• The Crow on the Hollywood Sign
    The woman walked into Jack Morane's office at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday in March, and he knew immediately that he was not going to like her. Not because she was dangerous -- she wasn't. Not because she was lying -- she might have been, but so was everybody. He knew he was not going to like her because she was right. And right people are always more dangerous than wrong ones. She did...
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  • The Starlight Project
    The signal came on a Tuesday in October, and Nathaniel Whitfield knew immediately that nothing would ever be the same. He was alone in the Harvard observatory, the kind of solitary vigil that astronomers loved to romanticize and anyone else would find unbearably lonely. The telescope's recording drum turned slowly, etching tiny deflections of light onto a roll of photographic paper. Nathaniel...
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  • The Rust Belt
    The factory had been closed for ten years. The sign in front said SOUDER STEEL WORKS in letters that had once been blue but were now the colour of dried blood. The windows were all broken, and weeds grew through the cracks in the concrete parking lot like the earth was trying to reclaim what the steel had taken. Ray Kowalski sat in his truck outside the gate and watched a crow pick at something...
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  • The Rising Water
    I. The water came to the Thorneland plantation on a Thursday in June, which was wrong because the river did not flood in June. The river flooded in April, when the snow melted in the Appalachians and turned the Mississippi into a brown beast that ate its banks. June was for heat and cicadas and the slow decay of things that were once grand. But the river had decided otherwise. I am Bell Thorne....
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  • THE BEAUTY OF DEATH
    The rain had been falling on London for eleven days when the order arrived. Captain Shane Holt sat in the train compartment watching fog swallow the suburbs, his fingers resting on the ring in his pocket. Elena's ring. Five years since she disappeared near Whitechapel. Five years since he had held her hand in a hospital in Dover and watched her breathe stop with the quiet dignity of a woman who...
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  • The Engineer
    The Engineer's Last Shift The numbers on the ionosphere monitor were wrong. Mike Callahan knew this the way a mechanic knows an engine is misfiring—by sound, by feel, by twenty-two years of knowing exactly what every machine in the Brooklyn coal plant was supposed to do. The monitor sat in the corner of the control room, a World War II-era device that had been installed to track atmospheric...
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  • The Weight of a Pebble
    (Act I: The Grey Shift) Sam lived in the town of Oakhaven, where the only thing more consistent than the rain was the sound of the factory whistle. For twenty years, he had worked in the stamping plant, his life a loop of grey concrete and metallic noise. He was a man of habits: the same coffee, the same route to work, the same silence at dinner. He didn't want power; he just wanted the noise...
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  • The Gilded Cage of Reason
    The city of Aethelgard was a monument to the Enlightenment, a place where reason was the only currency and logic the only law. In Aethelgard, the "Academy of Pure Thought" governed every aspect of existence, from the architecture of the streets to the frequency of the citizens' heartbeats. To feel was to be inefficient; to love was to be irrational. Julian was the Academy's most celebrated...
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  • The Last Echo of the Empire
    ## Act I: The Outset The city of Aethelgard was a spire of ivory and gold, the last bastion of the Solar Empire. For a thousand years, it had been the center of the known world, a place of unmatched art, science, and luxury. But the gold was peeling, and the ivory was cracking. The empire was not falling to an enemy from without, but to a rot from within. The nobility spent their days in a haze...
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  • The Rust Belt
    ACT I: THE LOSS Mike Kowalski lost his job on a Thursday. It was a small thing, in the way that the end of the world often is: a meeting in a conference room that smelled like stale coffee and resignation, a manager named David who spoke in words like "synergy" and "right-sizing" and "strategic realignment," and then Mike was handed an envelope with two weeks' pay and told to clear out his...
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