story
Be careful with trusting navigation systems. Sometimes they lie. They say there is a place where world ships go when they know the end is close.
Read MoreThe Ghost Stories We Tell Around Photon FiresJosie stared hard at the woman standing just outside the connecting hose’s exit. The expandable tubing she walked through was well-insulated, but for most of its length dimmer even than her ship had been. Still, though the light bleeding in from the exit to Mizar 5’s concourse dazzled Josie’s eyes, this woman’s face looked unexpectedly familiar. Not the wig, though.
Read MoreThe Best Friend We Never HadThe night she came back, the Cut bled dimensions off onto the City … like every other night.
Read MoreSymphony to a city under the stars
When Zhang Xuan took illegal control of the long-range corvette, Whisper, sirens rang out, and the whole of Luna City seemed to go mad. Every spaceport locked down and sealed. Port Authority police went on the alert, assault rifles at the ready, rocket-launchers covering every conceivable escape route.
Read MoreThe Heaven-Moving WayThere was a peculiar kind of sadism, or was it masochism, involved in downlowing into a limbsuit and going out among the slowfolk.
Read MoreA Night Out at a Nice PlaceWitness the Meshing. What a crowd has gathered. Reappropriated gallows creak beneath the weight of eight brown bodies hanging. Their wrists are shackled with electric zip ties.
Read MoreTo Blight a Fig Tree Before It Bears FruitRhett Walker had always been a creature of unsettled dreams. When he woke on one particular night, somewhere in the dusty nowhere of west Durango, he couldn’t quite remember what had caused him to bolt upright, breathing heavy and screaming his throat raw, his hand already on his gun.
Read MoreAsylum of Cuckoos