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  • THE SILENT OBSERVER
    A Collection of Nine Stories I. THE MAN WHO WATCHED THE SKY Dr. Vladimir Petrov watched the sky every night from the roof of the observatory in a small town outside Moscow. He had been watching it for twenty-seven years. He was sixty-two years old, he had a wife who did not understand him, a daughter who barely spoke to him, and a job that consisted almost entirely of looking at a computer...
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  • October 12, 2012
    Julian Thorne is the most charming man I have ever met and I am already suspicious of him. He hired me this morning as his personal assistant. We met at a coffee shop on Broadway near 96th Street — Julian insisted on a neutral location, neither his office nor mine. He was twenty-eight, Ivy League (Columbia, business school), and wore a suit that cost more than my father's car. He spoke about...
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  • The Ashwood Covenant
    The Ashwood Covenant The road to Ashwood Manor was unpaved and lined with oaks so old they looked carved from the same darkness that filled the sky above them. Claire Beaumont's rental car navigated the ruts with the cautious respect one reserves for a grave. She had come from Chicago with a press pass, a notebook, and a story that would make her name. The magazine editor who had given her this...
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  • The Watcher in the Beams
    The snake was coiled in the beams like an ancient secret, waiting to be discovered again. I knew this the moment I saw it, on my wedding night, in the attic of the old Calloway house that my husband's family had occupied for four generations and that I had married into with the sort of naive enthusiasm that Southern girls are raised on, from Sunday school lessons to tea parties to the quiet,...
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  • The Silence Hunter
    Jack Steel didn't do "hope." Hope was for people who didn't know how the universe actually worked. In the Neon Belt, a cluster of space stations held together by duct tape and desperation, Jack made a living finding things that didn't want to be found. He was a "Silence Hunter." His specialty was tracking planets that had gone dark—worlds that had used "Cloaking" technology to hide from the...
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  • The Open Source of Tomorrow
    The discovery happened on a Friday, which was appropriate because James Chen had always believed that the universe had a dark sense of humor. It was 1925, and the laboratory at Columbia University smelled of ether and ambition, the two being nearly indistinguishable in a room where you could not tell which was evaporating and which was being born. The Eternity Protocol was not supposed to be a...
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  • Sample V-07: The Collector of Echoes
    (Southern Gothic Style) The Blackwood Estate did not sit upon the land; it sank into it. Located in the humid, suffocating heart of the Louisiana bayou, the house was a skeletal ruin of Greek Revival columns and rotting cedar, draped in Spanish moss that hung like the grey beards of forgotten giants. The air was a thick soup of jasmine, sulfur, and the metallic tang of stagnant water. For...
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  • Title: The Architect of the Broken Code
    (Act I: The Ascent) The Academy of Silver was the crown jewel of the New York Hegemony, a place where the children of the elite were trained to maintain the city's algorithmic order. Professor Sterling was the Academy's most celebrated lecturer, a man who could navigate the complexities of social engineering with surgical precision. But Sterling had a secret: he had discovered a flaw in the...
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  • Sample V-01: The Silent Requiem
    (Style A: Victorian Melancholy) The fog did not roll in; it descended, a heavy, velvet shroud of charcoal grey that erased the cobblestones of Kensington and swallowed the gaslights one by one. Inside the drawing room of the Sterling estate, the air smelled of old parchment and dying lilies. Arthur Sterling, once the most celebrated astronomer of the Royal Society, did not look at the...
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  • The Solar Cathedral
    The city of Ouroboros was a monument to the fear of the sky. For three generations, the inhabitants had lived beneath the Great Dome, a sprawling canopy of lead-glass and reinforced steel that shielded them from the "Searing Winds" of the surface. Outside, the world was a wasteland of iridescent ash; inside, it was a gothic hive of incense, neon, and iron. Father Julian was the city's most...
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  • The Patient from Below
    ACT I Dr. Henry Blackwood's clinic was on Harley Street, in a building that had been a townhouse before someone with money and no taste turned it into a medical practice. The waiting room smelled of carbolic acid and lavender—two smells that had been mixed together by someone who thought they complemented each other but in fact created an odor that was worse than either alone. Blackwood sat in...
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  • Shadows in the Concrete Jungle
    The bullet missed me by about three inches. I saw it come through the window of my office on Centre Street and I knew, with that same cold knowing that had been guiding me since the shooting, where it would go. It went through the whiskey glass on my desk, through the ledger that documented everything I'd built in four years of blood and sweat and compromise, and into the wall behind it where...
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