He slowed for a feathered corpse in the middle of the road. Up above, the local troop of macaques shrieked at a flock of gene-crafted micro-raptors. He rounded the blind curve and jerked the steering wheel back to avoid a washout from last night’s thunderstorm. The truck bounced across broken asphalt, and the steering wheel twisted out of his hands. From the corner of his eye, he saw a man emerging from the woods. He jammed the brakes and his truck left the road, plowing to a stop into the soft red dirt undercut from the crumbling asphalt.
Read MoreWar DogThe old man stared out the window at the sky streaked with burnt oranges and sizzling yellows. A few white stars winked. Magentas hung suspended in the mist. Sherbet, he thought. I bet the dawn tastes like rainbow sherbet. If the old man had a spoon big enough, he would have scooped it all.
Read MoreThe Old Man and the PhoenixTerasadh arrived in the world with a force so abrupt that the resin womb holding her split in two, cracking as she took her first breath and cried out from the shock of being alive.
Read MoreThe Prince Who Gave Up Her Empire
He must have fallen asleep for when he knew next, the old man was standing over him, silently. Easily. Not as one who had crossed the waste from end to end. As surely he had. The sun would dip soon. As would he. And it would all be over. Living. This game they played, his annu had called it.
Read MoreThe Warrior Boy Who Would Not SufferAndrius Kavalauskas, the last magician of Lithuania, closed the door and rested his head against the wood as the nurse’s footsteps faded away. He smelled cabbage and pork cooking from the apartment across the hallway and knew that in a few hours he would find a plate of food sitting by his door. Daina was a good neighbor, a good friend.
Read MorePaskutinis Iliuzija (The Last Illusion)She scrabbled in the dirt, sifting through dust piles, raising turrets and smashing castles. Her hands were coated with grime, the mud dark in the lines of her palms. Pushing her skirt up around her thighs, she examined her socks, gray with grit. She crouched down closer to the earth, and pressed both hands, fingers spread out, into the impressionable ground.
Read MoreI Remember Your FaceYou want to fall.
You want to fall up, sideways, diagonal — towards the sun, or the moons, or the asteroid field. Out here in the vast pin-pricked black, it all feels like falling down.
Read MoreFall to Her
My brother shaped me, built me into the perfect bodyguard — skilled in lies and unable to lie to him; deadly in the arts of poison and steel; loyal only to him; unremarkable in looks but my body trained until I had exacting control over every muscle, every breath. I had no title and no name. My brother called me She.
Read MoreThe Gentleman of ChaosSo Beatrice sat up and patted her head. Pigtails still held, thank the Good Goddess Durga, as Dad used to say…although Dad hadn’t believed in any pantheon predating Darwin, had gone gravy to the slaprash an atheist and a scientist and taking in vain the names of all fiend-eating ladygods sharing cross references in the ‘cyclopedia.
Read MoreThe Big Bah-Ha