Next up was the Aleuthian. It stood at the front, fidgeting with its hair and clothes with three of its rubbery appendages.
From the seat next to mine, Nimthron yelled, “Hurry it up already. Some of us don’t have three hundred years.”
Nimthron turned to me. “That’s only if it’s female, of course. Males have significantly shorter lives. But it’s nearly impossible to tell.”
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Flashes of memory assaulted me—wandering alone in a blizzard, standing on the edge of an icy sea, the word “DEAD” flashing in the air. And always, waking up in the same place.
Everywhere I looked, prismatic light reflected off a sparkling surface. And the cold crept into my bones.
I glance up at the heavens as I stride toward the launchpad. The usual thick, gray clouds churn in their eternal cauldron.
There’s no reason to be nervous, I tell myself for the hundredth time. Most of the tests have gone perfectly fine.
Our airship has the long, rounded body of a submarine, albeit one with massive engines slung along the back. The resizer agent is built into those hefty engines, so I can adjust our size at will. In theory, anyway.
The walls crumble more every day. It’s not just something you can fix with workers and stone, either. If it were that easy, we would’ve saved the city long ago.
But these magic-imbued walls are held together by our relationships—by love—and that love is fading.
Mirrors never show the truth on our birthdays. They show only fractures, pieces that we can almost hide, but never completely.
And this mirror is no exception.
I steel myself before peering inside its depths. Darksouls—the reflected versions of ourselves living in mirrors—have a persuasive air about them.
The Piggly Wiggly smells like baking chicken as I hustle in past a leaning stack of boxed soda. The crumpled piece of notebook paper in my hand is moist with the sweat from my palm.
Three things. I can get three things. Surely I can manage that.
This time, I’ll get it right. This time, Mina will get what she sent me for.
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It was my job to lead us out of our underground dwellings when the surface was finally safe. I expected to encounter many things upon our emergence. Destruction, scorched earth. But not a summoning.
It was just lying there. Waiting for us. A metal cube. When I picked it up, it projected a trail of red footprints on the cracked ground.
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The call from steel magnate Charles Weldon interrupted my plans to spend a pea-souper of a morning with two fingers of Jack Daniels and a newspaper. But I knew I wouldn’t regret it when I stepped into the tycoon’s home office. Whatever made one of the richest men in California this jumpy was bound to pay well.
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The wipers of the ’66 Corvette swept the rain from the windshield, but the downpour blurred Duncan’s view of the darkened road, and the headlights didn’t provide much help either. After the day he’d had, he just wanted to get home. Thankfully, the purr of the engine eased the tension in his back.
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The stars are my guide.
It isn’t their light that I follow so much as their song. Every night, I wait for them to come out, to paint the ocean waves. Water laps against my boat, and I follow the path laid out by the celestial chorus.
The king was broken in pieces.
Ezahtira shouldn’t have been surprised. Ever since the gods punished the kings for their corruption, the nation of Cadmar had suffered the Two-Taloned Curse. The First Talon turned each king into a stone-like substance at death, after which he would crumble.
My undead grandmother is my conscience.
By “undead” I don’t mean a decrepit, old woman who looks like she shouldn’t still be sucking wind. I mean a decrepit, old woman who died of a heart attack three months ago yet still manages to ruin my life.
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