• The Ghost Physician
    Blackwater sat on the Mississippi like a bruise on skin. Dr. Silas Beauregard noticed this on his first day. The town was beautiful in the way that only decaying things can be beautiful—magnolia trees leaning over porches that had sagged beneath the weight of a century, a river that moved with the slow indifference of something that has seen empires rise and fall and does not care about...
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  • The Silence Between Raindrops
    The Silence Between Raindrops The clinic door was the kind of automatic door that didn't work, so Vivian pushed it open with her shoulder and stepped into a waiting room that smelled of iodine and bad decisions. It was three in the morning, which in Los Angeles meant it was either too late for decent things or too early for terrible ones. This clinic occupied the grey zone between. There was...
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  • The Weight of the Key
    Aurelius was the last of the Key-Bearers, a solitary figure wandering the Floating Archipelago of Aethelgard. In a universe where the stars were drifting apart and the islands of reality were crumbling into the abyss, he held the only tool that could stop the end: the Dimensional Key. His mission was a cosmic pilgrimage. To stabilize the Archipelago, Aurelius had to travel to the farthest...
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  • The Shadow You Left
    The rain in Los Angeles doesn't wash anything clean. It just makes the dirt wetter, which is to say it makes it more honest. I was at my desk, typing the last line of a letter I didn't want to send, when the door opened. The bell above it made a sound like someone clearing their throat—nervous, apologetic, like it knew it was interrupting something important. He stood in the doorway with water...
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  • The Pattern She Saw
    Mark Sullivan sat in his apartment at three in the morning, surrounded by printouts and sticky notes and empty coffee cups, staring at a spreadsheet that had become the only thing in his life that made sense. He was twenty-nine, a doctoral student in statistics at Boston University, and he had been working on his dissertation for eleven months — a predictive model of social mobility patterns in...
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  • The Corvus Inheritance
    The fog that rolled off the Irwell River into Manchester did not behave like ordinary weather. It descended upon the city like a living thing, swallowing the smokestacks and mill chimneys until the sky and the earth seemed to collapse into one another. I stood at the mouth of the abandoned Corvus mine on the edge of Salford and watched it disappear into the dark passage ahead. I was twenty-two...
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  • The Open Prison
    The town of Oakhaven was a place where the clocks always seemed to tick in unison, and the church spire dominated the horizon like a watchful finger. Caleb had spent his entire youth within the walls of "The Sanctuary," a strict religious commune that preached the purity of isolation. For eighteen years, his world was a cycle of prayer, manual labor, and the constant, suffocating presence of...
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  • The Warden's Log
    Log Entry 402. Subject: Patient 402. Observation: Day 2,190. The subject remains in a state of apparent catatonia. He spends hours staring at the north wall of his cell, his fingers tracing patterns in the concrete. To the untrained eye, he is a broken shell, a waste of state resources. But I have watched him for six years, and I know that the stillness is a lie. Patient 402 is not staring at a...
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  • The Ghosts of Mons
    ACT I: THE THRESHOLD The fog did not behave. That was Corporal Arthur Blackwood's first thought as he crawled through the mud of a Belgian field that his map insisted did not exist. The Second Battle of Mons had begun three days ago, and the British Expeditionary Force was falling back in an ordered retreat that felt very much like a rout. Arthur's 1st Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers had been...
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  • The Infinite Passage
    ## Act I The ticket was warm when Tommy found it. Not metaphorically warm—actually warm, like something that had been sitting in sunlight, though the bottle it came in had been lying in a puddle on the Manhattan docks for as long as anyone could remember. He pulled it from the water with a hook and a curse, and the paper inside had no return address, no destination, just three words printed in...
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