Mehdi leaned back to see the top of the sheer cliff rising before him made of the same yellow sand he stood upon. He couldn’t believe it. He was here.
“Never seen a cliff before, kid?” Jasper chuckled behind him.
Correction, they were here.
Jasper shook his head. “Considering that village you come from,
“Come.”
The voice rumbles through my dreams, calling me to the waking world. Cool, wet wind swirls over me, flowing through the open shutters of my arched window. When I went to sleep, those shutters were locked and bolted. A smile creeps up from my soul. They should know that locked windows never stop
Mercedes held her breath as the airship landed, its solar sails radiating energy. A gangway lowered toward a long line of eager passengers with tickets in hand.
First: board the airship.
She exhaled a slow breath. It had to be this airship, heading for the district housing the prestigious Leric Institute.
A bitter breeze rakes over my cheeks as I step from the Jackson Hole Aerial Tram, but it’s not the cold that sends shivers skittering through my gloved hands and up my arms. It’s excitement.
Up ahead, my best friend, Brandon, faces me, a wide smile plastered on his face. He signs the words,
“Earth to Echo.”
Electricity courses through Echo as Darbo’s deep voice prods her consciousness. She stirs, blinking out at the spaceship’s main chamber.
My jail cell.
Darbo stands by the main control panel, pressing the button that shoots shock waves across Echo’s incorporeal form. Nearby, his daughter Delilah crunches on star-puffs
Tank had a sixth sense about space junk. He could intuit the difference between a salvageable satellite and orbital debris, a useful skill ever since the collapse of the Sagan-Hawking interstellar gateway had induced collisions and made debris removal a prime concern for space travel. If only his spacey superpower could differentiate
Read it now
Six months into the sleep-zombie catastrophe, the survivors knew one thing: they were grateful for the winged, magic sloths.
One such survivor, Leesia, leaped over a crumbling stone wall marking an old boundary between fields. Gasping for breath, she dropped to her knees. Her brother-in-law Rayth joined her a moment later.
“At least we caught it early.” I offer a box of tissues to Renee Halloway as we stand outside her son’s hospital room. When she doesn’t grab it, her husband John takes the box instead.
I hate giving bad news. It wrenches my stomach every time I have to say cancer.
Forin would do it this time. Master the All-Gate. And prove his father’s doubts wrong. All the other Gates were limited, only allowing travel between two specific worlds. Heck, sometimes you had to travel thousands of miles just to get to that world’s Gate. The All-Gate would change that. Forin could think of a place,
Read it now
Kae shifted in her seat as the dean of the Academy squinted at her over his spectacles. “Miss Ruve, it is highly irregular for you to request an audience instead of submitting an application form.”
Kae hesitated. “My ability is… unusual.”
“What exactly is your ability?”
“I …” Kae cleared her throat, which felt strangely tight.
The Main Event: Me versus Sea.
A fight to the finish—probably mine. My opponent is the ocean.
Water’s a liquid? Tell the riptide that. Solid as a giant’s fist, it hauls me farther out every second. To defeat me, the riptide doesn’t drag me under. It doesn’t have to.
The flower opened silently. Unremarkably. Alone in the forest’s center, right where I’d planted it. Beautiful. Unnoticed. Deadly.
Smiling, I crouched beside it. They’d never suspect this. Those humans were too busy worrying about World War III, global warming, and zombies to stop and smell the flowers.
Their loss.
Recent Comments