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  • The Circle of Rain
    (V-10: Film Noir) The rain in Los Angeles didn't wash anything away; it just turned the grime into a mirror. Detective Miller sat in his office, the neon sign of the "Blue Note" lounge across the street flickering in a rhythmic, agonizing pulse of sapphire and shadow. He was a man who lived in the margins, a private eye who specialized in finding things that people wanted to stay lost. For ten...
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  • The Fragile Mirror
    **Observation Log: Unit 7** **Target**: Species 44-B (Humanity) **Objective**: Final Clearance To the High Council of the Eternal Lattice: I have completed the observation of the target species. As per the Prime Directive, I have identified the optimal moment for the erasure of their planetary coordinates. The humans are a fascinating contradiction. They are biologically fragile, intellectually...
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  • BILL'S TUESDAY
    BILL'S TUESDAY THE CAR The carburetor on the '78 Ford wouldn't tune and Bill Harlan couldn't figure out why because it wasn't the carburetor, it was something deeper and older and harder to name, the kind of problem that lives in the engine the way grief lives in a house: you can paint over it and sand it smooth and put furniture in front of it but it's still there, humming under the...
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  • The mansion on blackwood hill
    The house had been dying for one hundred and fifty years, and Atticus Blackwood was its last physician. Or perhaps its last mourner. He was not sure which. Blackwood Manor stood on a hill above the Savannah River in South Carolina, a sprawling Victorian structure of faded white pillars and purple ivy that had grown over the cracks like a scar tissue trying to hold the building together. The...
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  • The Utopia of Screams (V-12)
    The city of Elysium was a masterpiece of social engineering. There was no crime, no poverty, and most importantly, no sadness. The "Emotional Equilibrium Bureau" ensured that every citizen lived in a state of perpetual, mild contentment. Julian was the city's most efficient Auditor. His job was to scan the psychic profiles of the citizenry and "trim" any emerging spikes of grief or anger before...
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  • The Last Bastion
    The sky over the Last Bastion was the color of a bruised plum, choked by the spores of the Hive. For three centuries, humanity had been hunted across the stars, their colonies extinguished one by one. Now, only one city remained, a jagged spire of steel and desperation clinging to a frozen rock at the edge of the galaxy. I was Commander Vance. I hadn't asked for the command, but in a world of...
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  • The Delaney Freeze
    I Margo Delaney did not fall during the raid on Vanguard Global's underground server farm—she simply stopped running and pressed a data-drive against her temple, activating the neural seal that Moretti had built into her brain. The corporate hit squad burst through the door three seconds later and found a woman sitting on the concrete floor, eyes closed, breathing shallow, alive but not alive...
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  • Ball of Death
    The briefing room at Langley had no windows, which was appropriate, because there was nothing outside worth looking at. Corrigan sat across the steel table from me and slid a manila folder across the surface. It stopped at my elbows. Inside was a single photograph: a scorched concrete wall with three perfect circular holes, each one the size of a dinner plate, and through each hole I could see...
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  • THE QUIET END
    Frank O'Malley woke at six in the morning. It was not an alarm clock that woke him. It was the habit of waking at six, established twelve years ago in a base camp in the Ho Chi Minh Trail and never broken, even after he broke everything else. He lay in the dark. The apartment was small—one bedroom, one bathroom, a kitchen that was really just a corner with a stove and a refrigerator the size of...
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  • The Void of Geneva
    The rain in post-war Geneva did not fall; it descended as a grey, oppressive curtain that blurred the line between the lake and the sky. Julian sat in a café that smelled of stale tobacco and wet wool, watching the pedestrians move like clockwork automatons through the mist. He was a man of thirty, with a face that seemed to have been carved from a piece of cold slate, and eyes that had seen...
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  • The Manchester Signal
    Davey McGee had always been the sort of man people looked past. At thirty-five, with a face that seemed permanently caught between confusion and mild offence, he occupied the space between things—a warehouse shelf, a pub corner, a council estate bench where he sat on his days off watching rain accumulate in the potholes of Cheetham Hill. His mother, a Irish woman from Belfast who had moved to...
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  • Viva Logan showed up late to her engagement dinner because she wanted Dominic Cole to think she was exactly the kind of woman he would never want.
    Viva Logan showed up late to her engagement dinner because she wanted Dominic Cole to think she was exactly the kind of woman he would never want. It was 1947, and Los Angeles was full of men who had come back from the war with pieces of themselves missing and a lot of money they did not know what to do with. Dominic Cole was thirty-three, a lawyer who had apparently made a name for himself...
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