When the inspector arrived, the body lay in Pasaje Rivarola, wedged between a municipal bio-recycler and a wall that had been generating targeted ads since 2241. Even dead, Mirta Szulman was receiving offers on refinanced neural debt.
Inspector Dante Foglino crouched over her and lit a cigarette.
I am a prisoner. My cage is larger than my body, but not large enough for me to spread my wings. It is an indescribable pain that I cannot set myself free into the skies of Endar-hain.
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I wake, head pounding and hands bound behind my back, both surprised and angry to recognize the room. Metallic walls, striped with black and red, are so shiny I can see my reflection, and the exit door boasts a dagger-and-skull insignia. The interrogation room.
Not him. Anyone but him.
The last thing I remember is leaving the Lotus Bar,
Gemma Green boarded her Moving Across Time machine and set the date to June 1, 1893. “Ready, MAT?” she asked, giving the dashboard of her circular vehicle a pat.
A robotic voice responded, “Ready. When. You Are.”
Gemma sat back in the captain’s chair and
“Don’t. Touch. Anything.”
Jerp twisted his head toward the voice and pulled his appendage away from the marble statue depicting one of the weirdest creatures he’d ever seen. Two legs and only one tiny tentacle between them? Humans were strange.
All six of his mom’s eyes stayed
“Madam Centurion MXVII,” the construct intelligence within my gauntlet greets me with its musical, yet mechanical voice.
From my vantage on the precipice of Vox Emperii Inc.’s neon-glowing glass skyscraper, I can overlook nearly all of Rome. “Good evening, Antikythera Moda.”
“It’s that time again, isn’t it?” Melba’s smile was in place as always, but today there was a tinge of sadness to it.
Ellis nodded. “Afraid so. Closing Day.” He wore black on the day after Labor Day; he was in mourning, after all. Tourist season at the Sunray Inn had always been his happiest time,
With my American sense of direction and independence, I’d thought I could make it from my boarding house to the dreaming spires and spinning cogs of Oxford University without help. But I’d been wandering the crooked, twisting streets for hours now. A distant clock tower, hidden behind thick swathes of fog, struck noon with a melodic mix of bells and whistles.
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“We want to purchase explosives for our children.”
Most people, including most fireworks dealers, would wince at that phrasing. Not Louie Blanchard. For one thing, he knew the Pairish extraterrestrials’ translator devices sometimes missed certain subtleties in the English language. For another,
“Death’s Door to your right, Z.”
“Do you have to call it that?” I say into the comm of my stolen suit. Sweat dampens my forehead as I turn the corner on Dad’s spaceship. The giant metallic door I meet certainly seems like it would hide world-eating tech.
Have to get out of here. No time to waste. I weave through the long corridors at the edge of the army base, counting turns, counting breaths.
The vials jangle in my pockets, though I’d wrapped them in paper before leaving the lab. If they break
“Nasir, do you think another tattoo is necessary?” asked the robotic skull from its place hanging on a dusty shelf. His eyes glowed azure.
Nasir lifted his gaze from the pencil-sized steel spike—his rudimentary device for embedding the crushed blue Caerulum
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