• The Glass Horizon
    The city of Neo-Kyoto was a forest of obsidian and light, where the rain fell in rhythmic pulses and the wind smelled of ozone and old ink. In the shadow of the Great Spire, where the corporate lords lived in floating gardens, Julian lived in the "Under-City," a labyrinth of neon alleys and steam-filled vents. He was a "Memory-Sculptor," a technician who could prune the traumas of the wealthy,...
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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 Gilded Trust
    New York, 1924. The city was a fever dream of gold and jazz, a place where the skyscrapers reached for a heaven that the people had long since forgotten. Samuel Vanderbilt sat at the apex of this dream, the master of the city's infrastructure, a man who owned the very veins through which the city's lifeblood flowed. But Samuel was a man of shadows. He lived in a penthouse of marble and glass,...
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  • The Crown of Dust
    The humid air of the Congo Basin felt like a wet blanket draped over Captain Alistair Finch's shoulders. He wiped the grime from his brass monocle, staring at the impenetrable wall of emerald green that lay before him. Behind him, his small contingent of porters and a disgraced botanist named Dr. Aristhone were hacking through the undergrowth with a desperation that bordered on madness. Finch...
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  • The Black Signal
    I. The rain had been falling on Los Angeles for three days when Mrs. Voss walked into my office. She wore a black dress that cost more than my car and a look on her face that said she had already decided I was not going to help her. "My husband is dead," she said. "The police say it was an accident. I do not." I looked at her. She was beautiful in the way that beautiful women in Los Angeles...
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  • The Last Dispatch from the Raj
    ## Act I: The Outset The heat of the Punjab in 1857 was a physical entity, a shimmering wall of gold and dust that blurred the line between the earth and the sky. Arthur, a second son of a minor English earl, stood on the veranda of the district bungalow, his white linen suit already stained with the sweat of a dying empire. He was twenty-one, a graduate of Oxford with a head full of Shelley...
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  • THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE RANGE
    The Mississippi delta in 1955 was the kind of place that remembered everything and forgave nothing. Captain Henry Ashworth drove through the swamp and oak trees, past abandoned plantations and collapsed sharecropper cabins, to a house that had once been grand and was now grand in ruin. Black Oak Manor sat at the end of a quarter-mile dirt road, surrounded by Spanish moss and memory. He had not...
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  • The Light of Collective Dawn
    Patrick O'Brien was nineteen when he found the books, and he was already tired of being tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. Brooklyn in 1923 was a city of cities — or at least it felt like that to Pat, walking home from the docks after a ten-hour shift carrying crates that weighed more than he did. The apartment on Willow Street smelled of boiled cabbage and his mother's lavender...
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  • Shadows on the Sound
    The rain in Los Angeles doesn't wash anything clean. It just makes the dirt slicker. I stood in my office on Sunset Boulevard with a cigarette burning in the ashtray and a phone call from a man I didn't trust telling me to go to an island I didn't want to visit. The Echo Island Sanitarium, located in the Santa Cruz Channel, was a government-funded facility for veterans with what they called...
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  • The Observer at Five Points
    I first met Edward Vance in a office on West 45th Street that smelled like stale coffee and old paper. He was sitting behind a desk that was so covered in blueprints I couldn't see the wood beneath them. He looked up when I entered, and the first thing I noticed about him was his hands—long-fingered, stained with ink, trembling slightly, the way a musician's hands tremble before a performance....
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