Fictional Worlds

The occasional breeze allayed the scorching midsummer heat, soothing the fever dreams of the sleepers in the mining scar. The remote blue sky was rooted to the earth, which here in the work zone was the blood red of hematite. Zhang Hua crouched low.…

They all tried to save me. In that space between life and death, you make a decision whether to wake up. Maybe that’s when time ceases to matter. I felt older than four years old and too young to remember. via Pocket

When Li Yaya was roused from sleep, it was seven o’clock in the morning on a Saturday. This was aggravating because the day before Saturday was Friday, and on Friday nights, Yaya never retired too early. The first thing she saw when she woke up was …

My father’s stables were the most important part of his holdings. By the time I had ten summers, I could soothe a panicked stallion and help birth a breech foal. via Pocket

The skimmer is on the roof waiting for him, but he cannot help but pause to take a few deep breaths when he first enters all that open space. via Pocket

Chenguang hikes up her sleeves before vaulting over the pile of fuzzy moss and greets Lukas with a nod. The chloropolyurethane fabric flaps in the slight breeze and the double suns beat down onto her arms. via Pocket

They never gave her a name; when she needs one she names and renames herself after the birds she sees from the watchtower, the birds she sees in the forest, whichever most recently caught her eye or arrow. via Pocket

Stormchases’ little skiff skipped and glided across the tropopause, skimming the denser atmosphere of the warm cloud-sea beneath, running before a fierce wind. via Pocket

Have you ever found yourself on a midtown sidewalk on some warm July day when a plummeting body splattered on the pavement, directly in front of you? Close enough to feel the explosive shockwave of hot liquid air, pelting your trousers with meat pel…

The Gods were circling when the sun rose, nine long patches of black that did not brighten with the sea as the sky lit up. I watched Them, Their knife-blade fins like polished onyx slicing the surface, formation shifting but the huge old matriarch a…

Gonzo arrived in an assault of brass music and spilling banners rippling the pelt of cannon smoke where her feet would’ve been, taking up the hotel entrance in all its marble and chrome—its expensive anachronisms and the people paid to stand next to…

Wake up, killer. For a year, two, you’ve been the static hum of space, floating, spread out over a solar system, asleep, invisible. Girl born on Helio 70, you. via Pocket

Long ago I dreamt things to myself because, when I talked to people, I had nothing else to do, most of the time. Robots were easy. I could loan them cycles and bandwidth to temporarily accelerate them, or just download them and read them completely …

I was sixteen when the viz came. The spiral went crazy for a while, shooting, soldiers at the corners. But then, like everyone knows, it went back to normal. By twenty I was looking for ghosts in the vaults. via Pocket

Sahar, moving softly through the river valley, made sure to listen. The sound filtered into her helmet from the external mics, and she imagined this must be what hiking on Earth must be like. via Pocket

Peter had been in the ground for six months when the birds began pushing up out of the earth. Small ones, at first, with brown feathers: sparrows, spitting out topsoil, their black eyes alert. They shook and stretched their wings in the sunlight. vi…

But visions are not prophecies, he told me. Prophecies come true. “There is a place,” I told him, “where time runs back on itself, where parallel lines converge, and where visions become prophecies. Where you will be not alone. via Pocket

I had heard Rob’s question. It’s just that while I was in the middle of performing CPR in the back of an ambulance on a patient who had been very stable until he had all of a sudden up and crashed, I wasn’t going to stop and answer it. It was a stup…

“My mother is the swamp,” Peregrine said. He leaned towards the mire’s trees, heaped as dark and snarled as bull kelp on a beach. His movement was drunken—he swayed forward, and back, then stumbled in. Ebb hesitated. Peregrine had given him the kind…

via Pocket

Our teacher Mrs. Strunt said the allosaurus coming to Hudson Falls was the best thing that ever happened to Hudson Falls, but the worst thing that ever happened to the allosaurus. She herded us onto the bus looking mad about it, trying to keep us fr…

The good news is, zombie unicorns almost never bite. The bad news is, even a tiny scratch from a zombie unicorn horn will turn you into a zombie. Mom discovered that by accident. Mom was really smart. via Pocket

Blackbird’s pilot waits, vitrified. Nine days since the ship closed around them and with the poison killing them hour by desperate hour, Anna decides she wants to see the alien once. Erik Wygaunt warns her, like Li Aixue before him: “Go in with an e…

T he tuktuk driver spits a small fiery globule out of the side of his mouth. It spins as it flies, striated by angular momentum, and burns a hole in the street, burrowing instantly into the asphalt. via Pocket

The snow crunches under our boots as us-in-Devora and us-in-Mel trace our way through the Forest-That-Thinks. We pause, waiting for directions. That way. via Pocket

The fisherman’s wife breathes out, and tendrils of smoke curl around her. She listens to the tide inside and out — salt sea and salt blood, eroding shores of sand and making a hollow space within her skin and bones. She listens, and the ebb and flow…

Isa died in a sudden suffocation of boiling blood and iron cinder in her mouth; she returned to herself wearing a blue cotton dress stained with fresh tobacco. She was younger and leaner, as she’d been when she first met Leslie Bell. via Pocket

Something moves in the half dark two gas lamps ahead of me. I hold fast at the edge of a small circle of gaslight cast down from the street lamp above me. I don’t breathe. I don’t move. via Pocket

Child’s mistress was out when the scentless woman entered the shop and laid a strip of severed cloth upon the counter. For once, Child wished her mistress were at her side. Child squinted, desperate to find a hint of the woman’s identity beneath the…

Things used to be pure inside me. Separated. When I was a boy, I was wholly a boy. When I was a horse, I was wholly a horse. Things used to be simple inside me. I was all one thing or I was all another. And the two only got close when the change was…