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  • The-Ledger-of-Lies
    The Ledger of LiesThe door to the Silver Orchid was heavy, lacquered in something that used to be red and now was the colour of dried blood. Vicky Malone pushed it open with her shoulder and stepped into the corridor that led to the VIP rooms. She was carrying a tray of empty glasses—someone had left them behind after a late-night poker game—and she was thinking about nothing more complicated...
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  • How It Ends
    How It EndsSusan put her coffee mug in the dishwasher and turned around. Tom was at the table with the newspaper. Not on his phone. Not on a laptop. The newspaper—the physical kind with ink on fingers, the one Susan had not seen in this house in four years."You are reading the paper," she said.Tom folded the sports section. "Yeah.""That is new.""It was on sale."Susan stood in the kitchen...
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  • What We Owe Each Other
    Blue Notes ACT I Diana Callahan sang "By the Light of the Silvery Moon" for an audience of three regulars, two drunks, and one man in the back booth who didn't clap when she finished but watched her with the kind of attention that made the three dollars in her tip jar feel like an insult. The Blue Note was a speakeasy on 47th Street where the whiskey was bootleg and the music was illegal and...
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  • # The Observatory
    The orchid was a Cattleya trianae, one of the finest specimens in Charles-Edouard's collection, and it had been in bloom for eleven days when he first noticed that it was wrong. Not wrong in the way that flowers go wrong—wilting, browning, rotting. Wrong in a way that had no name, because it was not a change that any botanist would recognize. The petals were still perfect. The color had not...
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  • The Mountain Gospel
    THE MOUNTAIN GOSPELACT ONE: THE EXPLOSIONThe chapel leaked when it rained, which was often, which was essentially always, because the roof was tin and the tin was old and the screws holding it to the rafters had surrendered to rust years ago, one by one, in the slow surrenders that mountains specialize in.Reverend Silas Greenwood stood at the altar -- which was a door laid across two milk...
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  • The Chronicles of Clementine
    (Style: Southern Gothic) The Blackwood Estate did not sit upon the land; it sank into it. The porch sagged like a tired lip, and the ivy strangled the columns in a slow, green murder. In the cellar, beneath the smell of damp earth and ancient rot, sat the Sleepers—twelve silver pods that looked like oversized eggs, humming a low, mournful tune. I am Clementine. I am the house. I am the walls,...
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  • "Who is this?"
    The thing about New York is that nobody cares who you are. They care what you can do, and even then, only for about thirty seconds. I've been a special agent with the FBI for fifteen years. Fifteen years of following leads, of interviewing witnesses, of sitting in interrogation rooms that smelled like stale coffee and old fear. I grew up in Queens, son of a cop who worked the precinct for...
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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 Absinthe Mirror
    Julian Saint-Claire lived in a house that was less a residence and more a museum of the exquisite. In the heart of the Belle Époque, his salon in Paris was the only place where the truly bored and the truly brilliant gathered. The walls were draped in heavy crimson velvet, the air was thick with the scent of lilies and opium, and the conversation was a delicate dance of cruelty and wit. Julian...
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  • THE WEIGHT OF NOTHING
    ### Act I: The Spark Ethan Cross stood in the supermarket aisle for twelve minutes before making a decision. The decision was about cereal. There were fourteen brands on the shelf, from store-brand corn flakes at three dollars a box to artisanal granola at nine dollars, and Ethan was trying to choose one. Not because he was hungry—hunger was not the issue. The issue was that each choice carried...
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  • The Double Life of Thomas Vance
    Thomas Vance opened the bookshop at nine in the morning and he closed it at six in the evening and he did exactly the same thing every day for three years. He straightened the books. He wiped the counter. He drank tea from a cup that said World's Best Bookseller in letters that were chipped and fading. He watched the people walk past the window and he thought about nothing. This was exactly...
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  • The Parallel Archive
    I. The diary was bound in German leather, water-stained and cracked at the spine. Dr. Sarah Whitmore found it in Box 47 of the Columbia University library's underground stacks, misfiled between a collection of 19th-century botanical illustrations and a set of encyclopaedia entries on atmospheric pressure. It was dated 1945. The handwriting was German, but the text was in English. The author...
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