“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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Lenny couldn’t help being the wisest man on Earth. Just as the rest of humanity couldn’t help being deeply and tragically ignorant.
He tapped his fingers against his carefully constructed booth as he sat by the vacant road outside his house.
You’d think the walking public
“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.
“See?” Joler exclaimed, waking me up. “I beg Crobet to train with me every day, but he just sits there!”
“Why haven’t you been training?” Turgess snapped. “You’re getting flabby!”
I shrugged, regretting giving them the access code to the underground command center. “When was the last threat?
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
I have nobody to blame but myself for bringing home that blasted opossum.
Last week, I gazed down at it, sprawled wounded and unmoving in a cratered building.
My conscience wouldn’t let me leave it.
So I brought it home.
Playing nursemen for the criminal cyborg started
Humans. Scout crouched in the narrow gap behind the couch as the two guards passed.
“Probably a glitch,” the guard that smelled like coffee said. “No one’s here.”
Scout’s ears twitched in amusement. He must’ve missed a motion sensor, but it didn’t matter. The employee lounge of CB-TED’s
The torture had stopped being pain three days ago. After a while, sensation was only data. Now it was just weather.
I slumped against the far wall of my cell, metal biting into my wrists. The shackles were designed for smaller creatures. They cut
If there was one thing that Iris City had in surplus, it was abandoned buildings. In his Icebird guise, Houston Haas circled over a block full of them, trying to localize the lady’s cries for help. At last, he pinpointed a rusting building that had once been a warehouse, surrounded by a graveyard of other similarly decrepit structures.
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