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  • The Southern Contract
    The Southern Contract Act I The barn was falling apart, which was appropriate because everything in the South was falling apart. Clara Beaumont sat on a stack of feed sacks and watched the last of the rain soak through the roof, and waited for the man who had found her to decide what to do with a Union officer's daughter who had nowhere to go. Cassian Thorne was everything the South had been...
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  • Neon Shadows
    Los Angeles was a city of electric lies. Under the relentless glare of the neon signs, the truth was something that only existed in the shadows, and in the shadows, everything had a price. Victor Thorne had spent forty years building a kingdom of silence. As a retired titan of the city's underground trade, he knew where every body was buried and which judges were on his payroll. He lived in a...
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  • The Keeper of Lost Souls
    The fog that night was the colour of bruised flesh, thick enough to swallow a man whole. I pulled my coat tighter and walked through the narrow alleys of Whitechapel, the cobblestones slick with rain and something darker. Seven years inside Newgate had taught me to read a city the way other men read books. Every shadow had meaning. Every sound told a story. The letter that had brought me to...
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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 Unlikely Immune
    The grocery store owner died on a Monday. No one knew why. The doctor said heart attack. The coroner agreed. The store was closed on Tuesday. The shelves were empty by Wednesday. Bill Henderson heard about it at the bar. He drank a beer. He drank another. He went home. Another one died on Thursday. An old woman on Elm Street. She had been sick for months. Cancer, they said. But when she died,...
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  • The First Migratory Bird
    Dr. Julian Ashford's hands did not shake. They had stopped shaking three years ago, in a field hospital outside Verdun, when the morphine ran out and he had to operate on a boy of nineteen with a shell fragment in his abdomen and a mother's voice echoing in his head in a language his mother didn't even speak. His hands were steady now. Surgeon's hands. Precise. Scarred. The kind of hands that...
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  • The Echoes of the Bight
    (Nigerian Igbo Variation) The village of Umuofia was a place of red earth and ancient whispers, where the spirits of the ancestors resided in the rustle of the iroko trees. Okonkwo was a man of iron and silence, a warrior whose reputation was built on the strength of his arm and the rigidity of his adherence to the clan's laws. He believed that the only way to survive in a world of chaos was to...
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  • The Water Line
    I. The water was at my knees when I realized I was alone. That was the first thing. Not the storm, not the flood, not the fact that Manhattan was drowning. The first thing was the silence. No radio. No phone. No voice on the other end of anything. Just the sound of water moving through concrete tunnels and my own breathing, which sounded too loud in the empty dark. My name is Nick Delaney. I am...
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  • The Last Memory of the World
    Emperor Alaric stood upon the balcony of the Eternal Palace, looking out over a world that had finally stopped bleeding. For three centuries, the Empire had expanded, not through the crude violence of the sword, but through the irresistible logic of the System. Alaric had been the final architect, the one who had closed the circle. He had unified every continent, standardized every law, and...
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  • The Guillotine's Grace
    Act I: The Falling Star (20%) Marie was the last ember of a dying dynasty. In the feverish streets of revolutionary Paris, her name was no longer a symbol of prestige, but a target. Her stepmother, a woman who had survived the transition from courtier to revolutionary, had betrayed Marie to the Committee of Public Safety to secure her own survival. Marie was dragged from her bed in the middle...
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  • The Void of Precision
    The city of Aethelgard was a white dream of symmetry. There were no shadows in Aethelgard, for the light was diffused through a canopy of translucent pearl, ensuring that every street, every building, and every citizen was illuminated with a constant, unwavering glow. Kael was the High Architect of the Equilibrium, the man responsible for ensuring that the city's physical and social structures...
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  • The Iron Bird in the Cage
    I. The smoke over Whitby had not yet cleared when the Persephone turned away. Captain Rick Hunter stood at the rail, his hands gripping the cold iron so tightly his knuckles showed through the oil stains. Below him, the English coast was a watercolour of fire and screaming. The main battery had done its job—the French frigate was splitting in two, her timbers exposed like the ribs of some great...
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