Companion pieces
Every Thursday at two, a dying ex-soldier teaches combat in a concrete tunnel beneath the city. His student is late. His kettle is slow. His standards are not negotiable.
Full Story
The Fixer disappeared for three days. This is what he was doing.
Full Story
The Fixer must carry one fragile cake across Vesper by dusk. What could go wrong.
Full Story
Pieces
Her job is to sell people a beautiful dream they never have to wake up from. She's signed three hundred and forty-eight — and kept count of how many are still alive.
Full Story
She trims their nails. She checks their skin. She knows when they're dying before the machines do.
Full Story
The Fixer disappeared for three days. This is what he was doing.
Full Story
Twelve-year-old Linh takes the long way home from school and finds something in an alley that should not exist. By nightfall, the people hunting it are in her neighborhood.
Novella
Her mother dances in a garden that doesn't exist. Her daughter watches through the glass.
Vignette
Pieces
She has a date tonight. She's been counting down for days. The outfit ties at the back.
Full Story
An elderly piano teacher gives weekly lessons to a girl whose mother is running out of reasons to stay.
Full Story
A Bliss technician comes to fix her Halo. She hadn't seen him in thirteen years.
Full Story
Once a week, he comes home for an hour. She moved the lamp.
Full Story
Pieces
Every September, Constance Harwick sets her garden table for twenty-six. Six chairs sit empty. No one says the name of the company that emptied them.
Full Story
Vivian Ashworth has prepared every detail of her granddaughter's christening. The afternoon will not go the way she's planned.
Full Story
A mother in a garden tells her daughter about the boy she loved at seventeen. She has never told anyone.
Full Story
Every night at dusk, she walks the route.
Novella
Dimitri Andreou returns to Driftwood with a five-day ticket back to Hamburg and a plan to bury his father and leave. The tunnels, his father's unfinished business, and a woman one floor down have other plans.
Novella
Twelve-year-old Linh takes the long way home from school and finds something in an alley that should not exist. By nightfall, the people hunting it are in her neighborhood.
Novella
