Shadows and Signals

Eve asked if I thought it was really the crown like everyone’s been saying—the fabled crown of Dolerissand, lost a thousand years ago. I told her they were just rumors...…

“You want me to prove this guy is cheating?” “Oh no,” says Atul, holding his hands up, palms facing me. “If he was cheating, we’d have caught him. We need you to prove he’s not cheating.”…

I don’t really want to get up from my rocking chair on the porch. I’m seventy-two, and some days it seems like everything hurts. What I wouldn’t give to just drive to the drug store and buy a bottle of Advil. But no, those days are long gone.…

Nothing prepares me for the scale of Paradox Station, a place where the tracks converge and separate like all the choices you ever wanted to make.…

When we first came here to this foreign place, we were new — we were strange.…

“The holy man was bringing healing water from the sacred mountain.” Claudio bends down to her height, hunching his broad shoulders to whisper to her. “Guess somebody killed him for it.”…

Lights flashed through smoke billowing from the Swallowtail Room’s arched doorway, and a pair of students fled toward the exit.…

The body was relatively well-preserved by the cold harbor waters, albeit bloated, but the arms had been severed postmortem.…

Silence followed as Jim carefully scanned every article, and Mavis touched each line. The way they knew, for Jim, this knowledge came differently to Mavis. For him, the words stood out boldly. He couldn’t miss it. ‘That’s the one,’ he pointed.…

People were already leery of the Arrow Drive; if we had any more mishaps, we’d forfeit our safety rating altogether and be barred not only from the lucrative corporate runs but also from such bread-and-butter jobs as our present engagement: the off-peak special to Gabor II.…

All I can think about is the impure blood roiling uneasily in my veins. Under normal circumstances, the faintest trace of human ancestry would be enough to keep me forever excluded from this place – and the last elf in my family line was four generations back.…