“No way. You’re crazy,” Morse scoffed.
“It’s the truth!” O’Connor’s nasally voice insisted over the Bluetooth connection. “Don’t you think I checked? Are you that arrogant?”
Morse scowled at the grimy storefront. “And how did it end up in a pawn shop in a backwater town like this?”
“Same way anything else ends up in a pawn shop.
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,
It was a blustery day in October of 1880 when Sherlock Holmes was summoned to a student tenement near the University of London. The telegram requested my presence as well, which was unusual. I went willingly since I had no other appointments that morning.
Lestrade met us outside in the street, visibly shaken and white as a sheet.
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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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?
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