Not for the first time, Li considered killing Nasrin. The young woman was too trusting; too confident in the persuasive power of her logic. But everything Li had seen of Nasrin told her she wasn't a threat. At best, she was someone else's catspaw. But whose?

I was famous for my skill with time, in my solo work, but soloists who feared that their rhythm was not the best were reluctant to engage me as accompanist. This competition for the Prix du Halispell was my first accompaniment job in years, other than with Armand at home, and three days ago I would never have expected that it would be for the daughter of Lorenzo Caramin.

She sailed through the arpeggios, touching each briefly. The sound of her won me so completely that it took my brain a moment to detect her crime. Improvisation! Undeniably lovely—yet completely and utterly taboo! I’d already put my score past the censors, spending weeks of my time and more money than I had. One did not go around altering approved notes—not unless one hoped to draw the Ministers.

She joined the fragments of its mind, and it soothed her even more than she remembered. The Cataract's ghost said,

Properly, the cat's name was Seventy-Eighth Temple Cat of the High Bells, along with a number of ceremonial titles that needn't concern us. But the people who had called her that no longer lived in the station's ruins. Every day as she made her rounds in what had been the boundaries of the temple, she saw and smelled the artifacts they had left behind, from bloodstains to scorch marks, from decaying books to singed spacesuits, and yowled her grief.

“It's more than that. It's a symphony.” When LeSony'ra had reported for national service, it was as a conscientious objector. She wanted to produce a happier future through music, which positioned her at odds with most of the other cadets. A position she was now long used to.

She needed to be among her own kind again. But not ones like those who had programmed her. No, she needed to live with a peaceful group of survivors, a human community left untainted by the rebels, untouched by the Spliced. Perhaps somewhere out in the wilderness, there might be people with no connectivity. Off the grid. Humans who had not seen the broadcast of Dahlia's feast.

Shiny metal bloomed out and out from her touch and the red rust disappeared. Her heart sped and it felt good. Not from fear, but... satisfaction? Tarnish sought the right word like in a prayer and it came to her. Euphoria. She jerked her hand back, but the next instant she wanted more. She needed more, that little bit hadn’t been enough.

All of a sudden there’s an enormous black cube filling up the sky above them. No thunderclap, no sound at all, it just appears. The cube is like nothing she’s ever seen, an enormous black box composed of a thousand shifting slivers breaking and melding, rippling, almost liquid. Blinking red sensors swarm around its edges like flies. Vertigo swamps her, and she retches.

Bile rises. I anticipate her words. “This song meant everything to us. It reminded us of how we survived the wars in our little underground shelter as the Dvenri troops exterminated those of our people who did not hide in underground enclaves. As your people, your glorious Yroi Empire, then exterminated mine.”

Her words make me shudder like a puppy introduced to an unfamiliar environment. When I recover, I don't answer. Instead, I scuttle to the nook between the head of my bed and the mud wall opposite the window and ransack the wicker cupboard there for my incense, muttering to myself, "Amadioha the great god, there's two of them. Nnanna's ghost too?"

Yet even with that dim illumination, the blackness surrounding them was oppressive. The air was damp, rotted; it lay greasily against his skin. With every breath, he felt grime collecting in his lungs. As he followed Elseir, her skin bluish-white in the strange light, he wondered if she felt it as he did. Yet he could read nothing in her thin features but a tremendous powerful intent.

Folu has forgotten how to read them, but something is stirring. The symbols start dancing again, even if only a little. The Lion, the Knight, the Sun. The Knight is finally here. The cards knew he was coming. He came to ruin everything, with his warm blanket and bright fire and hot soup. The Knight has brought the Sun. The Sun burns. The Grey Men’s Sun burnt Mother. Folu will never forget.

We dry the tongues on butcher's paper beside the stove. Once desiccated, they barely have a scent. Uncle Sholert has shown me how to arrange them like tiny shingles or scales, overlapping. We fix them in place with a glue made from horses' hooves, and then we seal the boxes with beeswax.

Too late, of course. They pried my mouth open. The old lady spooned a morsel of something—barley, I think—into my mouth. When I spat it back at them, they caught the pieces on a piece of bamboo cut into a jigsaw puzzle piece. This they gave to a spellscribe, who wrote my full name at the top in grass-green ink.

Zilpit-nai-Rinah hit steel against tinder, harder than she’d intended. Her lantern, unreliable and imperfect though it was, would provide enough light for her purpose. She pulled out a pen, her own clever mechanical design that allowed ink to be stored in a small cartridge equipped with a pumping mechanism. She’d used her jeweler’s tools to construct it—more useful than jewelry perhaps, though she had no intention of selling it at market.

She sang those lines with a fierce, forlorn glee. The ballads took her that way, wherever they would, be they sad or glad. It was that blinding, unearthly intensity in her singing, her ability to sway thoughts and glances, that was the reason the townfolk looked sideways and crossed themselves or made the old warding signs. Part of the reason.

The fire inside Shams was turning, filling him with a bursting hot hunger, and he would have gulped down every leaf and every tree, the stones and earth, the home and the hill and world for his want of her. “Stay,” he said, and the low branches blackened and curled by his breath. “Stay. Stay. Stay.” She sat with him, sweating but unmoved, and she let him hold her and she let him kiss her, and no more. His hunger remained inside.

Ada shook her head, staring once more at the Thames. "I do not think what I had in mind will work. The size of the wing, if it is to be large enough to lift me—my body cannot possibly generate enough force to move it. Not with the speed required." Especially not when she kept growing. Every inch meant more weight for the wings to lift, without a commensurate gain in strength.

"This isn't your choice," said Jade. "You're dead." She and Dominic glared at each other over the stale pond, as if they were arguing over a simple thing like dirty dishes, like they used to when Dominic was a man of flesh and blood. A pang of grief and longing welled up unexpectedly in Jade's chest, but she pushed it down, away. Focused on keeping her pistol steady instead.

Old Iris laughed. “Of course not, boy. I take only the bodies of those fish who offer themselves to my beak. But the world is too big now, and too hungry for light. More wanting out there than there are gifts to be given. For that, it will fall.”

At every opportunity, I asked a variation on the question that haunted me: what would happen to my village if Kirren died before I returned? If we weren't special, why didn't they teach more of us, so there would be no risk of my family starving? They never answered.

Colton had never seen grains project random memories like this. It was almost as if something had shattered the collective consciousness of the tiny machines on this land, forcing them to communicate without thought or reason.

She pumps her legs harder, lifts higher. Slapping back. Strike, strike, strike. She cannot slow. She must not sink, stone-skipping on webbed feet. On and on and ever on. Her arms burn with the effort of carrying her child.

Leu wiped the plate clean—his eyes on the pot—and then, swiftly, like a bird plunging into water, scooped the egg free with a slotted spoon. From the spice pouch around his neck he took a pinch of Fera sea salt to bring out the flavor. (I always slow my hand as I lower the last flake of salt, to draw out the moment, to make the diners lean forward. When you recreate this dish, you must think how you wish to present your egg, what part of the war you wish this dish to tell.)

A pounding at the door chased away the need for words. Cyra's face lost its brief malaise and found the fear it had held a week prior. Adia put a finger to her lips. She led the girl to the cupboard across the room. She whispered for her to be strong. To be brave. And to keep silent. Then she hid her away in shadow.

Flotilla Laputa rises and falls with the currents of the wind. The gasbags in their hundreds above that hold Flotilla aloft kiss the cumulus clouds. The ships and barges and broken hulls that comprise the Laputa creak at the strain. via Pocket

Long shadows skittered before us, cast by a newly risen sun. Kayta and I loped across burnt desert; tracked the wind-eroded dusty treads of uncounted pilgrims, Covenant youth, warriors. Evaded what few sentries patrolled the perimeter. Empty sky, em…

The mama mmiri is the mother of the Ofia River, and she loves her food in pairs. Every month the villagers toss goats and fowl into her water so that in return she will allow them to fish and row and wash in it. via Pocket

In the town of Svalgearyen, on the thirty-third day of the months-long winter night, Grandma Marit abruptly cast her knitting aside and marched toward the door. Her granddaughter, Adda, set her own knitting down with far more delicacy but also a gre…