The first thing you notice is light—cool and soft white, pervasive and blank.
You are so comfortable and drowsy it doesn’t occur to you to wonder where you are or how you got there. The temperature is pleasant. There is no sound other than your pulse, no smell besides a faint,
The galaxy stretched out before me, brightly colored stars blinking beckoningly. I stepped toward it, tucking the long chain with its ornate key back into my shirt as I pulled the door shut behind me, closing off the suspended wooden platform with its many other portal doorways. Standing on the edge of the
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Ya open the spaceship’s door and stare at yer landin’ spot. This deserted planet seems made for cows. Lotsa grass, stretchy bright sky. Some spindly trees for shade. No fences in sight. Yer herd will love it. Or oughta, anyway. Ya never know with them testy space cows. One thing wrong, and yer world
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The first thing Mia noticed was the blood—dark specks drizzled across fresh snow like errant paint strokes. Her boots crunched in pursuit until the spatter disappeared into a sheet of white beyond the remote compound.
Blinding wind cut at her eyes as she peered into the Yukon permafrost and shouldered her
“I can’t find him!” Becca yanked Mark into her apartment and snapped the door shut. “I’ve looked everywhere!”
Mark furrowed his brow. The living room had been rearranged into a wide-open space with the couch, wicker chair, and TV all lined up against the wall next to each other. That’s not very convenient.
There is nothing more tedious than a Chalean war party. Their banter is unintelligent, their manners are lackluster, and don’t even get me started on the leftover jerky I’ve been forced to eat for nine days in a row now.
Maybe—maybe—if they had let me ride on a horse that didn’t sneeze
“By my reckoning, it will be fifty years before I pose a significant threat.”
The letter was signed by Eldred Ballantyne, dated November 24, 1952, and left with a firm of attorneys who’d mailed it as instructed fifty years later. The Singer Biotechnical Institute president at the time was curious enough to open it,
A time drone exited the Cretaceous forest and rose to a cruising height of fifty meters, flying toward a herd of hadrosaurs. Some of the dinosaurs slurped water from a river splashing over a series of rocks, while others munched on fresh-scented, juicy ferns. All soaked up the summer sunshine.
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Cat herding ain’t easy. Sure you’re up for it, son?”
I gave Gus my most resolute stare. The old cat hand nodded, and just like that I was his new partner.
This was my first run as a cat herder, and I was eager to prove myself. I’d had other work before, but
It was living inside me, killing me little by little. And worse, it talked to me.
“Don’t fight me, Clay.”
“It’s useless.”
“Isn’t this what you wanted?”
That last one stung, because it was right. I had wanted it at the time.
I was the head of the botany team tasked with splicing
“You are aware there will be side effects.”
I nodded but didn’t meet the study coordinator’s eye. I kept my gaze locked on my hands: the warped fingers, fused thumbs, and lines of surgical scars.
Lupus has side effects, too.
“You understand we cannot tell you exactly what those side effects will be.
I stepped into Gram’s room in Sandy Valley Home and nearly dropped my fresh-cut flowers. Gram sat next to the open window, her arm half-buried in a bucket of dried insects and grubs. She tossed some onto the pavement where a crow pecked hungrily.
Hazel, Gram’s aide, smiled at me. “You’re just in time,
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