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  • The Starlight Fleet
    The jazz band had just finished a set when Nicholas Sterling first spoke the words that would haunt him for the rest of his life. He was sitting at a corner table in the Cotton Club, a glass of gin between his hands, listening to Louis Armstrong's trumpet weave through the smoke and the laughter and the clinking of glasses. The gin was cheap, but the music was priceless, and for a moment,...
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  • The Black Signal
    I. The rain had been falling on Los Angeles for three days when Mrs. Voss walked into my office. She wore a black dress that cost more than my car and a look on her face that said she had already decided I was not going to help her. "My husband is dead," she said. "The police say it was an accident. I do not." I looked at her. She was beautiful in the way that beautiful women in Los Angeles...
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  • The Glass Ceiling of Blood
    ## Act I: The Outset The skyscrapers of Manhattan were not buildings; they were monuments to a religion of greed. In the penthouse of the Obsidian Tower, the air was filtered, the light was artificial, and the morality was non-existent. Julian was the "Golden Boy" of the firm, a brilliant analyst who could manipulate market trends with a single keystroke. He was young, handsome, and utterly...
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  • The Woman in the Corner
    Maggie O'Sullivan had been working in New York houses for twenty-five years. She had cleaned up after senators and stockbrokers and socialites and immigrants who made more money in a week than Maggie earned in a year. She had seen every kind of madness money could buy, and she had learned the most important rule of her profession: never ask questions, never get involved, and never, ever believe...
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  • The Last Honor of Alistair
    The castle of Blackwood stood on a cliff overlooking the grey Atlantic, its stones worn smooth by centuries of salt and wind. It was a place of echoing halls and faded tapestries, a monument to a nobility that had long since lost its purpose. Count Alistair, the last of the line, spent his days in the library, reading the journals of ancestors who had once led armies and shaped kingdoms....
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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 Weight of a Pebble
    (Act I: The Grey Shift) Sam lived in the town of Oakhaven, where the only thing more consistent than the rain was the sound of the factory whistle. For twenty years, he had worked in the stamping plant, his life a loop of grey concrete and metallic noise. He was a man of habits: the same coffee, the same route to work, the same silence at dinner. He didn't want power; he just wanted the noise...
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  • Echoes in the Jazz Age
    The summer of 1925 began on the Long Island Sound with a sound that Helen Winthrop would never forget: jazz music playing from an open window, champagne glasses clinking, laughter echoing across the water like a promise nobody intended to keep. Helen had come from Ohio — a small town where the most exciting thing that happened was the annual county fair, where people still believed that...
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  • The Ledger of Lost Souls
    Governor Julian sat in the veranda of his colonial residence, the humid air of the Congo Basin pressing against him like a wet blanket. He was sipping a chilled gin and tonic, watching the sun set over a landscape that had been meticulously reorganized into a grid of rubber plantations. He was the pride of the Imperial Office. His "Administrative Optimization Plan" had increased the colony's...
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  • The Cipher War
    The neon lights of Manhattan flickered like a dying pulse, casting jagged streaks of pink and cyan across the rain-slicked streets. Claire sat in a windowless room in the basement of a nondescript laundromat, her fingers dancing across a holographic keyboard. She was the best cryptographer in the city, but she wasn't working for a government or a corporation. She was working for her own...
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  • The Rust Belt Conspiracy
    The town of Oakhaven was a place where the wind tasted of iron and disappointment. Once the crown jewel of the American Midwest, it was now a skeletal remains of a city, a landscape of collapsed warehouses and rusted gantries that looked like the ribcages of dead giants. Caleb Moore lived in a trailer on the edge of the slag heaps, spending his days repairing antique tractors and his nights...
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  • The Mirror
    Dr. Thomas Grey worked at St. Dunstan's, a private psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of London, and he was very good at his job. He was forty-seven, composed, methodical, and possessed of the kind of calm that made patients trust him and colleagues respect him. His patients were the hospital's most interesting cases—people who had fallen apart in ways that defied simple diagnosis....
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