• The Chicago Cipher
    The rain in Chicago didn't wash anything away; it just moved the filth from one street to another. I sat in a booth at a greasy spoon, watching the reflection of the neon 'EAT' sign in my coffee. My name is Jax. At least, that's the name on the birth certificate of the kid I'm currently inhabiting. In my previous life, I was a ghost for a government that didn't exist, a man who could disappear...
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  • Act I: The House
    The house sat on a hill in Mississippi that used to be a river delta and then a cotton field and then a graveyard and then a house, and the hill had always been a river delta and would always be a river delta no matter what anyone built on top of it. Elias Thibodeaux inherited the house from his great-great-grandfather, who had inherited it from a man named Baptiste who had come to Louisiana...
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  • The Rust in the Walls
    Tom Star woke up at six in the morning the way he always did, which was before the alarm because his body had forgotten how to sleep through the night. He was forty-two and he lived in a apartment above a laundromat in Oakhaven, Ohio, a town that used to make things and now mostly made excuses. He got up, made coffee, drank it standing at the window looking at the strip mall across the street....
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  • ACT I
    Dr. Julian Frost found his own biography in a Taiping archival document, written in 1854—twenty years before he was born. The discovery happened on a Tuesday, in the imperial archives of Tianjing, where Julian had spent the last three months cataloging rebel propaganda and religious texts for his forthcoming Oxford publication. He was thirty-two, a man of meticulous habits and rational...
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  • The Swamp Saint
    The swamp did not give up its secrets easily. It held them the way a mother holds a child—close, protective, with a fierce intelligence that refused to be disturbed. Eulalia DuPre had been told the swamp would try to kill her. Her cousin Jean-Luc had said so in a letter, written in a hand that grew increasingly shaky with each page. "The bayou is beautiful," he had written, "but it is beautiful...
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  • Act I: The Iron Womb
    The cabin sat inside the great beast's mouth like a tooth in a jaw. Captain Edmund Harrington pressed his face to the small porthole and watched the blue water ripple through the whale's throat. The walls around him pulsed with a slow, wet rhythm. Every few seconds, the cabin shifted three inches to starboard, then settled. They were riding inside a living thing four hundred feet long, and the...
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  • The Bright Girl from Nowhere
    The Bright Girl from Nowhere The coffee at Les Deux Magots was terrible, and Daisy Calloway had been drinking it for four hours. She sat at the corner table with her notebook open, her pen moving across the page in a continuous stream. She'd been writing since dawn—since before the sun had come up over the Seine, since before the baker on the corner had lit his oven, since before Paris had...
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  • The Road Not Taken
    Jack Morrison ran a bar in a town called End of the Road. The town had thirty people. One gas station. A convenience store next to it. A church. A post office. Then desert. Endless desert. Jack's day started at six. Black coffee. Fix the truck. Open the bar. The bar had no name. A sign on the door said Open or Closed. People came to drink. Most days, nobody came. Jack sat behind the counter and...
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  • ACT I
    The Beauregard plantation looked like a dying animal: magnificent once, now skeletal, its ribs of white columns protruding through peeling paint like bone through rotting flesh. Elias Thorne stood at the gate and felt something he hadn't felt since Boston, something that was almost sympathy. He had come south as a Union intelligence officer, armed with maps and coded messages and a conviction...
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  • Act I: The Phone Call
    The phone rang at 11:43 PM on a Thursday. Eleanor Lin picked it up because it was the only thing in the house she could do without thinking about. "It's me," the voice said. She knew his voice. She had known his voice for twelve years, since the day he proposed to her in a physics department office while explaining quantum tunneling to a group of graduate students who were pretending not to...
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