• The Other Side of the Mirror
    The first session with Client X began on a Monday in March, which is to say it began on a day that was indistinguishable from every other day in my practice. I am Arthur Payne. I am forty-five years old. I am a psychologist with a private practice on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I specialize in trauma and post-traumatic stress. I have been doing this work for eighteen years. I am good at...
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  • The Rust Belt
    The machine in the back of the shop had been broken for three weeks. It was a used press brake, bought from a man in Toledo who claimed it had been sitting in a warehouse since 1978 and had never been used. Danny knew better. He had seen the rust on the hydraulic lines. He had seen the way the control panel flickered like a dying heartbeat. But he had bought it anyway, because the monthly...
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  • The Berlin Protocol
    ## Act I: The Outset Berlin in 1961 was a city of concrete and paranoia, a place where the wind carried the scent of ozone and betrayal. Leo lived in a small apartment in the Wedding district, his walls covered in maps and encrypted telegrams. He was a "Ghost"—a double agent who had spent five years playing the Soviets and the Americans against each other. He was a master of the lapped-over...
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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 Architect of Memory
    (Biographical Fiction Variation) The archives of the Vatican are a labyrinth of silence and dust, where the history of the world is stored in vellum and ink. Father Thomas Moreland had spent forty years in these depths, a scholar of the forgotten, a man who believed that the truth was not found in the grand narratives of the Church, but in the margins of the manuscripts. Thomas was a man of...
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  • The Bastard's Cathedral
    (Act I: The Ash and the Iron) The year was 1422, and the valley of Oakhaven was a graveyard of burnt villages and broken crosses. Cedric, the bastard son of a disgraced Earl, returned to his ancestral lands not with a plea for forgiveness, but with a sword of cold iron. He had spent ten years in the mercenary camps of the East, learning that the only true law was the edge of a blade and the...
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  • The Signal Operator
    **Queens, New York** The coffee machine in the break room was broken again. I kicked it once—hard, but not hard enough to damage it, just hard enough to express my opinion—and it worked for maybe ten more minutes before giving up entirely. That was fine. I didn't really want coffee. I wanted to go home and sleep for a week. It was 6:47 AM on a Tuesday in March 2015. I was working the night...
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  • The Black Signal
    The signal came through at 2:17 AM on a Thursday, and Jack Morane was drunk. He worked the graveyard shift at KLA-7, a small radio station in downtown Los Angeles that broadcast old standards and used car commercials between midnight and six. Jack's job was simple: make sure the equipment didn't catch fire, change the records when the automated system glitched, and keep his eyes open well...
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  • The Man Who Watched
    I am Nick Delaney and I write about things nobody reads for a website called The Brooklyn Beat that gets four hundred visitors a month and pays me in exposure. I am thirty-four years old and I have been thirty-four for six years, which is the New York version of being stuck. The story about Marcus Rivera was supposed to be my breakthrough. A rising star from the Bronx, the article was going to...
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  • The House of Rotting Gold
    (Act I: The Mossy Gates) The estate of Blackwood Manor sat in the humid heart of the Mississippi Delta, a decaying monument to a glory that had died a century ago. Silas returned to the manor not as a son, but as a scavenger. The house was a labyrinth of peeling wallpaper and weeping willow trees, where the air tasted of salt and old secrets. He had come to reclaim the family's lost prestige,...
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