Our first SF short is a grim and gritty cybernoir: “Ghost in the Tank” by M.R. Robinson. If you’ve ever wondered what reality television will look like in the future, Robinson has you covered. David Marino returns to our pages with “The Overview Initiative,” a tribute to space travel and the human spirit. We also have two terrific flash pieces: “Memeostasis” from Benjamin Rosenbaum and “The Sharing of Some Familiar Song” by Adam-Troy Castro.

Our original fantasy shorts include “An Oral History of the Schooner Key Invasion,” a novelette from Alex Irvine that’s an absolute blast of cosmic SF adventure. Beesan Odeh’s new tale “Ash-Shūrā; or, A Book, a Bowl, a Bag of Coins” is a darkly mythical tale of suffering and trickery. We also have a flash story (“The Best of Intentions”) from Mari Ness, and another (“I Cut Off a Monster’s Arm. AITA?”) from Marie Brennan. And of course, the nonfiction team has put together a terrific array of book reviews and author spotlight interviews.

Thanks so much for joining us for another great issue of speculative fun!

But surely—surely—no one can think that she would respond by hurting an innocent child? Well. Not that the child had been quite so innocent, as a teenager, but—No. No. She is not that type of person. Not at all. She knows of evil spirits and wicked fairies, of course—everyone does—but she is proud to say that she is not one of them. Has never been one of them.

No, her intentions have always—always—been good.

Always.

No, if anyone had been misguided, had been wrong—and she herself did not think that was the case—it was the others. The others who had overloaded that poor child with gift upon gift upon gift, making her a target. With the best of intentions, of course—she would never deny that. They meant—she is certain about this—to be kind. And yet. Just look at the results. Not just the heads of state, but nearly every member of government—everyone who was in the palace at the time—not simply asleep, but essentially comatose for years. A full century, if she understands matters correctly, and she thinks she does. And all of the chaos, the destruction, the deaths that had followed. Proof—if any further proof were needed—of the dangers of any sort of sudden shift in government, or any sort of revolution.

And just imagine what might have happened without that thick, hastily raised wall of briars around the palace.

Yes, such an unpleasant thought—an unpleasant, she fears, truth. But she has never, she is proud to say, refused to face, to discuss, unpleasant truths.

But speaking of that wall—that hastily raised wall of briars and thorns? Again, she knows—she is certain—that it too was raised with the best of intentions. And of course it had saved any number of people—she won’t deny that, either.

And yet.

She herself will never forget—never—all of those bones, tangled in those sharp thorns and rotting roses.

The bones of ambitious younger sons, eager to turn this—this tragedy—into an opportunity for advancement. The bones of princes intrigued by the image of a sleeping, helpless young girl—such an unsavory thought, yes, and not one to dwell on. The bones of those who had merely come to marvel at the roses, and wonder.

The bones of those who had believed—truly believed—in true love.

Not all of them princes.

Struck to her heart—the very depths of her heart—she had gathered each and every bone, each and every fragment. The snapped leg bones. The shattered ribs. The delicate finger bones. She was certain—absolutely certain—that she had not missed a single one.

And once gathered, she had made the painful decision to return each and every bone, with her own, gentle, trembling hands.

It had been the only right—the only ethical thing to do. Even those more unsavory types—she did not wish to dwell on their inner thoughts—deserved a proper burial, at the very least. And, too, she was able to give her personal word of honor—her personal oath—that the dreadful barrier and its ravenous thorns were gone. That the castle could now be approached in complete safety. And that what had happened to their loved and unloved children could never—would never—happen again.

How could she—how could anyone—have guessed what would happen next?

She does not wish to take up any more of their time. Indeed, she should not—she cannot—not when fire is about to rain down on the castle walls, already gravely weakened—she fears—by a century of steady bombardment from rose petals and thorns. The incoming armies, she understands, have any number of advanced weapons, developed while everyone behind that barrier had slept, and she fears—she very much fears—that their leaders will not be inclined to listen to any opposition, or protests of innocence. Oh, not because they are consumed by vengeance. Certainly not.

Merely that these leaders are convinced—absolutely convinced—that they will not, cannot, be safe until the now exposed castle is annihilated. Completely.

And acting—she is certain about this—with the best of intentions.

And—oh dear. That was almost certainly a scream.

No, she cannot—she will not—take up any more of their precious time. Not now. But she hopes—she sincerely hopes—that they understand—fully understand—that she cannot be blamed for any of this. She simply cannot. And that she has always—always—acted with the best of intentions.

The story came directly out of two incidents around the same time last summer: a con released a panel description complaining about the existence of too many lesbian stories, and a couple of gaming websites started mass-censoring/banning queer games and creators. The way these events overlapped made both even more frustrating; looking back at my early handwritten notes for this story, the first line is “too many lesbians” in scare quotes. I could point to countless similar examples that also played a part in inspiring this story: Twitch marking queer content as “sensitive,” YouTube demonetizing videos that so much as say “gay” or “lesbian,” the fact that the mere existence of queer people can be deemed inappropriate. Growing up, I internalized the belief that the sight of two women kissing was more offensive than graphic violence. A world in which snuff videos are okay and queer intimacy is censored might strike some readers as unrealistic . . . but I think that’s the least fictional part of this story. (Then there are the smaller, sillier pieces of inspiration: replaying the ghost-fights is just racing your ghost in Mario Kart but make it sad and weird.)

In terms of process, I wrote the first draft during my final week at Clarion West last year, so it was not my usual process! I typically identify as a slow writer and meticulous outliner. In this case, I had one sleep-deprived week in which to write and submit a (mostly) complete piece. The published version hasn’t changed too much since that draft, although the brackets like [describe some things] and [make this part good] are now gone! I don’t write a ton of SF, and I remember feeling incredibly nervous to share the first draft with my classmates. I probably wouldn’t have gone back to finish it without the encouragement of my classmates and our instructor that week, Martha Wells. Special thanks to Rukman Ragas, Kehkashan Khalid, and Rida Altaf, who dragged this story over the finish line.

One of my personal favorite devices is the use of intimate second person like you are doing here with a first person narrator telling this story directly to a specific second person character as if in a letter or confession. Can you give us some insight into why this form of second person was right for the story and how it informed your writing?

This is one of my favorite devices, too! I think my love for this style—which I tend to describe as first-person direct address rather than second-person, since it’s all about the “I”—comes from my affection for the dramatic monologues of Romantic or Victorian poetry. Think Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (“Will’t please you sit and look at her?”) or Christina Rossetti’s “The Convent Threshold” (“There’s blood between us, love”), poems built around a shivery moment where you-the-reader feel implicated in the story being told. I love the way direct address can make a reader immediately uneasy, so I wanted to do something similar here: The first line of the story (“The first time you killed me . . .”) reads like an accusation, which I hope it feels a bit jarring, even if only momentarily.

Beyond that, too, I think direct address lends itself well to a story about obsession. For me, this story is all about peering into Emel’s head, so it had to be told in her voice—and every thought, for her, revolves about Mira, the “you,” who she could never address this honestly outside of her own head. And I also love trapping the reader in the head of a character who is also trapped in some way. I’m fond of the way in which the appearance of the real “you” can trouble the kind of claustrophobic intimacy we can get from direct address: When Mira actually appears on the page, she’s not quite the same as the “you” Emel has been addressing, which is disorienting for Emel and perhaps also for the reader.

While reading, I found myself really compelled by when you chose to repeat words or phrases and how that repetition demonstrated character and narrative progression. Did you have a process or method that guided your choices to repeat and where?

For a while, this story’s working title was “Again, Again,” so I was definitely thinking a lot about repetition! Actually, to some extent, I’m thinking about repetition any time I’m writing. Sound and rhythm are always top-of-mind for me, and intentional repetition is often a big part of that; I can’t call a draft finished until I’m happy with the way it sounds. (This goes back to my typical outlining process: I want to know every single thing that’s going to happen in a story before I begin so that I can focus entirely on the language itself once I start to draft!) Mostly this is instinct rather than structured process, but I do end up reading my drafts aloud more times than I can count.

So, repetition is a go-to for me, especially—and especially in this story—repetition with a difference in meaning. Like direct address, this is something I love in poetry that I’ve tried to steal for my own purposes: I love when poets play with forms that rely on repetition, like the villanelle, and I am a sucker for unexpected uses of anaphora or epistrophe. There’s an Elizabeth Bishop line I adore: “Nature repeats herself, or almost does: / repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.” I think repeat/revise might be the most natural, most fundamental of structures. We look for patterns and exceptions, we try and try again, we replay old memories on loop while asking “but what if this one thing were different?” This story makes that literal: Not only does repeat/revise happen frequently on a line level, but that’s the plot. Emel repeats and repeats and repeats, looking for a way to revise, revise, revise. With this or any story, I’m always trying to make the line level echo the biggest big-picture themes.

The setting of this story is not so dissimilar from internet and influencer culture now. Do you consider this story a cautionary tale of what’s to come if culture doesn’t change its course, or is this only a subtle exaggeration and the die is already cast?

This is a difficult question in the best way, and I think my answer is “both, maybe neither?” While I do have a lot of thoughts on internet and influencer culture, I wouldn’t call this story a cautionary tale, exactly—or at least I didn’t set out to issue some kind of warning to the reader. As a reader, I don’t particularly like stories where there’s a clear lesson, and I don’t love writing those stories. The thing that compels me about speculative fiction is generally not the way it can be used to ask questions or make claims about the future but rather the way it allows us to view the present from new angles. If I had to pick, then, I’d say this story is more exaggeration of our present than warning of what’s to come.

I think our current culture often demands the performance of vulnerability—go ahead, offer up your most intimate self for public consumption, you’re the product now, give us moremoremore!—and then responds to that vulnerability with a gleeful, sneering revulsion. That’s the intersection of technology/culture that I wanted to explore with this story, coupled with the issues of censorship I mentioned earlier: these cruel and strange dynamics, we want you and we hate you, we’re obsessed with you and we would destroy you if we could. So, the question that interests me is not “will technology/culture continue to develop in this particular way?” but rather “what does this do to people?” And that’s not a near- or far-future problem; that’s a right-now problem. It’s bleak, so the story is bleak. At the same time, though, I’m also not trying to issue a doom-or-gloom statement on the state of the world. So many things feel dire right now, but I’d like to think that the die isn’t already cast. I’m a big believer in the radical uses of hope. We must believe in the possibility of a better world. We must refuse to listen to those who would tell us otherwise.

What other stories or projects do you have out or coming out soon that you can share?

I’ve got a couple of stories coming out soon-ish, including a story in Fusion Fragment that I’ve been describing as “Julian of Norwich gets launched into space,” which is not accurate but also not inaccurate. Other than “Ghost in the Tank,” though, my favorite thing I’ve published in 2026 is “The Last God of Talam Dor”(bit.ly/3QIyg6d), a dark fantasy novelette that explores a lot of the same themes as this story: the intersections of queerness and shame, desire and devotion, love and suffering. I would recommend that one to anyone who read “Ghost in the Tank” and thought “if only this story had a semi-hopeful ending and also a keen interest in ancient and medieval myth and theology.” All my publications can be found at www.m-r-robinson.com!

I’m also currently working on a novel (or three, as is the way) but the biggest project devouring my free time right now is OTHERSIDE (bit.ly/4tdAUhM), a new magazine of speculative literature by 2SLGBTQIA+ authors, where I’m one of the co-founders and editors-in-chief. Issue 1 came out in March; by the time this interview is out, we’ll have just released Issue 2, and we’ll be preparing to open again to submissions in July! Like I mentioned, this is a tough time for queer creators and stories, so I hope curious readers will consider checking OTHERSIDE out. I’m very proud of the work we’re doing.

Stupid, stupid, to cry over something make-believe—stupid and ugly and pathetic, too, when already the only thing I wanted in the world was for you to find me pretty. I couldn’t help it. I hadn’t expected it to hurt so bad, dying in the sim. I hadn’t expected it to hurt at all.

We were piloting mechs that first simstream. My first, your first. I’d been signed with S1MULANT for two weeks. You had inked your contract the same day I did, but you still showed me around the house like you’d always lived there, like you already knew everything there was to know. You acted like you didn’t care when the other girls ignored us, so I did too. I learned how to make you laugh; you learned how to make me queasy with a glance. It wasn’t a surprise, then, when the agency asked us to stream together. We had chemistry. I thought we did, anyway.

But the rest of it—

I mean, I knew to expect a fight. Back before the content crackdowns, the most violent streams got the most viewers, and Daniel had been clear enough even in my first interview with S1MULANT that I should plan to spend at least half my stream time getting beat to shit in virtual reality. All kinds of fights, he’d said. All kinds of fights, yeah, but we all knew the fans went nuts for a girl in a giant robot. So, I was nervous the first time I hooked into the simtank, the first time we went live. I wasn’t surprised.

It was how it felt to die that surprised me.

I could feel your mech’s blows from inside mine: the jolt and shudder of being knocked around, the scrape of steel against my hull. But none of it hurt, none of it felt real, until a metal fist tore through my cockpit and sent me flying in a shower of sparks. I landed on my back already gurgling around a mouthful of blood, sure that was the moment the sim would end. Instead you hit eject, like you couldn’t stand the thought of an unfair fight, and landed at my side. No more mech-on-mech action. Not that chat seemed to mind girl-on-girl action—not when you straddled my hips and wrapped one gloved hand around my throat, gun in the other.

You looked scared. I’ll always remember how scared you looked, like you weren’t the one on top of me with a laser pistol in your hand—like it wasn’t you, like it was someone else shoving a gun into my mouth so hard my teeth cracked. I don’t think I ever saw you look that scared again.

At the edges of my vision, the superimposed chat overlay accelerated to match my heartbeat: KILL HER KILL HER KILL HER whipping past, KISS HER KILL HER KISS HER as the viewcount skyrocketed. Long before I’d signed the contract, I knew S1MULANT had a reputation for snuff videos. That’s what viewers liked: girls killing one another on loop, so realistic you wouldn’t know it was VR without the obligatory disclaimer before every stream. I knew what to expect. They’d told us what to expect. But—that doesn’t mean I was ready to be the one on my back in the dirt.

Someone spent enough bits that a song started playing. A kids’ song, something out of an old cartoon. You looked like you might be sick. Someone spent a thousand more—pingpingping, numbers flashing pink in the periphery—to put a glowing cowboy hat on you. Stupid. Stupid.

“It’s okay,” I said, or would have said, if you didn’t have a pistol in my mouth. “You look so beautiful,” I might have said, or “I’m really glad it’s you, Mira,” or “you can make it up to me later,” but I couldn’t say any of that, because then someone spent five thousand bits and the gun in my mouth blinked into a claymore, and chat went nuts, and my vision went black.

I came out of my simtank already crying, mouth watering so bad I couldn’t keep from spitting all over the perfect polished tile. Every inch of my body hurt just like it had in the sim. You were out of your tank and across the room before my vision cleared; you tore two wires coming out. Later, when Daniel delivered a bill and a warning, you said you didn’t care.

That was my first mistake. You said I don’t care about the bill, and I thought you meant I care about you. How was I supposed to know better, when you tore two wires trying to get to me? When you held my hair as I vomited in the corner? When you touched me like an apology?

“I’m sorry,” you said, “sorrysorrysorrysorry,” like you were about to start crying too. “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t even know they—that it would—fuckfuckfuck,” and then you tugged me close and pinned me against your shoulder despite my tears and my wet mouth.

The first time you killed me, I realized how much I liked it when you comforted me.

The first time you killed me, I realized how much I liked it when you hurt me.

The next day, when you asked if we could stream something different—a racing game or a truck sim or maybe just talking—and Daniel said no, I didn’t argue. So, that’s what we did. Again and again, that’s what we did. You killed me. You comforted me.

That’s what we did, until you ruined it.

• • • •

This time, when you kill me, I don’t end the stream.

After all these months, I’ve gotten better at separating simulated pain from my physical body, which is a polite way to say I don’t barf in the corner after every stream anymore. Instead I linger in virtual space—scrolling chat, catching my breath, saying hi to the regulars. You’re already gone. There’s no trace of you: just the sickly glow of the overlay. Same fight, different day.

The numbers look okay. Not good, not bad. My views have dropped lately, but they haven’t plummeted, which is more than some streamers can say post-crackdowns. For the most part, though, no one donates like they used to, not even my regulars. Feels like they’re rooting against me, and not in the fun i hope she gets ufckin pulped lmao way. Just bitching and moaning, nonstop git gud and show tits? and teabagging emotes. I know my streams aren’t as good as when you were here, really here. Still, I used to think people liked me. Now I don’t know what they like.

Someone donated a hundred subs in chat while I was busy getting my skull obliterated, which should make Daniel happy, at least. If the agency’s happy—if the agency leaves me alone—I’m happy. I don’t care about subs. I care about keeping Daniel off my back. And I care about my tips. A few thousand dollars more and I’ll be able to upgrade my simtank. The latest and greatest in simulated intelligence, the ad says. I check it a dozen times a day; I’ve watched every review.

I’ve been saving since you left. It’s slow. The bits people spend on emotes or power-ups go straight to me. I never see revenue from ads or subs. Fifteen percent goes to Daniel. Sixty goes to S1MULANT. Lucky thirteen goes to housing; staying in the agency house is mandatory, but it’s the first time in my life I’ve had a reliable place to stay, so I can’t complain. The rest goes to our debt. All the girls in the house lease our simtanks. Last time I checked, I was on track to pay mine off in twenty-seven years.

I swipe through a few other streams, stalling. A couple of the other S1MULANT girls are online. Ten thousand other strangers. These days, no one simstreams fights, not the way you and I do. The way we did. It’s not that people don’t want to watch girls die on camera anymore. The viewers for the VR streams are there. But—I don’t know. Everything’s different now. Everything’s harder. I try not to care. Try to keep my head down and pretend I don’t care about the algorithm pissing acid in my face.

Eventually, I log off and unhook myself from the simtank. The best part is the part where you kill me. This is the second-best part: the part where I get to admire the marks left behind by the machine. The wires leave raw patches on my arms; I already know there will be violent bruises around my eyes from the headset. They aren’t the right marks—the marks you’d left on me in the sim, never really there—but they’re something.

They’re proof that once you touched me.

Without the headset, the world shifts from lurid purples and neon-lit geometry back to the sim-room: damp, dark, cold. The lights went out a month ago. No one from S1MULANT ever came to fix them. We spend so much time in the tanks. It doesn’t make sense to keep the house nice too.

Outside the tank, outside the sims, everything is shit.

But in the sim, there’s only you. There’s you, and you, and you: a thousand recorded fights, each one home to a different memory, a different ghost. It’s almost like you never left.

• • • •

Daniel calls before I’ve even left the room. When I answer, his face looms larger than life in the center of my vision. He looks tired, like he’s forgotten to turn on his usual filters.

“Em, honey,” he says, like we’re friends, like he’s you, like he has any right to call me that: “Do anything else, I beg you. Anything. Sit there and talk. Take a shit on stream, for all I care. But this—no more of this. The fighting. The goddamned motherfucking lesbionic rerun show.”

“I brought in forty-seven thousand viewers at peak today,” I say, trying to find the doorknob through Daniel’s flickering face. He never makes an audio call when he can subject me to his face instead. Sometimes I fantasize about ripping the S1MULANT implant right out of my skull. They’d bill me for it, though, and probably sue me for breach of contract too.

“And, what, a thousand reports of adult content? Tell me, Emel, sweetie, is that good? Is it good, do you think, to have forty-seven thousand people watching a demonetized video?”

“Okay,” I say as flatly as I can. We’ve had this conversation a hundred times since you left. Blowing someone’s brains out in VR isn’t adult content, not according to the new terms of service. You can turn a face to paste. You can do worse than that, if you want. Put two men or two women together, though—let one of them touch the other’s throat just right—let them look at one another like I can’t help looking at you, the way I wish you’d look at me—and you’re in trouble, even if one is only a recording. That used to be different. A lot of things did.

“Okay?” Even through the static blue cast of the call, Daniel looks red. “Okay, okay, you want to get kicked around like a dog, so be it. We can work with that, honey. But no more reruns, no more dyke-drama-power-hour, no more woe-is-me. We’ll get some testosterone in there, set up a collab for with one of the boys from MCA, shake the censors off my back—”

“Okay.”

“What about the kid who does the shoot-’em-up content? Justin? Jason? Jaxon?”

“Okay,” I say again, flatter somehow. “Sure. Yes. Are we done? Can I go shower?”

He looks like he wants to strangle me. If he were here, he’d probably try. He’d grab my shoulders and yell like he used to yell back when he came to the house to check on us, back before the agency replaced his weekly visits with cameras in every corner. Used to be a lot easier for him to control what we streamed until someone realized it would be cheaper to leave us alone with the cameras and the tanks and the blown-out lights, even if that meant the occasional demonetized video.

Instead he ends the call, and I’m alone in the dark with the ghost of you.

Every corner of the house makes me think of you. In the white of the shower, beneath a flickering yellow bulb, a dribble of blood carves its way down my thighs to stain the water at my feet. I shut my eyes, tilt my head back, and remember leather-gloved hands, your high-collared mech-pilot’s uniform. I close one hand around my throat. I tell myself you’re the reason for the blood between my legs. Then I finger myself and pretend it’s you until Felicity pounds on the door and starts screaming at me to stop hogging the shower. When I get back to the bunkroom, I climb to the top and sprawl out in my bunk, so close to the ceiling I can almost feel it crushing me. I think about you. I think about the nights we spent in your bunk, me holding my breath, you whispering this doesn’t mean anything.

I think about calling you. I think about asking if you watched.

No, you would say. No, I don’t watch the simstreams, because you’re so much better than me, because you don’t think about me, because you don’t wonder, because you don’t care.

I don’t call. I never do.

• • • •

Every minute I’m not streaming is money lost; every minute I spend alone in my bunk makes me want to jump off the roof. So, when I wake up at four in the morning and see I’m not scheduled until eleven, I go straight to the simtanks anyway. S1MULANT doesn’t mind if we stream when we aren’t on the schedule so long as we don’t miss our scheduled blocks. They’d probably like it if we streamed twenty-four hours a day anyway.

I just—want to see you.

As soon as I go live, viewers trickle into chat. Regulars, mostly: the same names every day. I’m pretty sure some of them get off to the streams. To me. The worst ones tell me they do, so I don’t have to guess. You can’t use the tanks without going live. If we could, I’d never leave.

“Hi, chat,” I say, doing my best to sound cheerful. “Hi, junkman69. Welcome, rawdogrizz. Thank you for the subs, Mister_Bitch. Quiet in here today. How’d you get here? Stream coming up in search? Trying to figure out if I’ve gotten myself shadowbanned again, or—”

FIRST!!! LFG LFGGGG

???? is anyone elses audio fucked

can someone donte a sub :pray: :pray:

Lag lag lagggggggggg

do one where yiu get your brains bwlown out

I scroll through old recordings, doing my best to ignore the machine-gun ping of chat. It’s all here, Mira: every time you’ve ever killed me, every wound left in your wake. Laser swords on a spaceship bridge. An old-timey desert shootout. Lances on horseback. Chat lights up when I scroll past the laser swords. That’s what my audience likes. Mechs, lasers, spaceships.

I want something different today. I want to see your face.

The simtank can’t change the recording. You’re an echo. A ghost, just like in the racing games I used to play as a kid: a simulation of a simulation, forever retracing the steps the real you told the virtual you to take once upon a time. Everything will be different once I upgrade my tank. No more reruns. You’ll even be able to think for yourself, according to the reviews. Indistinguishable from the real thing! Meet your heroes in VR! Bring your loved ones back to life! A few thousand dollars more, that’s all, and I’ll be able to talk to you again, Mira. I’ll be able to ask you anything. Everything.

“I’m upgrading my simtank soon,” I say idly to the chat. “Content will be better then. If you aren’t subbed yet, now’s the time.”

If anyone responds, I miss it. I’m busy putting the final touches on today’s stream. I’ve picked a replay of one of our last fights. Not one of the historical settings, not some far-flung planet, but something closer to home: a bar brawl, all neon lights and pulsing beats and a bartender with more decorative implants than flesh pouring drinks in the background. My chat always likes it when there’s bystanders. Anyone who pays enough bits during this stream can watch the fight from the bartender’s body.

I swipe the overlay as far to one side as I can get it, trying to focus on your face instead. Sometimes the sims get your expressions wrong up close; you aren’t easy to replicate. But the basics are right. Those are your eyes, so brown they’re almost black and prone to crinkling at the corners when you smile your sidelong smile. There’s the little divot of a scar in your cheek. The bow of your lips, parting as you take your place across from me, something cragged and silver glinting in between your knuckles.

You look like you. I want you to be you.

“Let’s go, Em,” the ghost says in your voice.

I know everything you’ll do. I’ve replayed this fight more times than I can count. The hardest part is remembering what I did the first time. When the ghost of you comes at me swinging, I have to remember to turn my head so you’re punching my mouth instead of air. I have to make it look good. I have to make people want to donate.

Your first punch splits my lip and leaves my front teeth wriggling. With the next, I throw up an arm to protect my face and hear something crunch in my elbow, feel something pop, and then I’m laughing, falling over a chair, drooling red down my chin. Someone’s paid their way into the bartender’s shoes. They’re using the opportunity to smash every bottle on the shelf.

Mira—you look perfect. You do. Your hair’s rumpled like when you used to touch me in your bunk, except this time you don’t get to say this doesn’t mean anything, it’s nothing, I’m just stressed, because you can’t say anything now, because the fights were always something different, something more than nothing. A few loose strands of hair stick slickly to your brow; sweat drips from your jaw and catches in the dip of your collarbone. I want to lick it up. I want to be on my back with you on top of me, salt dripping into my eyes. No swords or pistols here, not unless someone spends enough bits. Just our fists. Just your hands on my body.

“Mira,” I croak. I can’t remember if I said your name originally. I don’t think so, because the ghost of you doesn’t react—just keeps hitting me, even when I can’t stop saying your name.

Someone donates fifty bits. I can see the notification in the periphery of my vision, right where everything has gone black and blurred. That’s fifty cents. Fifty cents closer to asking you the question.

Hit me, I try to say. Hurt me.

Again and again, you do.

• • • •

The first time we fought this fight—the one with the bartender, the one where you hit me until your knuckles were bleeding as bad as my face—I came out of the simtank with puke already yellowing my shirt.

It was always hardest dying like that: slow, then sudden. I remember clutching my nose, moaning low and awful like an animal, and I remember you grabbing me, half-gentle, half-violent. You thought I was crying from the memory of pain. I was crying because I didn’t want it to be over.

Somehow, without a word, we ended up together on the shower floor, both of us still in our clothes. When someone knocked, you reached up, turned the water on, and shouted something about almost done. Then, only then, did you ease my ruined shirt over my head and toss it aside. You took my hands in yours and squeezed my fingers like you meant to break them.

“I can’t do this anymore,” you said.

I didn’t answer right away—I couldn’t figure out what you meant—and you released my hands, then pulled your shirt off, too. For no reason. No reason, except to wrap your arms around me. I tilted my head to crush my nose against your neck and ended up with my eyes full of hot water.

“I’m leaving, Em. I called my parents last night and they’re making the arrangements. I have a trust I can use to buy my way out of the contract, and then I’m getting a real job. My dad’s going to let me work for him.”

Again I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. I didn’t have anything to say. What did you want me to say, Mira? Congratulations or wow or take me with you or—I don’t know. I didn’t know. Did you want me to beg? I didn’t have anyone to offer me a job. I didn’t have a trust fund. I only had you.

“The sims are so fucked,” you said. You were talking faster, gripping me harder. “It’s fucked, all of it. I thought it would be different, do you know what I mean? I thought it would be better.”

Easy enough for you to say, I might have said. You, who could buy your way out. You, who knew your parents would take you home the moment you were ready to leave. You, who had never wanted to kiss me in the same way I wanted to kiss you.

I licked my chapped lips and tasted copper. I inhaled, trying to find the smell of you—salt, summer, sunlight, coconut shampoo—and almost choked on a mouthful of water. “I like spending time with you,” I said, soft and stupid. “I don’t really mind the sims.”

You didn’t reply. Just leaned back and looked at me.

That was the moment. That was the moment I knew you would say I’m taking you with me, Em, we’re getting out of here, you and me. I knew it. Even if you didn’t want me, Mira, you cared about me.

I knew you did. I was so sure you did.

You swallowed hard. You took my face in your hands. Slowly, you pressed one thumbnail into my split lip until blood welled from the center.

“I thought this would be fun,” you said. “It isn’t fun anymore.”

I never thought this would be fun, I would have said, except by then you had one hand in my hair and your thumb in my mouth.

• • • •

When I get out of the tank, I have a dozen missed calls. For all of three seconds, I’m irritated. Then I realize it’s one in the afternoon, and panic takes the place of irritation. I’ve already forgotten the name of the streamer Daniel had picked for a collab. Jacob or Joshua or Jordan, some name like that, buried in an early-morning message I’d barely bothered skimming. I can’t even remember how I was supposed to contact him. The only thing I remember is that I was supposed to contact him. Two hours ago. In other words, I remember exactly enough to know I’m in trouble.

It’s been so long since I streamed with someone else. Someone other than you. I suck down a shaky breath, then another, one hand pressed to the cool, curved exterior of the tank to ground myself. For once, the darkness of the sim-room is a comfort. What’s the worst that can happen? Daniel screams at me? Fine. No big deal. S1MULANT sends me a bill? Sure. Enough debt and it stops being real. As long as they don’t start garnishing my tips. If that happened—I don’t know. I don’t know.

The next breath is a little easier, a little steadier. I hit play on Daniel’s first message and start scrolling through my notifications to distract myself from the lecture I know is coming: Daniel, Daniel, Daniel, Mira, Daniel—

I stop. Carefully, like someone has slipped a bomb between my ribs and one wrong movement will set it off, I fold my hands under my armpits and peer at the ceiling. Everything’s gone strange and slantwise. I count each breath. In, hold, out, hold, accidental thick wet wheeze, in. Four times.

These days, almost everyone sends video messages. Projections, simulations, whatever. It was different when we were kids, but now people want you to look at them, even if they aren’t really there.

Yours is just your voice. Maybe you’ve had enough of your face showing up onscreen. Maybe you don’t trust me with your face anymore.

“Forgive me for calling,” you’re saying. You sound thin and far away, nothing like my memory. Nothing like the recordings. “I was thinking about you, Emel. Not—well, anyway, you know. There’s something I wanted to talk to you about. Maybe we could meet up sometime this week.”

When I swallow, I taste blood.

• • • •

None of this is real, you used to say after a stream, when you pulled me close and touched my neck and we sat together in the tank’s cool shadow. I always thought you meant the sims. When you left, I realized you meant this. You meant the house, the agency, me. You meant everything.

• • • •

I can’t bring myself to call; I don’t trust myself not to say something I shouldn’t. So, I text you. Sunday? 2 PM? You insist on meeting in person, which makes sense: it’s hard to make private calls in the house. There are cameras almost everywhere and mics everywhere the cameras aren’t.

But—maybe it’s because you want to see me.

I plan accordingly. It takes me an hour to get ready. I put on makeup borrowed from the box under Sasha’s bunk, then take it off again when my reflection makes me flinch. I change my outfit three times before I give up and steal something of Felicity’s out of the laundry. Almost everything I own has a S1MULANT logo on it. I want to look good for you, though. I want to look like a regular person, like the kind of person you want to see.

I can’t remember the last time I left the house. We aren’t prisoners; it’s easy enough to apply for a daypass to take the train downtown. Still, it’s been a long time—I never wanted to leave when you were there, never wanted to leave after you were gone—and I’m twitchy from the moment I step outside until the moment I reach the café. I keep expecting someone to recognize me. It sounds stupid, I know. I’m just used to being watched.

I get there early, hoping to scope out the café. But you’re already there, because of course you are: sitting at a shady table right outside and flipping through a paper book like you’re some starlet in a period piece.

One glimpse and I go lead-footed and clammy, torn between wanting to run to you and wanting to flee. You look up from your book before I can decide. When our eyes meet, you smile. My stomach clenches.

Mira, you look like a stranger. I’ve seen you every day since you left. A version of you. But this version of you—that smile that doesn’t even make your eyes go crinkly at the corners, the bow-necked blouse that makes you look like you’re on your way to a job interview, your hair cut short enough to tuck behind your ears, even the slope of your shoulders—

Somehow, you look less real than you do in the sims.

You don’t reach for me when I approach. You don’t hit me in the face or try to hold my hand. You don’t even stand to greet me. “Emel, hi,” you say, and gesture at the chair across from you with one manicured hand.

Hearing you call me anything other than Em makes me want to collapse or die or melt into the sidewalk. “Your hair is different,” I manage. You’ve always had a gift for getting me to say the stupidest possible thing.

“It’s nice to see you,” you say. You slip your book into your bag. “I went ahead and ordered. Black, iced. Is that still what you like?”

“Right. Yes. Yeah, that’s good.” I can’t remember how to make small talk with anyone other than rawdogrizz and Mister_Bitch; I can’t find any of the words I’d practiced on the train. It’s all I can do to stumble ahead, stupid, always so stupid around you: “Do you ever watch my streams?”

“No,” you say. You lean forward, hands outstretched like you’re holding out a gift. “I wanted to talk to you—”

“Is that—are you engaged—?”

“No, no,” you say again, but that doesn’t stop you from jerking your hands back, tucking them under the table. “I wanted to offer you a job.”

“A job,” I echo. I squint at the table like I might be able to see through it if I just try hard enough. I don’t want to look at you. I can’t look at you.

“It’s a consulting gig. My parents are looking to poach a few people out of the agencies. We’re moving into the streaming space, and we need people who know that world. When they asked if any of the girls I knew could be a good fit, I thought of you. We’ll buy out your contract, obviously.”

I look up. “You thought of me?”

“I thought it might make sense for you.”

“Is there housing?”

“A complex, like any of the tech companies, but it’s nicer than the S1MULANT one. No bunks, private bathrooms, all the amenities.”

“Will you be there?”

“No. No, it’s not like that. It wouldn’t be like it was.” You pause. “There’s a morality clause. It’s—important to my parents.”

I feel sick. I feel like you’ve got me on my back in the dirt, one hand around my throat and a gun in my mouth. I press my fingers to the sticky underside of the table, then drag them towards me until I feel the snag of a splinter. “What do you mean? Maybe I don’t remember what it was like.”

“You know what I mean, Emel.”

And you get this look. I know this look. I know the bobbing of your throat like you’re swallowing a stone. I know the darting of your eyes like you’re afraid of being watched, afraid of being caught doing something you shouldn’t. The last time I saw this look, you were cradling my face in your hands and saying I thought it would be different, I thought it would be fun.

“The way you felt about me,” you say.

• • • •

The first time I told you I loved you—the only time I ever said it out loud—we were streaming.

I didn’t mean to. I know you don’t believe me, Mira, but I swear it wasn’t planned. It just felt right, somehow, to choke out those words like a bloody-tongued prayer as you beat me senseless with the flat side of a broadsword. I remember the taste of that sword. I remember how beautiful you looked. It’s the only recording I’ve never replayed: a historical sim, complete with shining armor. You looked radiant and furious at once, like some avenging angel come to punish me for the sin of wanting you.

Outside the sims, I couldn’t be someone who loved you. Outside the sims, I was only Emel. I never would have dared to say those words, not when all I wanted was to please you. In the sims, though—

“I love you,” I said, spilling blood down my chin and onto your boots, “I love you, I love you so much, please,” and you stopped. You brought the tip of the sword to my throat. You looked like you were going to be sick.

“Em,” you said. Em, and nothing else.

Then someone in the chat spent three thousand bits on power-ups and the blade at my throat blinked into a chainsaw.

You didn’t try to comfort me, not that time. When the stream cut, you ripped out of your tank so suddenly the machine blared in protest, then dragged me out of mine by the collar of my sweat-soaked t-shirt before I could catch my breath. “What the fuck—what the fuck was that about?”

“Mira—”

“Putting on a show?” you snapped. “What, for chat? For an extra tip? Anyone could see that. My family could see that. Do you know what my parents would do if they thought—if I was—if we—? Are you stupid? Do you think that’s okay, to fuck with someone’s life like that?”

I didn’t say it for chat. I didn’t say it for your family. I said it for you, only for you, and I said it because it was true. But I couldn’t figure out how to tell you that. Your anger in that moment felt so much worse than when you hit me in the sims, and I just wanted everything to feel good again.

So I shoved you.

You shoved me, too.

I stumbled back, then came up half-laughing, half-crying. “It’s okay. It’s okay, you can hit me, if that would help—”

You did. By then, you were crying too. It was the first time I think you’d ever wanted to touch me as badly as I wanted you. I was so glad. So what if the price of your touch was a torn-up lip and a bloody nose? You hit me. You hit me until we were both crying too hard to fight anymore, and then we crumpled to the floor, tangled together like one body. There on the cold tiles, you pressed your open mouth to my red cheek and dug your nails into my arms and neither one of us said a word for a long, long time.

It felt good. It felt sweet and right and true, like the first time I came to your bunk in the middle of the night and you dragged me in and pulled me against your chest and touched my waistband and said is this okay? but what you meant to say was this doesn’t mean anything and I said yes but what I meant to say was I love you, I love you, please.

• • • •

I need air. I need air like I’ve never needed air in all my life. Standing up from the table feels like coming out of a sim, like I’m one wrong step away from vomiting all over my shoes. “Fuck off,” I say, only it comes out strangled. I’m too busy trying not to cry to come up with a better line.

You’re faster than me, though, and you’re out of your chair with your hands around my wrists before I can escape. Immediately, the heat of your touch claws an awful, shameful sound out of my throat. Your breath catches; you inhale as if you mean to speak.

Then you press your lips into a thin line, drop my hands, and wipe your palms on your perfectly pressed slacks.

“What did you come here for?” I croak. “Just to fuck with me?”

“Please, Emel, don’t make a scene. I came here to help you.”

“You feel guilty,” I say.

“I don’t feel guilty. That’s not what this is about.”

“What is it about?”

You falter. “Please,” you try again. “Please, let me help you. Is this what you want? To waste your life working for S1MULANT, watching these—these replays? I—I mean, it’s fucked up, you’re sick, I’m sorry—”

“I thought you didn’t watch my streams.”

“I don’t.” A muscle jumps in your jaw. Then: “Once.”

“Are your parents proud?”

“Em,” you say.

You look almost like you might cry. More than anything, you look like you wish I’d stop staring. I can’t help myself, though. I can’t stop studying the rise and fall of your chest, the movement of your throat, the pale scar on your cheek. I know you. I know every inch of you, Mira. So it’s easy for me to imagine what it would be like, working for you. Getting memos from you. Staring at your name in my inbox. Pretending I don’t know what your laugh sounds like when you’re trying to be quiet in the middle of the night, pretending I don’t know how it used to feel against my skin, pretending I don’t care about the fact that I’ll never truly know your hands again. Maybe I could learn to see you from across the room without thinking about what it felt like when you hurt me, when you held me. Maybe I could even learn to like it: your cool pity, my hot shame, this smile that doesn’t reach your eyes.

Maybe that would be better than working for S1MULANT.

But I don’t think so.

I want to ask: Do you hate me? I want to reach for your arm and say if you hate me, you can tell me. I want to grab your hand and drag it to my mouth and say: Do you want to hit me? Would that help? Because it would be okay, Mira. If you wanted to touch me—it would be okay. I’d like that.

“Can I have a little money?” I ask. “Instead of the job? A few thousand dollars. That’s all I need. It would make a big difference.”

• • • •

I never said it outside of the sims. Not those words, not I love you. I don’t think I ever said anything half that true to you in all the time we lived together. But—the night I said it in the sim, the night I hit you and you hit me in the sim-room, I came to your bunk when everyone else was asleep.

In the dark, with a sliver of moonlight cutting your face in two, you didn’t look real, not like in the sims. You were a ghost, a glitch, a dream. When you saw me, you smiled. You shifted to make room, then patted the space beside you just like you’d done a hundred times.

“Could you love me?” I asked. “Could you ever really love me?”

You hesitated.

I held my breath.

• • • •

“Could you love me?” I ask. “Could you ever really love me?”

You hesitate.

“Even though I’m like this?” I continue. I can hear the desperation in my voice. It’s awful, I know, stupid and ugly and pathetic, but I trust you not to mind. I trust you like I did at the beginning. “Do you think you could love me even though there’s so much wrong with me? Even though I’m sick?”

And the you who is not you—the upgraded you—the you I spent all afternoon training to say the right things—the you who will never call me and ask me if I want to work for your parents—the you who will hold me when I ask and hurt me when I ask but who will never, ever pity me, not even for a moment—smiles. Your eyes crinkle at the corners. You reach for me like you don’t care if this video gets demonetized, like you don’t care about the debt I’ll never pay off, like you don’t care about my contract, like you know exactly how long I’ve been waiting to ask you this question.

“Yeah,” you say. “Yeah, Em. Of course I love you. Come here.”

I dim the overlay and mute the chat. I spit blood in the dirt. Through the black shadow of your fallen mech, I crawl to you. “Say it again,” I say.

You do. Again and again, you do.

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month, it’s time to take your pills, rub some ointment on those aching bones, and try to ignore all those creeping chills as you descend deeper and deeper into the madness of the grave in The Dorians, by Nick Cutter.

(Upfront warning—this book has quite a bit of body horror in it, as well as descriptions of suicidal ideation, so if that’s not your particular cup of tea, you might want to take a pass.)

The Dorians is a psychological horror/thriller that follows five terminally ill elderly people, all of whom have chosen to die via medically assisted suicide, and their subsequent trip to a remote island in the Canadian wilderness after being told of an experimental procedure that could not just revitalize their aging bodies back into the flower of youth, but might in fact cheat death forever. Once there, they meet the young scientific genius behind the treatment, Dr. Astrid Marsh, and her three assistants (one a bioethicist, the other two general maintenance and labor), as well as a mystery woman with whom Astrid is unreasonably close (one might say possessively so).

Naturally, experimental scientific treatments being performed in isolated laboratories by an unhinged researcher with barely anyone around means that absolutely nothing goes wrong, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Haha. HaHAha. HAHAHAHAHAHAAaaaaa oh yeah, no, that’s not at all what happens, but you’ll have to read the book to see just how horrible everything gets, and let me tell you, it gets pretty disturbing.

Longtime fans of the genre will instantly recognize the bones of The Dorians story (it’s a heady mix of Jurassic Park, Frankenstein, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, with hints of The Thing and *gestures at Stephen King’s bibliography*. Still, Cutter does an excellent job of swirling up these different flavors into a taste decidedly his own. The initial pacing of the book is deliberate and methodical, unfolding the cast of characters in a mix of third-person descriptions and first-person thoughts. It’s a difficult method that can easily lead to motives feeling shallow and underdeveloped, but Cutter masterfully establishes seventy to eighty years of life in a series of snapshot vignettes for each character that allow them to occupy the space needed without drowning the reader in endless backstory. In addition, Cutter also peppers in various deliberate narrative not-quite-fourth-wall-breaking asides that help build a slowly growing sense of ominous disaster that lurks just around the next page.

Then, you flip the next page, and now the disaster is there, and it’s coming for you.

Once the action gets going and characters start facing consequences for Knowing Things Wot Are Not Meant To Be Known Of, Cutter cleverly executes a shift in focus from “what will go wrong” to “will anyone survive and how,” while also subverting some standard horror tropes in interesting ways. Cutter also does a masterful job of letting the latter part of the story breathe, in that it isn’t a breakneck pace to the finish line once everything goes wrong, but rather a slowly building crescendo that ebbs and flows while constantly ratcheting the tension higher and higher, and the ending was fantastic in how it wrapped things up while still leaving a frisson of fear lingering in the narrative air.

Overall, if you’re looking for an escape from the horrors of everyday life into the horrors of classic human hubris, you can’t go wrong with The Dorians. Living forever is something best reserved for the minds of madmen and monsters.

Souls arrive here as if tugged by a current. They cross the lawns without footsteps and enter halls that smell faintly of chalk and autumn leaves. It is here they are told they have died. Not passed on, as it seems to those who grieve them. Passing on is what they are here to do. No more than three months. “A season,” the counselors call it. “The last season of your life.”

Then you must go.

The counselors do not pretend to know what comes next. They only know this: Before a soul’s last season ends, each must review the contents of their lives and come to terms with them if they are to move on to whatever does come next.

Sometimes a soul will choose the screening room, where their lives play out before them on the silver screen. Others prefer the library, where they review their lives in the pages of a book. No matter which way they choose, on the screen or within their own minds, their lives—every ordinary afternoon and terrible joy—scroll by. And, at the end, when the lights come up in the screening room, or when a librarian comes round the corner to the table where someone had been reading their book, the soul has gone. The screen is black. The book’s pages are empty.

The only other choice, if it can be called that, is to leave the institute and try to remain on Earth, feeding on whatever attention or remembrance or fear you can muster or find in others, as your spirit grows thin and sharp. Those who don’t want to leave the world call this survival. The counselors call it denial.

Patrick King had been a counselor for more years than he could remember. He himself had died at seventeen. His boyfriend Jonas had been driving when he’d slid on black ice and they’d spun into a ravine. Jonas survived. Patrick didn’t. When he’d arrived at the doorstep of the institute a few days later, inconsolable, Graham, his own counselor, an old man with hands like folded maps, couldn’t persuade him to view his own life in this, his last season. On Patrick’s last day before he had to make the choice, Graham didn’t appear behind his desk in his counseling office. Instead, a file folder with papers drifting out of it lay on Graham’s desk, and when Patrick picked it up, he found the name of a new soul at the institute listed underneath his own, which had the additional title of counselor beside it. His first client. The institute had chosen him to take Graham’s seat.

It was a rare mercy and a cruel one. Counselors were allowed to stay beyond their last season, allowed to exist without their spirits withering, though this was only possible in the service of helping others do what they themselves couldn’t.

They were also allowed weekend furloughs. On rotation, of course, as new souls were always showing up. Patrick always took his turns.

The rules were clear: The living could never see the dead as themselves, so Patrick became a rotation of stranger’s faces in Jonas’s life. A graduate student passing Jonas on the steps of the Cathedral of Learning. A middle-aged runner on the trails in the park. A regular at the café where Jonas worked the espresso machine with the same careful hands he used to place upon Patrick’s cheeks as he kissed him. Patrick learned to speak in half-true sentences, to smile vaguely, without recognition, to accept the dissatisfying ache of being known only as a blur.

It was better than nothing. He told himself that every time he returned from seeing Jonas and the life that had been taken from him.

Then Sara arrived.

She was sixteen and defiant, two weeks late to the institute after her death, which was nearly unheard of. Most souls followed the paths there within days, without even trying. Sara, though, had lingered in the rooms of her old life for a time instead, refusing the call. When Patrick explained the institute—“its . . . dynamics,” he called its processes—when he told her about the clock ticking inside her chest, Sara laughed, sharp and disbelieving.

“You’re saying this is it?” she said. “Three months and a movie or a book? Do you at least offer snacks?”

“It’s more than a movie or a book,” Patrick said. “It’s your life.”

“Then why are you still here?” she asked. Her stare was cold, and Patrick looked down at his hands, folded together on the desk that used to be Graham’s.

They met three times a week. Sara talked about her mother, who had survived her husband’s death when Sara and her brother were small children, taking care of them on her own afterward. She talked about her brother’s talent for drawing, about the way, before she died, she’d been planning to dye her hair blue. Patrick listened and learned the dangerous geography of sympathy, how some counselors loved their assignments too much.

Still, when Sara smiled, something loosened in him. When she cried, he forgot the clock.

He told Anne he needed help.

Anne had been at the institute longer than anyone—over a century, some whispered. She wore her time lightly, like a shawl. Patrick told her Sara was difficult. Anne watched him with eyes that missed nothing.

“You’re attached,” she said gently.

“I’m failing,” Patrick said, and it sounded like truth because it contained some.

Anne told him not to worry. She said she would take Sara’s case on herself.

Sara did not forgive him the change, though. A few weeks before her last season was supposed to end, she disappeared from the hallways of the institute altogether, slipping away at dawn, the front gates sighing as if they sensed her run past them.

Patrick broke the rules and sought her out, finding her in the neighborhood where she’d grown up, lingering near her house, watching the lights go on and off in the windows, pressing herself against the walls of her old life. She whispered into her mother’s dreams and laughed when her brother shivered for no reason he could think of. She was learning the tricks of staying. Patrick watched her practice, watched the way she dimmed and sharpened by turns.

The memories of his own visitations rose up in him, the hope they’d given him initially, before even that was eroded by disappointment. Each time he visited, he got nothing but distracted smiles from Jonas. And the way Jonas would pause when Patrick—always a stranger now—entered a room, as if a memory had brushed past him. Patrick saw the truth. His visits were a haunting. They kept Jonas, too, turned toward a life he could no longer fully inhabit.

“You came,” Sara said when she finally noticed Patrick watching her. There was a note of triumph in her tone. “See? There’s another way.”

“This isn’t living,” Patrick said. “It’s waiting.”

“For what?” she demanded.

“For the courage to leave,” he said. And then, because honesty had finally caught him, “I’m not judging, so don’t worry. I don’t have it either.”

They sat on the curb as the streetlights hummed awake. Patrick told her about Jonas. About the faces of strangers he always had to wear. About the bargain he’d made and had once called a mercy.

Then he made a choice he’d been avoiding since he was seventeen.

“It’s your turn now,” he said. “At the institute, I mean. You’ll have time. You’ll help people. You’ll do better than I did.”

Sara stared. “And you?”

“I guess it’ll be whatever comes next,” he said, then surprised himself by grinning. “And besides, I want to see my life whole. The design it makes in the end.”

Patrick entered the screening room alone after returning to the abandoned school on the hillside, then the lights dimmed. The film began with a boy on a hillside, the city spread bright below him. It ended with a hand on a steering wheel and love so fierce it broke the world open.

When the lights came up again, Patrick was gone.

On a day not long after, Jonas sat in the café with sunlight on the counter and felt—without knowing why—that something had finally loosened in him. He smiled at a stranger without feeling there was anything strange about it.

On the hillside above the city, where the ivy crept and the shattered windows gleamed, Sara took her seat behind a desk to learn the work of waiting.

And somewhere beyond the screen, whatever comes next continued, persistent as a river.

Well . . . Let’s just say I wrote it after November 4, 2024.

Jacey Watkins has such a strong and relatable “why” when it comes to her pursuit of a future in the time travel field. Do you feel like you have a similar “why” when it comes to your own pursuit of writing?

I have been a professional writer since I was sixteen—which is fifty years now. I have always wanted to write. I think it comes from being the youngest of four. One of my earliest memories is of five adults (my parents and siblings) sitting in the living room reading, while I went from person to person begging them to play. They were reading instead. I was maybe three. So sometimes I think this was just a bid for attention that became a lifelong fixation.

College is such a formative time for so many people, when they learn truths about themselves they may not have even suspected existed. What drew you to writing about this particular time of life?

My father, brother, sister, and brother-in-law were all college professors. My eldest niece is as well. College was the pinnacle of existence in our family. I have a degree in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and I’m attending the University of Nevada, Las Vegas for another bachelor’s because I love being in school. One class per semester because I don’t have enough time for even that, but it keeps me on campus and interested.

If we do ever crack the secret of time travel, do you think we will be able to use it responsibly?

Nope.

Is there a project you are currently working on? And if not are there any themes, objects, or news that might be tickling your fingers?

I’m working on several. I’m finishing a side series in my Fey universe, called the Qavnerian Protectorate series. The most recent novel, The Unexpected Hero, just came out, and I’ve finished the next one. I’m also working on the next book in my Diving series, as well as two standalone novels. One is a crime novel set in the 1970s and another is dark fantasy that will appear next fall.

Timed Midterm

Instructions:

• Time Allotted: 130 minutes
• No Breaks Allowed.
• No Outside Devices Allowed.
• Any Student Caught Time Traveling During an Exam Will Be Expelled.
• Questions Disappear Once Answered.
• Students May Not Read Ahead.
• Answer the Questions in the Order in Which They Are Presented.
• The Essay Sections of the Test Require Actual Writing.
• Proctors Are On-Site Just to Remove the Testing Device Once the Student Has Completed the Exam.

Reminders:

• Any Student Who Participates in an Unauthorized Use of Time Travel Will Be Expelled and Not Allowed Near Any Time Travel Program Existing Now or in the Future or in the Past.
• Any Student Who Uses Time Travel for Personal Gain (including but not limited to improving GPA) Will Be Expelled.
• Any Student Tampering with Time Travel Equipment or Devices Will Be Expelled.
• Any Student Caught Cheating Will Be Expelled.
• Cheating Is Defined in Time Travel Behavioral Code Book in Sections 34785.55A Through 89662.99Z.

Test Includes:

• 15 True or False Statements
• 35 Multiple Choice Questions
• 10 Short Essay Questions
• 5 Short Essay Research Questions
• 5 Essay Questions (Student must respond to no fewer than three to pass. A response underneath the required minimum word count will be considered No Response)

Excerpt:

Multiple Choice

18. You have been assigned the termination of a minor historical figure. You:

a. Research heavily and plan your action for maximum local-time impact.

b. Research heavily and avoid taking action during times that would cause major local-time impact.

c. Seek clarification from your handler about whether or not to cause major local-time impact.

d. None of the Above.

19. You have been assigned the termination of a major historical figure. You:

a. Trust the research you have been given and take the suggested place and moment, following suggested guidelines.

b. Assume Time Travelers before you have attempted a termination of the same figure and failed. You do your best to research their failures before making your plan.

c. Assume Time Travelers before you have attempted a termination of the same figure and failed. You trust those failures are already included in the research. You travel to the suggested place and moment, and follow the suggested guidelines.

d. None of the Above

Excerpt:

Essay Questions

2. The correct answer for Multiple Choice Question #18 is D: None of the Above. Given that answer, outline the steps you would take from the moment of assignment to action in the field. Remember to take timeline disruption into account in your response.

As a reminder: Question #18 posits that you have been assigned the termination of a minor historical figure.

Minimum 500 words

4. The correct answer for Multiple Choice Question #19 is D: None of the Above. Given that answer, outline the steps you would take from the moment of assignment to action in the field.

As a reminder: Question #19 posits that you have been assigned the termination of a major historical figure.

Minimum 2000 words

• • • •

Jacey Watkins’s fingers were shaking as she stared at the five remaining questions on her Advanced Temporal Disruption Midterm. She was already exhausted from responding to ten “short” essay questions.

Now she hit the “long” essay questions and as she read them, her heart sank.

She hadn’t expected the damn midterm be so hard.

Six students were left in the room, including her. Everyone was bent over the creaky device that had greeted them on the individual half-desks that looked like they had come from 1960. That she could recognize the date desks arrived in classrooms was a tribute to her education at the Holcomb Time Travel Academy so far.

The academy was the best in the entire country, and in the top ten worldwide. Only time travel academies in Budapest and Australia were ranked higher in historical detail—something that had interested her when she applied.

She hadn’t realized just how twisty the physics and mathematics of time travel classes would be. Nor had she realized how much timeline disruption considerations would mess with her brain.

Still, she had done the best she could in the class so far, and she had managed to regurgitate most of what she learned in the true/false and multiple choice sections. The answers to the short essays came almost verbatim from her notes—which she had memorized—and the research questions hadn’t seemed hard. (Which worried her.)

The device that she had to take the test on was antiquated and finicky. It had a keyboard—an actual keyboard, not a holoboard. She had to be careful to hit the correct keys, which also slowed her down.

And the device caused other problems. Jacey had missed an entire true-or-false question because it hooked up to the question ahead of it, and vanished off her screen when she answered the previous question.

She couldn’t tell the proctors either, because calling them over would effectively end her exam. One poor kid had done just that after the first few questions, saying something about an unanswered question disappearing from the board, and instead of answering him, they confiscated his device. He tried to argue, but they wouldn’t listen. They ushered him out quickly, so that he wouldn’t disrupt the rest of the class.

But he had.

Of course he had. This midterm was a third of the grade, and there would be no makeup tests. Professor Stephenson was exceptionally draconian that way.

Just like this room. It was stuffy and smelled of chalk. There was a blackboard behind the two proctors—both graduate students who looked like they would rather be anywhere else. They weren’t allowed to use any personal devices while they monitored the exam. They also weren’t allowed to look at the devices they had taken from the students after the students finished.

There was antiquated wireless bandwidth in this room, designed in that old-fashioned way for two reasons. The first was pretty simple: Using ancient tech made it that much harder for scientifically minded students to cheat. The second was practical: This classroom was normally used for freshmen who needed to experience historical reality before they headed back to some unspecified past.

Historical reality was cool for the first day or so. After that, it was one of the uglier aspects of any time travel course.

Sitting in this combination chair desk, made entirely of wood, was screwing up her back, which should have been the least of her worries. She still had questions to answer, and not a lot of time left.

It didn’t help that a part of her—a very large part of her—had picked this moment to freak out. She had known going in that this class would be hard, but she figured she could handle it. But the math wasn’t favoring her right now. If she missed too many questions and didn’t finish these essays, she would fail.

And anyone who failed the midterm had no real way to make up the points. Professor Stephenson did not give extra credit. She didn’t give points to people who participated in class. Unlike most professors, she didn’t even give a point for attendance.

She only counted the midterm, the presentation, and the final. The midterm was tough, the final was rumored to be nearly impossible, and the presentation was an adventure in torture—or so some of the upperclassmen had said.

No wonder most students failed this class the first time around.

Jacey stared at the remaining five questions. Question two looked hard, but she could write a short answer. And, at least, there was the temporal disruption clue.

Question five also allowed for a short answer, but she didn’t even understand the question. She had a hunch she understood questions three and one, and that scared her, because whenever she felt like she understood something in this class, she learned that she had understood it superficially.

But she was never one of the students that Professor Stephenson had dealt with contemptuously. All Professor Stephenson had said to Jacey when she dared answer in class was a bland Good enough.

Jacey wasn’t sure what Good enough meant or how it would translate to grades. Did it mean that she was mediocre? C-worthy? Did it mean that she would barely pass? Did it mean that she understood everything and didn’t have to worry about that topic anymore?

She had no idea.

And she suffered through each class, no matter what was going on in her life. Attendance in person was required, unlike some of the large freshman seminars that had a video component. Mandatory attendance usually factored in a day or two for illness, but not in Professor Stephenson’s class.

Professor Stephenson explained it up front: When you are traveling in time, you do not get a personal day because you’re feeling a bit off. You don’t get mental health days. You don’t get to shut down because you’re not feeling up to the work. The tougher you become about yourself and your schedule, the better off you will be.

Jacey took that to heart. She took everything about this class to heart. She recorded her notes as well as wrote everything down. (One of the many rules of this program was that potential time travelers had to learn how to take notes. Penmanship was a required one-credit class. Writing was essential in the past and could not be ignored in the future—just in case there was some kind of technological breakdown. Therefore, penmanship had to be learned [and learned well].)

Jacey paid more attention to this class than she had to her first Physics of Time Travel class, the one that everyone had said was stupidly hard. It had been, but not as intimidating as this class.

None of the other prerequisites for this class had been this kind of stupidly hard either. She had loved Historical Research, Advanced Historical Research, and all of Time Travel Theory courses that she had taken so far. The other two classes, Temporal Disruption I and Temporal Disruption II, had messed with her brain, but hadn’t been so tough that she wasn’t sure she understood it.

Advanced Temporal Disruption messed with her brain and made her feel like she was the dumbest person in class. She wasn’t—or, at least, she hadn’t been when the class started.

Now, maybe she was. Because only fifteen of the thirty-five students who had signed up had made it to the midterm exam. Most had flamed out, unable to handle Professor Stephenson. Others thought the workload untenable. A few, according to rumor, anyway, dropped out of school entirely.

Jacey had to suck it up to deal with Professor Stephenson. She was the most unpleasant professor it had been Jacey’s misfortune to study under.

If someone got a question wrong, Professor Stephenson would go after them until they either figured out the answer or burst into tears.

She would wait impatiently while they sobbed, tapping her foot or sighing heavily. Some students couldn’t stop sobbing and they would leave the classroom.

Others sobbed, choked, and then the crying subsided. Once it did, Professor Stephenson would launch into a tiny lecture.

There’ll be no one to guide you down the garden path if you’re traveling in time, she’d say. You might want to rethink your career choice.

Maybe some had. Jacey hadn’t. She was as committed as ever. The study was fascinating, but hard.

And this test was extremely difficult.

Question one required only 250 words, but she could go longer if she needed to. Question three was a gimme, but she didn’t understand question five.

Question two seemed like it would be hard to answer in 500 words. She would have to go long. She decided she would answer one and three, and see how much time she had left. If it was only a few minutes, she would have to go for question two. Otherwise, she was going to tackle question four.

She had tried to answer a different version of question four in class and gotten the dreaded Good enough answer. But right now, Good enough was better than nothing.

She answered question one first, and had to pad her answer to hit 250 words. That worried her, but not enough to reread her response.

Answering questions one and three had taken ten of her forty minutes, which meant she had to write exceptionally fast to answer question four.

Which she did.

She had missed a few steps when she tried to answer it in class, but she remembered those steps now, and she put them in her outline—and she put them as early as she could so she wouldn’t miss them again.

So . . . if she had received an assignment to terminate a major historical figure, she would:

1. Clarify the assignment.

This was one of the steps she had missed in class. She had to make sure that the individual named was indeed the historical figure and not some minor historical figure with the exact same name. Make no assumptions. Assumptions had terrible consequences. (That was something she had missed in class.)

2. She would do months-worth of research because she had all the time in the world.

In class she had mentioned that she would do as much research as she could before starting the assignment and had gotten a Good enough response. But then, in an unusual move, Professor Stephenson had explained further. Jacey didn’t have to leave on the suggested start date, because no matter what she did, the timing of her trip was not dependent on the date in the modern era. (That was, and still felt like, an embarrassing well duh.)

3. She would examine all of the research material provided.

4. She did not have to follow the suggestions in the assignment.

She simply had to make sure the historical figure was wiped out of the timeline before he (and it was usually a he) did whatever it was that made him a major historical figure.

5. She would examine the timeline—as best she could—to make sure that her actions would not cause a severe timeline disruption.

(Thank you for the reminder, question two)

6. She would leave the time period as soon as she completed her mission.

7. She would return to her time and not explore the changes caused by her action, unless required by the person who had given her the assignment.

8. She would wait for her next assignment and “forget” she had ever participated in this one.

She wrote those points as quickly as she could. She wrote the bullet points first and then explained them. She had a feeling that eight points weren’t enough, but they would get her to 2,000 words in the time she had left, so she was going to have to make do with that.

She knew she was missing something, probably something important, something that would impact her grade as much as losing that true/false question to the stupid device malfunction, but she was so stressed, she couldn’t figure out what it was she was leaving out.

She reread what she could in the question four essay, tweaked it a bit, and knew she wasn’t going to come up with two more points.

With five minutes to spare, she raised her hand and Bales, one of the proctors, responded. He had been the resident assistant in her dorm during her freshman year and when he picked up the device, he smiled at her.

He inclined his head toward the door, and mouthed, Relax. Not because he knew she had this—he didn’t—but because he knew she couldn’t do anything else about it.

She was done, and that little device held a portion of her future.

She stood. Her hands were still shaking. Her arms were sore from resting on the uncomfortable desk, and her back hurt so badly that she was going to have to do some stretching exercises when she returned to the dorm.

She made her way out of the classroom, going around the back so that she wouldn’t go near the proctors. There were still three students left, typing madly, the panic clear on their faces.

She had a hunch they weren’t going to finish, and oh, were they going to be upset if that was the case.

Finishing was half the battle, at least that was what she had been telling herself.

She let herself out the door and into the hallway. The hallway was much cooler than that classroom. Other classroom doors lined the walls ahead of her, but they were closed and the interiors—visible through tiny square windows built into the doors—were dark.

She headed toward the staircase leading to the ground level, grabbing the thick wooden railing, and wincing as she felt a splinter go deeper into her hand.

The Class Survivors, as they called themselves, had promised to meet in Gareth’s Pizza Parlor, a 1970s-type hangout that was two blocks off campus. Technically, anything said at Gareth’s was not subject to the recording and tracking that everyone assumed was being done on campus.

Of course no one had proved it. But everyone was nervous about everything at Holcomb Time Travel Academy.

She picked her way down the stairs. Their centers were worn down from thousands of feet—or maybe it had been designed that way for historical accuracy.

Right now, she was peeved at historical accuracy. It made her head hurt. Her shoulders ached, and she was so tired.

At least this midterm had been her last before the one-week break. Next year, she wouldn’t get a break if she took classes in the fall semester. She would have to live through an actual time travel to a Thanksgiving dinner, held somewhen in the past. After American Thanksgiving had been invented by . . . oh, God. The name escaped her. Some leader or other during some war or other.

Her brain was shutting down. She needed food and caffeine and maybe, just maybe, she would allow herself to have a beer.

She shoved her way out the double doors and stopped on the sidewalk.

A cold wind had come up since she went inside. It blew dried leaves across the sidewalk and smelled faintly of snow. Winter was supposed to come early this year, and, frankly, she welcomed it. Her wardrobe—her real wardrobe—was better suited to cold temperatures than hot ones.

When she had applied for short-term time travels, she had asked for cold climates, because she just couldn’t imagine heading back to somewhere with deadly heat and no air conditioning. She had classmates who were in training now for those assignments, and that meant studying in actual deserts, without any modern protections at all.

She couldn’t think of a better definition of hell.

Usually that thought made her smile, but on this day it didn’t.

Beer. Pizza. The food of Gods or at least students for centuries.

The campus was mostly empty. Students tended to flee when they had completed their final midterm. There was still one day left of classes this week, but all that meant was that a good three-quarters of the students were already gone.

She always found the empty campus creepy. This place had wide sidewalks and comfortable places to sit. Built-in amphitheaters and large terraces in front of buildings of all different styles, all designed to accommodate camaraderie and lots of discussion.

On days like this, cold and gray with a growing wind, it felt like the entire community had been abandoned long ago. The decay on the buildings—the mold along one side of the Historical Reality Building: Post-Modern Italy, the cracks along the façade of the Physics Building, the scum at the edge of the pond in front of the Historical Reality Building: Unspecified Medieval Europe—added to the feeling.

She hurried past all of those buildings, heading toward Gareth’s Pizza. Ahead, a high speed train went by on its elevated track, reminding her what century she was in. Some private vehicles, all silver and sleek, were nose-in along the only available personal parking.

People milled around, although not everyone was a student. Most seemed older, probably professors, finishing up their grades—a task, one of her profs freshman year had said, that seemed to go back to time immemorial. And then he had laughed, because he had started his class that fall with a speech about the way that phrases like “time immemorial” meant nothing once time travel was invented.

There were stairs that led to the Sandimus Street, one of the thoroughfares that surrounded campus. Most of the streets had themes, usually some historical period that was easy to replicate, just so that the businesses could appeal to students.

Few businesses were as successful as Gareth’s, maybe because Gareth’s got the atmosphere right and the food was good.

She could smell the garlic, tomato sauce, and the baking crust as she approached. Her stomach growled.

The building was an unassuming single story structure that had initially been made of wood. Some more wood had been added at some point, looking like it had been glued on, and then there had been an ill-advised white stucco phase in an attempt to mimic some kind of Italian architecture.

The stucco had been removed as quickly as it had been slapped over the wood, but remnants remained—and melted—along the sides of the building, mixing between the gravel in the flower beds, the evergreen shrubs, and the dead bushes that no one had bothered to remove.

Jacey stepped over some broken glass and onto the cracked sidewalk. Her hands had stopped shaking but she was still on edge, going over and over the exam in her head, trying to figure out what else she had missed.

The big wooden door slammed open, narrowly missing her, and some students came out, huddled in thick jackets. They were laughing and talking about where they planned to go for the week. The smell of alcohol and pizza wafted out behind them, making her stomach growl again.

She slipped inside without having to touch the door, and then stood for a second as her eyes adjusted to the darkness of the interior. The overhead lights were always thin here, and the lighting toward the back was minimal.

There were lights on the tables, but they only illuminated the patrons, not the rest of the place.

Even Gareth’s was emptier than it should have been in the middle of the afternoon—five full booths with pizzas in the center; four people huddled over a slice at the bar, looking morose; and a couple of servers, standing near the open kitchen window, talking to two of the bakers.

Her group was at a table beneath a television set from maybe the early twenty-first century, playing a football game that had definitely come from that time period.

The table had the remains of three pizzas, their pans piled on top of each other, dishes pushed to the side. Two full pitchers of beer leached foam over the edge, and no one cleaned it up.

Six people were still there, but there were four more empty seats, which meant that a few folks had already left.

She hurried to the table and grabbed one of the empty chairs near the wall.

“There’s no pizza here,” she said, looking at the stacked pans.

“I’m up for ordering more,” Clyde said. He was square-jawed and handsome in a 1940s movie star way. Sometimes he accented that with hair gel and a thin mustache, although today, it was all gone.

His dark blond hair was mussed and there were deep shadows under his eyes.

“Anyone else?” Jacey asked. “Or should I just get a slice?”

“Pepperoni,” Nevin said—or at least that was what she thought he said. He’d clearly had a lot to drink. His blue shirt was half unbuttoned, revealing a thatch of black hair on his chest, and his dark brown eyes were glazed.

She took that muttered maybe-pepperoni word as a yes, and flagged down one of the servers. It had taken her half of her freshman year to get used to ordering food from actual people, so that she had the practice under her belt when she did travel into the past.

She still found it deeply inconvenient.

She ordered a pizza and a foul fizzy drink that replicated something called a Diet Coke. She’d developed a taste for it, however, rather liking the chemical flavor it left on her tongue.

Maybe that was why she’d be good at going into the past. She wasn’t that fussy about food that she should have found disgusting.

“Took you long enough to get here,” said Carly, who was on her second go-around in Advanced Timeline Disruption. Half the rumors that Jacey had heard about the difficulty level of the class had come from Carly, and in the beginning, Jacey had thought that it had just been some form of sour grapes.

It hadn’t been.

But that didn’t stop Carly from jabbing at her.

“That midterm was hard,” Jacey said. “I was being cautious.”

“I was cautious and it didn’t take me that long,” Carly said.

Jacey felt a stab of anger. She had done her best and she was tired. She didn’t need Carly’s criticisms right now.

“Some of us haven’t had the benefit of trying twice,” Jacey said.

Carly’s cheeks flushed. The jab apparently hit its mark.

“Not yet, anyway,” Carly said, and spun out of her chair. She walked fast to the bathrooms in the back.

“She’s in a bad mood,” Jacey said.

“Aren’t you?” Tito asked. He had kept his mustache from a Spanish Civil War reenactment he had to do for his Historical Reality: Rise of Fascism class. His black hair was growing out, though, revealing light brown roots.

“I don’t know,” Jacey said. “I’m too shaken up to know what I’m feeling.”

“I’m feeling grumpy,” said Angie. Her face was mottled, and her eyes red. Maybe she had been crying too, although Jacey couldn’t tell. She had learned, in the past six weeks, that Angie cried easily but the crying seemed to be part of a process—Angie would cry first, then straighten her spine, and get on with whatever she was facing.

“I’m thinking of dropping out,” Nevin said. He’d said that before, but this time, he sounded serious—or as serious as someone could be when they’d had too much beer.

He was tilting in his chair. Only one hand braced on the nearby wall kept him from sliding under the table.

“Again?” Carly asked. She had returned to the table with a handful of peppermint candies wrapped in some kind of clear plastic. “What’s causing it this time?”

The question verged on mean, but Nevin didn’t seem to notice.

He pushed himself into a sitting position and focused his bleary red eyes on Carly.

“Terminate,” he said. “They made me think about terminate.”

He stood up, swaying a little. He clutched the back of his chair to steady himself.

“I’m going home,” he announced and staggered out of the restaurant.

Everyone watched him go. Then Carly said, “He didn’t pay again, did he?”

“You think he forgot or is this drinking thing an act to get us to buy him food?” Mary W. asked. She no longer needed the W after her name, but the group had kept it there because Professor Stephenson had assigned it when it turned out there were four Marys in class.

“Maybe both,” Clyde said.

“No matter what it is, I guess I’m on my own for pepperoni,” Jacey said.

“I’ll have some,” Clyde said.

“Me too,” Tito said. “I think I’m just going to eat my way through the next three days.”

“What’s the next three days?” Mary W. asked.

“We get our grades in three days, or have you forgotten?” Carly said.

“Time means nothing to me,” Mary W. said.

In the early days of this class, that would have gotten a laugh, but it didn’t now.

“The word terminate bother anyone else?” Angie asked. Her voice was wobbly, and her nose had grown red. Jacey hoped Angie wouldn’t start crying again. It was always unpleasant when Angie started crying.

“Why would it bother us?” Jacey asked. She wanted to nip this entire topic in the bud. “It’s all over the readings and the exercises. It’s not like we haven’t discussed it before.”

“We haven’t, though, not really,” Angie said. “I mean it’s kinda there, but we are just heading into that stuff, right?”

She looked at Carly for confirmation. Carly was unwrapping one of those candies. The rest were in a pile next to a puddle of something or other—maybe beer.

“You’re asking me?” Carly said.

“You’re the only one who has had the class before,” Angie said.

“I don’t know what other classes you’ve taken,” Carly said. “Or what lectures you listened to.”

“We all knew what we signed up for,” Tito said. “They told us we can change the world, and we knew that might include what they’re calling termination.”

Maybe Jacey did want a beer, particularly for this conversation. She supposed it had to happen at some point, but she wasn’t ready for it.

Besides, if she was going to have a deep philosophical discussion, she wouldn’t have it with these people. Maybe with the group from her first Physics of Time Travel class.

The hints in that class about alternate timelines and the effect of chaos theory on changes caused by time travel had intrigued her. And her classmates there had been interested and interesting.

She had hoped to get into Advanced Physics of Time Travel next semester, even though she’d been told that was a class for researchers, not for actual travelers in time.

The prof of her first physics class had hinted that too many alternate timelines caused them to collapse inward and destroy all the work that the time travelers had done.

He made it sound like history reverted to its original timeline, but one of her later professors had scoffed at the idea.

Those were the kinds of things she wanted to discuss with actual smart people, not this group, which—if the classroom discussions were any indication—occasionally had trouble grasping what timeline disruption actually meant.

“Not every trip to the past involves a termination,” Mary W. said, repeating what they had all learned as freshmen. “You have to be superspecial to qualify for that level of time travel.”

The most senior level. Something most of the people in the Academy would never qualify for. Yet they were being quizzed on it.

“Termination is such a bloodless word,” Angie said. “We all know what it means.”

This conversation wasn’t going to end any time soon. Jacey sighed. Now, she wished she hadn’t come here or ordered the pizza.

“Do we?” Jacey asked because she was hungry and she was feeling pissy.

“It means we’re going to kill someone.” Angie’s voice wobbled again. “We had to imagine the steps we would take to kill someone.”

“Well, that’s about as blunt as it gets,” Clyde said.

“But that’s not true,” Jacey said. “We’re usually not killing anyone. Termination means we take them out of the timeline.”

“Yeah, usually with one of those old-fashioned rifles,” Angie said.

Carly unwrapped another candy. Her mouth was already bulging with two of them, but she crammed the third in anyway.

“None of you have had Professor Warthe’s Ethics of Time Travel yet, have you?” she asked. It was a bit hard to understand her because she kept moving the candies from one side of her mouth to the other. “He spends four weeks on this topic. It’s what made me stay at the Academy. I was thinking of dropping out after failing this class.”

That had Jacey’s attention. She hadn’t realized that Carly had been thinking of dropping out. Carly had seemed bulletproof, like nothing about the classes bothered her.

“What did he say?” Tito asked. He was leaning forward.

Carly sighed. “You realize you’re asking me to explain four weeks of lectures in a single answer.”

“I’m asking you what made the difference for you,” Tito said.

“Okay,” Carly said. She put the rest of the candies in the pocket of her sweater, then played with a piece of that strange plastic wrap. It crinkled as she spoke. “He said nothing about time travel is simple.”

“That’s a ‘well duh,’” Clyde said. He moved to one side as the server showed up with Jacey’s pizza.

Jacey cleared a spot on the table for it, and grabbed a plate that looked clean enough. She was so hungry she could eat the plate. The pizza’s cheese was still bubbling. The pepperoni had curled, making little cup shapes that held a ridiculous amount of grease.

“I mean it,” Carly said. “The answers are weird and tough. Like, so let’s pick some twentieth-century boogeyman like the profs always do. If you, say, get rid of that Hitler guy by making sure his parents never meet, are you terminating him?”

“He won’t exist,” Tito said, “so yes.”

“But you’re not doing something we think is reprehensible,” Carly said. “You’re just stopping two people from getting to know each other.”

“Timeline snapback,” Mary W. said. “At least I think that’s what it’s called. They’ll meet later. If you do something simple like that, it usually doesn’t work.”

“Or does it?” Carly asked. “Because it took one sperm and one egg to make a monster. The female cycle guarantees that particular egg will be gone even as little as six months later. So it would be a different egg meeting a different sperm, even though the couple is the same.”

“And if they name the kid Adolf?” Tito asked.

“It won’t matter. He won’t be the same kid genetically. I mean, you’re not the same as your siblings,” Carly said.

The men were looking at her, as if trying to understand what, exactly, she was talking about. Apparently, they hadn’t been through any of the biology classes yet.

“That simple change, though, creates a question,” Carly said. “And here it is: Did you ‘terminate’ one of the boogeymen of the twentieth century?”

“Well,” Clyde said slowly, “using the terminology of the Academy, yes, you would have.”

“Exactly,” Carly said.

Jacey served herself a piece of pizza. The cheese stretched, and she had to use her forefinger to separate the cheese strings from the entire pie. The cheese was hot and burned into her skin.

She was pretending not to be involved in this conversation, but she was listening. And she wasn’t sure she was believing anything she heard.

“You’re still an assassin.” The voice belonged to Nevin. He was standing—or rather, swaying—near the table.

“I thought you left,” Tito said. He didn’t sound happy that Nevin had returned.

“Left my wallet when I paid,” Nevin said.

“You didn’t pay,” Mary W said. “If you don’t have your wallet, you lost it somewhere else.”

Wallets and purses were another thing to get used to. Jacey hated both of them, because they made paying so very hard. She had to remember that her wallet contained her payment cards, which the Academy gave out to students at the start of the term.

Most places around the Academy only took payment cards or cash, which was a real eye-opener. It was annoying. She had lost or forgotten her wallet more than once.

“I’m sure it’s here,” Nevin said. He wasn’t slurring his words as badly as he had.

He leaned over and grabbed things on the table, lifting napkins, sliding plates, shoving glasses aside. He reached for Jacey’s pizza, and she moved it out of his way. She had no idea where his hands had been, and the very idea of that disgusted her.

He ran a hand through his hair, making it all stick up. “Okay, that’s not going to be any fun,” he said. “I don’t even know where I was today.”

“The midterm,” Carly said. “Then here.”

“Maybe I forgot it at home,” Nevin said.

“Maybe,” Carly said. Her tone said, Get the hell out of here.

“Hey, Nevs,” Clyde said. “What did you mean when you said that you were forced to think about the word terminate?”

Nevin rocked back on his heels, nearly lost his balance, and put his hand on the back of a nearby booth. The woman in the booth slid away from him, as if she expected him to reach for her.

“I said that?” he asked.

“About the exam,” Clyde said.

“Hm,” Nevin said. “I guess today is the day I don’t remember nothing.”

He pushed himself upright, then started to totter away from them. Then he stopped, lifted a hand with the forefinger pointing, almost like an exclamation point, and turned around.

“I don’t know what I meant,” he said, “but I have been thinking about it. They’re turning us into assassins. On purpose. In defense of the timeline.”

Then he leaned forward, brushing close to the woman in the booth again. She was watching him now.

“You know,” Nevin said, “that’s the other thing they don’t explain. Which timeline?”

His voice had become strident. Half the people in Gareth’s turned toward him.

He didn’t seem to notice.

He pivoted again, had to grab a different booth for balance, and then staggered forward.

“You guys see my wallet,” he said loudly, “you save it for me, okay?”

Then he continued out the door, without waiting for a response.

“That was fun,” Clyde said, meaning the opposite.

Jacey took a bite of pizza. She had been too mesmerized to do it earlier. The pepperoni was crisp, but the crust was slightly burned. Still, it didn’t matter. She needed food.

“What does he mean ‘which timeline’?” Angie asked. “I thought there was only one timeline.”

“One main timeline,” Mary W said. “They said that a lot freshman year.”

“But which one is it?” Angie said. “In that Physics class, they said we would create hundreds of timelines in our lifetime if we traveled in the past. So how do we know which one is the main one?”

Her words hung over the group. Jacey continued to eat her piece of pizza, not saying anything. What was there to say?

They were all tired, they’d all had a tough exam, and they had been drinking. Ruminating like this was a luxury, not a necessity.

Unless you were Nevin. Who was beginning to sound like he might not return at all.

Although maybe that had just been the alcohol talking.

She sipped her Diet Coke thing and grabbed another slice of pizza.

“You’re being quiet,” Carly said to her.

“Eating.” Jacey deliberately spoke with her mouth full.

“You’re still being quiet,” Carly said. “What’re you thinking?”

Jacey sighed. She didn’t want to talk.

She chewed, swallowed, and chased the food down with more fake Diet Coke. Then she let out a burp that made Tito slide back on his chair.

“Impressive,” Clyde said with a grin.

Jacey hadn’t burped like that to impress. She had done so to make them stop paying attention to her, but it didn’t work. Now they were all staring at her with something like admiration.

“Carbonation,” she said to Clyde.

“You’re dodging me,” Carly said. “You’re thinking something.”

“Why do you care?” Jacey asked.

“Because you’re always interesting,” Carly said. She wasn’t saying it as a compliment. She seemed to mean something else by it.

Jacey ripped the crust off her piece of pizza. She made it into a meticulous job, doing it slowly.

“These conversations are dumb,” she said. “You knew what you were getting into. Everyone wants to change the timeline. Everyone wants to be a big hero. And then you find out that maybe you have to shoot a shitty human being dead or you have to poison some vicious murderer guy, and whoa! You’re surprised. Only you’re supposed to research a job when you get it.”

“After you got it,” Tito said.

“You should have some basic knowledge of the time period,” Jacey said. “You probably know who the target is.”

“Unless they’re—what did Professor Stephenson call it?—a minor historical figure,” Mary W. said.

“So quit the job. Walk away,” Jacey said. “And if it all bothers you now—”

As she said that, she looked directly at Angie, whose bottom lip was trembling.

“—then drop out like Nevin is threatening to do. Or change your major to ethics or philosophy. Or do the science crap, in biology, like Carly was talking about, or maybe figure out why too many changes causes timelines to collapse.”

“Wait! What?” Clyde asked. “What’s this about timelines?”

Jacey waved her hand to shut him up, dripping red sauce in the center of the table.

“That’s not important,” she said. “What’s important is that you gotta figure out what you want to do here. And in your future.”

That phrase was something all of the professors said. Time travel could get confusing. People had to pay attention to their own lives, lived from one point to the next, even if they were going backwards in time.

The future was the future from this moment in human history.

Your future was the next moment (or moments) in your life, even if you were in, say, 1875.

Past future was the future for the regular (non-time traveling) folk in 1875.

It could get extremely confusing.

And her head hurt. Maybe she should have some beer after all. It would probably help her sleep.

“So,” Angie said, “it doesn’t bother you to kill people?”

“You know,” Mary W. said, “that was in our college applications.”

“And I got asked it in the interview,” Tito said.

“Me, too,” Clyde said.

“It’s standard,” Carly said. “But at that point it was theoretical. I bet all of you said some version of Not if they’re a bad person. Am I right?”

She was right about Jacey. But now Carly had her wondering. Did the time traveler path (upper level) include lessons in killing? Like the military did, maybe. (As if she would know. She had never been near the military.)

It was so weird, though. She was sitting here, listening, feeling her headache get worse, and she was slowly realizing she wasn’t bothered by the word terminate at all. Or the fact that she would be the one to do the dirty work.

“Found it!”

The shout caught everyone’s attention in the restaurant. Nevin was leaning in the door, holding up his wallet. He was grinning and swaying, still clearly drunk.

He staggered back inside, waved the wallet at the group at the table, said, “The cash is still in it too!”

He tossed all of his cash on the table in triumph.

“Bet you haven’t seen money like that before!” he said loudly.

“Oh, I have,” Carly said, pulling the money toward herself, and placing it on top of one of Gareth’s ridiculous paper invoices. “And that should pretty much cover us for the entire amount.”

“Hey, no!” Nevin said. “I’m not paying for your pizza.”

“Why not?” Clyde asked. “We’ve paid for yours all semester.”

“Jeez,” Nevin said sinking into a chair. “I’ve been robbed after all.”

And then he reached for a beer, clearly thinking it would make the pain go away.

• • • •

The first Monday after Fall Break, only nine people showed up to Professor Stephenson’s Advanced Temporal Dislocation class. Angie was not one of them. Neither was Nevin—or the kid who had his device taken away near the beginning of the midterm.

Jacey sat in her usual chair toward the back, but it felt silly to be back there. The room was built for forty students and had never been full for this class.

Now it looked ridiculously empty, with everyone scattered along the rows. Professor Stephenson didn’t seem to mind.

She hadn’t even looked at the class yet. She was a tall, thin woman who favored loose black clothing that made her look even taller and thinner.

She stood in the bottom of what looked like half a bowl. Behind her was a blackboard that she never used, and in front of her was some kind of projector that had been made for presentations in the early twenty-first century. Jacey knew enough to figure that someone needed one of those laptop computers from the period to make the projector work, but she hadn’t seen anyone do it yet.

Jacey was tired. She had traveled during Fall Break, although she hadn’t gone home. She had driven to her grandmother’s and then driven back. Jacey had actually rented a real personal vehicle because she didn’t want to risk talking to anyone on public transport. She wanted time to think, and driving—actual physical driving—gave her a chance to do that.

Her grandmother had lived near the great time-travel hub of Dixon, Illinois. Dixon had been in the middle of nowhere when the time-travel industry started. The flat land, the easy access to several great universities, and the unwillingness of the small-town residents to ask questions had been the perfect place to found an industry that reveled in secrecy.

Jacey’s grandmother had lived there her entire life, and her grave was on a little rise in a cemetery just outside of town.

Jacey had never met the woman, but had come to the gravesite ever since she had been in high school. It was the perfect place to think.

Besides, she had a hunch that her grandmother had been a kindred spirit. Her marriage to Jacey’s grandfather had been, in his words, “mercifully short,” and had produced two children, one of whom had been Jacey’s father.

He had hated his mother, and had felt that the world was a better place after she had died. But his stories about her—that she wasn’t always home when she was supposed to be, that sometimes she seemed older when he saw her after only a few hours away, that she was secretive and seemed to know more about history than anyone he had ever met—led the entire family to believe that she worked for one of the many time-travel conglomerates that had risen around Dixon.

It was that idea, and the fact that someone not her grandfather had sprung for an actual grave in a choice spot on a hill overlooking the city, someone who invested enough to put a sculpture of a slender woman with a stunningly beautiful face on top of the headstone, someone who had placed one word beneath the statue—Beloved—that intrigued Jacey from the start.

At some point, she would research her own grandmother. Until then, she was the only family member who visited.

She sat graveside, staring at the birth and death dates, and wondered what kind of living happened in between them.

This time, she had asked a quiet question of the beautiful woman on top of the stone: Did you consider yourself an assassin? Is that why you grew increasingly hard?

Of course Jacey got no answers, not from the grave itself. But the gravesite had calmed her.

It was one of those timeless places, at least in the United States. Cemeteries had existed even before the country’s founding. The cemetery had housed the city’s finest for hundreds of years. It had also been full when her grandmother had been buried there. No one new was supposed to get a spot.

More proof, according to Jacey’s father, that his mother had traveled in time. She had probably bought the spot when she went back to kill a senator or something.

At Christmas, Jacey had tried to tell her father that time travel didn’t work that way, especially for the travelers, but he didn’t want to listen. He barely talked to her anymore, saying that she was emulating a person she had never met, and that was wrong.

But he emulated dozens of different historical figures and he had never met them. Jacey had only pointed that out to him once, but once had probably been one time too many.

Her family didn’t want her here at the Academy. They hadn’t funded her education. And she really hadn’t talked to them since she started taking classes there.

During the break, she had had a big decision to make. She had only gotten an eighty-five on her midterm in this class, which meant that she had to do extremely well on the presentation and the final to pass.

That grade really had been a crystalizing moment, and she could understand why some of her classmates had not come back to class—and might not have returned to campus at all.

Time travel wasn’t easy. It required the thinking that military leaders had to do in war—that it was worth sacrificing this area to gain in that area.

Such thinking—such experience—came with great power. One person really could change a timeline. But it also came with a strange anonymity.

She knew the names of generals and military leaders from all of her favorite moments in history.

Aside from the founders of time travel, she did not know the name of a single traveler—and she never would.

“Miss Cullen! Are you going to continue to woolgather or do you have an answer to the question?”

Professor Stephenson’s nasal voice pierced through Jacey’s thoughts. She hadn’t even realized that the class had started, let alone that she had been asked a question.

She was even more tired than she thought.

“I’m sorry, Professor,” she said. “Could you repeat the question?”

“Did you do the reading and research for today’s class?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Jacey almost felt like she should stand up to take the questions.

“Then answer a question for me. Would you terminate John Wilkes Booth?”

Jacey’s mouth went dry. John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, whom some still considered to be the greatest president of the United States.

Jacey made herself swallow. “I assume the job is designed so that Abraham Lincoln would live out his presidential term?”

Professor Stephenson had walked to Jacey’s side of the room, but hadn’t come up the stairs. She was holding a pencil in her hand, and had another stuck in the graying bun at the top of her head. She would have looked absent minded, if it weren’t for her very sharp blue eyes.

“I did not tell you the goal of the termination,” Professor Stephenson said, “and I will not. Sometimes, you must determine that on your own.”

Jacey nodded. She had done the single chapter of reading on the man, but nothing more.

“Well, then,” said Jacey, “since he died shortly after the assassination, I’m going to assume they didn’t want him to get to that end date. It would have the bonus of preventing Lincoln’s death.”

“Why do you consider that to be relevant?” Professor Stephenson asked. “I asked you if you would terminate him?”

“I think it is relevant,” Jacey said. “I’d need to know what the goal was so I could plan the job.”

“Hm,” Professor Stephenson said. “Anyone else want to weigh in?”

No one raised a hand. People tended not to volunteer in this class, and Jacey had a hunch that the lack of volunteers would continue now that the class was smaller.

“All right, then,” Professor Stephenson said, “you’re still on the hot seat, Miss Cullen. Would you terminate John Wilkes Booth?”

Jacey bit her lip and thought about it.

Everyone knew that Booth had assassinated Lincoln. But Booth had also been part of the most famous acting family in America at that point. He had performed all over the country, and the Booths had become some of the best known Shakespeareans in the world.

His brother Edwin’s contribution to theater was still studied, or so the research book had said.

And Jacey didn’t know what the relationship between Edwin and John Wilkes had been, nor did she know if John Wilkes had any children. She did know that he hadn’t married, but she didn’t know much else.

“No, ma’am,” she said after a moment. “I don’t have enough information to do the job.”

Professor Stephenson’s eyebrows rose. The response clearly intrigued her.

“Even though Booth is one of American’s villains,” she said crisply, “you would not take the assignment to end his life?”

Jacey’s heart was pounding and her mouth had gone dry. Fortunately, her hands were clasped on her lap or everyone would have seen them shaking.

“That’s correct, ma’am,” she said.

“Hmph.” Professor Stephenson turned away, toward Clyde’s side of the room. He was frowning at Jacey and shaking his head slightly.

But before she completed the pivot, Professor Stephenson stopped and pivoted again, until she was facing Jacey.

“You wouldn’t take the assignment,” Professor Stephenson said, as if she was trying to clarify this in her head. “Because you value life?”

Jacey answered before she even had time to think about it.

“Because I value specificity,” she said.

The edges of Professor Stephenson’s mouth edged upward, and then her expression returned to its normal glower. She nodded once, then turned back toward Clyde’s side of the room.

Clyde was still staring at Jacey, as if he couldn’t believe she had said that. He opened his hands slightly as if to say What the ever-loving fuck?

Professor Stephenson caught the move. She focused on him.

“Mr. Auella,” she said, “would you take the assignment?”

“Of course I would,” he said with a little too much enthusiasm. “I mean you said it. He’s one of America’s villains.”

Professor Stephenson nodded, then faced the class. “And yet,” she said, “we know of him. Do we know why we know of him? If he’s one of America’s villains, shouldn’t some time traveler have ended him by now?”

No one volunteered. Jacey’s heart was still beating too quickly. She didn’t want to be on the hot seat again.

“Why hasn’t anyone?” Professor Stephenson asked.

“Because the time period is protected,” Mary W. said. Her voice sounded thin. That might have been because she was sitting way up in the back or it might have been because she clearly was feeling tentative about her answer.

“That’s a myth,” Professor Stephenson said. “Haven’t your other professors informed you of that?”

“I—um—didn’t have—um—no,” Mary said, her cheeks flushed. She looked down.

“Physics of Time Travel, people.” Professor Stephenson clapped her hands. “Why hasn’t anyone offed John Wilkes Booth yet?”

Tito cleared his throat. The sound echoed in the large space.

“Mr. Pluma,” Professor Stephenson said. “Do you have an opinion?”

“A guess, ma’am,” he said. “I think that’s all we can have.”

She stared at him. So did everyone else. Jacey had to turn in her chair so that she could see Tito’s face. His teeth were tugging on his lower lip.

She doubted he even knew he was doing that.

“Do you care to share your guess with the class?” Professor Stephenson’s sarcasm was cutting. It used to make Jacey flinch. But she had trained herself to sit still during any harsh remark from Professor Stephenson so that she wouldn’t react at all when Professor Stephenson treated her badly.

Tito cleared his throat again. “Um, well, physics of time travel,” he said. “We go back, and one of us offs John Wilkes Booth. That creates an alternate timeline. So if we weren’t privy to the mission, we stay in this timeline, where this Booth guy never died.”

“And the others?” Professor Stephenson asked.

“What others?” Tito asked.

“You said ‘we go back’ and ‘one of us’ offs—colorful word, that—Booth. What happens to the others who went back?”

“That’s—ah—Advanced Physics of Time Travel,” Tito said, his voice wobbled. “And I’m taking that next semester.”

Professor Stephenson rolled her eyes. “Has anyone taken Advanced Physics of Time Travel yet?”

No one raised their hand. Everyone stared at her. Jacey hadn’t taken the class, but even if she had, she wasn’t sure she would have raised her hand.

When Professor Stephenson was in this mood, tangling with her was not advised.

“Miss Cullen,” she said, making Jacey jump.

“I haven’t taken the class either,” Jacey said quickly.

“I presumed as much when you did not raise your hand,” Professor Stephenson said.

Jacey’s cheeks flushed.

“I want to ask you a different question,” Professor Stephenson said.

“Okay,” Jacey said quickly. She wanted to get past that awkward moment.

“Let’s pretend that you have been given the assignment to ‘off’—” Professor Stephenson nodded toward Tito “—Mr. Booth.”

“Okay,” Jacey said, and immediately wished she hadn’t. It was verging on a nervous tic.

“Let’s say that the company making the assignment doesn’t care at all about the history of theater or great actors or renown Shakespeareans.”

Jacey started to say Okay but caught herself.

“Let’s say that to this company, the entire Booth family was fair game. Their research says that aside from the—well, rather sizeable—impact on American theater and, of course, the even more sizeable impact of Mr. Booth’s assassination of Mr. Lincoln, the entire Booth family of the mid-nineteenth century made no impact on history that this company cares about. Would you take the assignment then?”

There was a trap built into the question, but Jacey had no idea what it was. She didn’t like the assumption of no impact outside of two rather large things and she thought this imaginary company was being quite cavalier with human history.

But she had already given Professor Stephenson an unexpected answer earlier. Jacey wasn’t sure she wanted to do that again.

“I might,” she said slowly. “I’d have to do my own research.”

Professor Stephenson stared at her for a moment, and Jacey had the sense that somehow she had disappointed her professor. But she wasn’t sure how.

She had not located the trap.

Professor Stephenson sighed, and then walked back to the podium. She pulled out a clear plastic folder with paper inside. She opened the folder, pulled out the paper, and then looked up at the class.

The disappointment was back. Or maybe it was determination. Jacey couldn’t tell. Then Professor Stephenson peeled off six sheets, stuck them back in the folder, and clutched the remaining sheets.

“This,” she said, as she handed out the paper to the various students, “will not count toward your grade. However, it is good practice for something that will count toward your grade. I suggest you do it with the same attention to detail that you gave the midterm.”

Tito was frowning over his sheet. Clyde had already folded his and put it in a book.

Professor Stephenson gave Jacey her copy last.

Jacey took the thin page, slightly irritated at the old-fashioned delivery method. Why did professors here have to use outdated technology all of the time? Couldn’t the students get a break on occasion and get their homework the way that schools usually did it?

She swallowed the irritation and looked down.

Advanced Temporal Disruption

Research Paper

Due at the beginning of the next class

You have accepted the assignment to terminate John Wilkes Booth. The termination must occur before Booth attends Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration in 1865.

Four others had this job before you. They failed. You are the fifth hire.

Below, list three ways you would attempt the termination.

List the risks of each method. Examine, if you can, any temporal disruptions that might result.

• • • •

By the time she looked up, three hands were already in the air, people wanting to ask clarification questions.

Jacey folded the paper and listened to the questions. None of them surprised her. She wanted the class to end so she could get started. She had forty-seven hours to complete this. Even before someone asked if they could use a time stretch, which was, essentially, a short time travel loop to gain more time, Jacey knew that the answer would be no.

They had to do the research in Real Time.

The questions finally ended, along with the class. And even though Jacey had chosen a chair deeper in the bowl than six of the other students, she was out the door ahead of them, already planning how she would accomplish this.

It required scheduling as well as creativity.

She hoped she was up to the task.

• • • •

Sixteen cups of coffee, one crash of her ancient writing computer, and lots of discarded notes later, Jacey finished the paper.

She barely had enough time to make it to class, and she certainly didn’t have enough time to reread her work.

Sometime in the middle of the first near all-nighter, she realized she had been going about the assignment all wrong.

She didn’t have time to do minute research on those tiny moments in Booth’s life that might have put him on a different path.

She had to assume that the previous four failed attempts at terminating Booth happened because the travelers went after the adult man. It would probably have been easy to try to shoot him while he was on a stage or arrange an accident with his horse or poison him after a triumphant show with his brothers Edwin and Junius at the Winter Garden theater in New York.

Booth had been a slippery and incautious man who had lived in a dangerous time. He had had the devil’s own luck, even at times when he shouldn’t have.

Most time travelers would probably have tried to take advantage of that.

But she couldn’t lose track of the conversation she had had after the midterm. Nevin’s presence haunted her, just like that discussion of the word termination haunted her.

She wasn’t sure she was strong enough to shoot a man in the head, the way that Booth had shot Lincoln. She couldn’t comfortably knife someone in his sleep. She really didn’t want to cause collateral damage to the other Booths or anyone who happened to be near John Wilkes on the day she went after him.

But she didn’t condone harming children, and she certainly didn’t want to get too close to a healthy young actor who drank too much and was known for a propensity for violence.

And then she remembered that this was not a graded assignment. It was some kind of practice.

So she felt free to stop thinking about what the professor wanted and to think about what Jacey might actually do.

She handed in the paper. Professor Stephenson hadn’t shown up. A teaching assistant took eight papers. Mary W. hadn’t arrived by the time Jacey left.

Class was canceled with an admonition written on the horrid chalkboard: Get some sleep.

So Jacey did.

• • • •

Only eight students showed up to the final class of the week. Mary W. did not attend. Jacey assumed Mary W. had dropped out. Maybe imagining herself in the 1860s, trying to terminate a dangerous man, had been too much for her.

Carly climbed over a few seats to sit near Tito. He glared at her.

“I’m not talking about it,” he said, and then he moved to a different row.

Jacey didn’t know if Tito meant he wasn’t going to talk about that assignment or if they had been having some other discussion. She hadn’t socialized with anyone from this class since the midterm.

Professor Stephenson was on time, which was, by her own definition, late.

She passed out seven papers, but held one back. That one happened to be Jacey’s.

Jacey stared at it, seeing only the black marks on the page. She didn’t even see a red mark on the top, like the other papers had.

“How do you know if someone shot him the night before the inauguration?” Tito demanded, without raising his hand. “I can’t believe that’s possible. It took me hours to find out exactly where that man had been living and traveling. It was a lot of work.”

“Mr. Pluma,” Professor Stephenson said as she set Jacey’s paper on the podium. “You did not do a lot of work. None of you did a lot of work. You couldn’t do a lot of work in the forty-seven hours I gave you. You did a preliminary investigation.”

Jacey kept staring at her paper. She couldn’t read it from this distance. Why hadn’t it come back to her?

“Most travelers do months of intense research before heading out on their assignment. The kind of preliminary work you did was the kind you might have to do if someone wants you to take a job quickly. Of course,” Professor Stephenson moved into her most didactic mode, “you would have to ask yourself—and maybe them—what’s the point of having a job done quickly when all of time is available?”

“You said I would have flunked this,” Tito said. “I did the work you assigned.”

“Your paper is barely different from three others in this room. The four of you did not pay attention to the assignment.” Professor Stephenson rolled up Jacey’s assignment and held it like a baton. “I told you. Other travelers failed at this mission. That meant there were four obvious ways to terminate Booth before the inauguration. You four found those obvious ways and did not deviate from them. That’s a failure.”

“It’s the work,” Tito said. He was getting angry.

“It is not,” Professor Stephenson said. “The imaginary company that wanted to hire you would hire you to think outside that annoyingly proverbial box. You did not. I told you there was a box. You had to figure out what it was on your own. Four of you did not.”

Jacey watched her paper move up and down as Professor Stephenson gestured.

“The rest of you had at least one item on your list that would qualify as outside the box,” Professor Stephenson said. “Your grade reflects that.”

Clyde sighed and leaned back in his chair.

“You will get a similar assignment in the next few weeks, and it will count toward your grade. You need to read the assignment carefully and remember this one.” Professor Stephenson returned to the podium. She took the clear folder with the paper inside, and shoved it on one of the podium shelves. When she had finished that, she was no longer holding Jacey’s paper.

Jacey raised her hand. She didn’t want to be rude, but—

“Ah, yes, Miss Cullen,” Professor Stephenson said. “See me after class.”

And that was that.

• • • •

Professor Stephenson’s office was on the top floor of the Theory Building. The name of the building had always amused Jacey, because she found it ridiculous that people would say things like You’ll find it in Theory. She always mentally added a comma. You’ll find it, in theory.

Irrelevant jokes like that eased her nerves. She had no idea why Professor Stephenson wanted to see her in person. It also bothered Jacey that she hadn’t gotten her paper back.

The Theory Building had a wide atrium at the center that opened to a skylight six stories up. Every other level ringed around that atrium, so that anyone coming out of a classroom or office could look down and see the plants and chairs and whoever was milling about down below.

The light was wonderful here. On cloudy days, the atrium was lit from sunlamps placed underneath the overhang from the ring.

Coming in here usually made her mood rise. Usually that wasn’t hard. But on this day, her nerves were getting the better of her.

She took the elevator up. Most of the features of this building were designed to replicate the mid-twenty-first century. The elevators here were fast, unlike the ones in, say, The Historical Reality Building: Mid-twentieth Century.

She wasn’t sure if she was grateful for the speed or not.

Professor Stephenson’s office was to the right. The entry was marked by two large schefflera plants. They were as well tended as the plants in the atrium.

The door beyond them was open. Jacey knocked and then walked in, just like instructed.

Professor Stephenson was leaning on her desk, a book in hand. She had a pair of glasses crammed into the bun on the top of her head, and another pair hanging from a chain around her neck.

She looked up as Jacey came inside.

“Sit,” Professor Stephenson said, gesturing toward a gray chair that looked surprisingly comfortable.

Behind it, there was a matching loveseat and several bookshelves. Computers of varying vintages littered a table on the other side of the room. This office had no window, but there was a blank wall across from the professor’s desk. That suggested either a holographic program that would mimic windows (there were several such programs all over campus) or the fact that the professor used that wall to watch vids and other images from the past.

Jacey sank into the chair. It had a thick cushion that held her up a little. She still had to tilt her head to look in Professor Stephenson’s sharp blue eyes.

Professor Stephenson set the book down but kept a hand on it.

“I’m sure you’re wondering about the paper,” she said, without a single trace of sarcasm. In fact, Jacey had never heard Professor Stephenson use such a calm and gentle tone before.

“Yes, ma’am,” Jacey said and swallowed compulsively. Oh, she hated being that nervous.

“You found three points where you could theoretically terminate John Wilkes Booth without resorting to violence.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jacey said. She had done as much research as she could in the limited amount of time given and she wasn’t sure her methods would work.

Booth was the ninth child of ten, so if she had decided to get in the way of his parents’ introduction to each other, nine other children—including Edwin Booth—would not have come into the world.

So, she had to delay the conception of the ninth child, as per the comments of Carly. A different egg would meet a different sperm, and a different biological child would be created.

Jacey’s first choice was to have Booth’s father, Junius Brutus Booth, a well-known British actor, get a different performing job or extend an acting tour. Her second was to remove Booth’s mother, Mary Ann Holmes, from the family farmhouse each time Junius was due home in 1837.

The final method seemed less sure, but Jacey included it. She would somehow delay Junius Booth’s departure from England seventeen years before Booth was born, which would probably have messed with the biology of all of the Booth children.

Jacey had worried that her methods lacked the kind of detail Professor Stephenson wanted, but Jacey didn’t have the time to learn, say, shipping schedules from England to America in 1821.

“It would seem to me,” Professor Stephenson said, “it would be easier to grab a pistol and shoot Booth in his boarding house the night before the inauguration.”

“I’m sure that was tried,” Jacey said primly.

Professor Stephenson smiled. “You would be right. Two travelers tried that and were thwarted. One lost his life. The other went to jail, which was not a pleasant experience in 1865.”

Jacey folded her hands and placed them on her lap to keep them from shaking.

“Are you averse to violence?” Professor Stephenson asked.

“Um, ah, personally?” Jacey asked. She forced herself to remain emotionless. “It’s part of life. It happens. We’re studying it all the time.”

“I asked the question incorrectly,” Professor Stephenson said. “Are you averse to using violence to achieve a worthy time-travel end?”

“In theory, no,” Jacey said.

“In practice.” Professor Stephenson seemed like a different person. In class, she would have asked that question with a slightly angry edge. Here, she seemed to want to know the answer.

“Um, if I have to, I mean, that’s what we’re training for, right?” Jacey asked.

Professor Stephenson tilted her head slightly. “Do you believe that?”

“It’s what gets talked about,” Jacey said. “You know, terminate and stuff like that. And there are all kinds of classes in weaponry throughout the ages. I mean, I’m supposed to learn poisons and how to shoot all kinds of guns.”

“You are,” Professor Stephenson said in that same patient voice. “Did you ever think that the weaponry was for your survival in dangerous times?”

Jacey felt cold. “No,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of that. But the poison, that’s—”

“If you know how to make poison, and if you can identify various kinds of poison, you know how to avoid it,” Professor Stephenson said.

“And use it,” Jacey said. She hoped she didn’t sound too judgmental.

Professor Stephenson smiled. “Often travelers who need to poison someone use a modern untraceable poison that they’ve brought with them.”

“Oh,” Jacey said.

Professor Stephenson let go of the book and braced her hands on the desk. She looked more comfortable than Jacey had ever seen her.

“We are not sanctioned assassins,” Professor Stephenson said. “In fact, if you look at the program we developed here, we’re sending people back to avoid whatever it was that happened, not to shoot someone and change it. Sometimes that is necessary, though, and it doesn’t really help the time traveler to think of what they had done. We have to pull them out of the field and work with them to deal with the death, even though—as one of your classmates said—the ‘bad person,’ which was their phrase, is still alive in another timeline.”

“Small comfort,” Jacey said.

“Exactly,” Professor Stephenson said. “But most people who come to the Academy lack imagination. They go for the easy answer, which is usually wrong, or they make assumptions that come from the entertainments they watch, which are mostly about going back in time to kill someone to alter the timeline, as if there’s only one.”

Jacey was frowning. She wasn’t sure where this was going.

“Students like that,” Professor Stephenson said, “will never get into an actual timeline disruption situation. If they are ever hired, they will go back to research something small that isn’t available in the records, such as what exact date did people start using actual matches in Duluth, Georgia.”

Jacey felt her frown grow deeper. Professor Stephenson clearly noticed and smiled at her.

“Then there are the students who think that we’re going to force them to become assassins. Those students drop out. I don’t know if you examined the information you were sent when you applied at the Academy, but we keep a tight lid on when students can drop a class and get a refund. We do not refund semester fees or fees from past years if a student drops out entirely. We expect students to drop, and we want to make sure we’re compensated.”

And then she shrugged, grinning just a little. The grin seemed like the old Professor Stephenson—the one who showed up in class.

“Of course, the students who use time travel to go back to avoid paying fees in the first place often find themselves arrested,” she said. “Illegal use of time travel has a lot more penalties than you’re taught in your basic Beginning Time Travel Law class.”

She seemed to be pleased about that. Jacey felt uncomfortable with it. Jacey would never consider using time travel to benefit herself, but she knew classmates who had discussed it.

They could get into so much trouble. She wondered if it was her responsibility to warn them.

“I teach this class,” Professor Stephenson said, “not because I enjoy talking about timeline disruption. I really don’t. I make it as difficult as possible for people who are unserious to remain in the class.”

Jacey nodded. That explained Professor Stephenson’s attitude toward the students.

“I often go years without a student thinking through what they’re talking about. It’s rare for a student to think outside the box. It’s even rarer for the student to be willing to do it on all three answers in a paper like this one.”

Jacey swallowed. She wasn’t sure if nodding was the right thing to do or not.

“You,” Professor Stephenson said, leaning forward just a bit, “are a breath of fresh air. I was trying to encourage you without telling you what I wanted.”

“That’s why you didn’t discuss my paper in class,” Jacey said.

“Precisely,” Professor Stephenson said. “We don’t want others to try to game the system.”

“What do you mean?” Jacey asked. “You mean the tests? That system?”

Professor Stephenson stood up and walked around her desk. She shuffled a few papers away from an array of buttons on the desktop.

Then she paused.

“The system I’m talking about,” she said, “is the actual time-travel network. If you want a real education in time travel that would allow you to work at something bigger than matches in Duluth, then you need to prove you’re worthy of even being asked.”

Jacey felt the ground shifting beneath her. She had thought that maybe she was going to get into trouble here, but that wasn’t what was happening.

Still, she concentrated as hard as she could because she didn’t want to mishear any of this.

“I’ll be honest,” Professor Stephenson said, “we’ve all had our eyes on you for a long time. Your questions in class showed an aptitude for imagination and independent thinking.”

That was why Professor Stephenson would always sound disappointed when she said Good enough in response to one of Jacey’s answers. It meant Jacey wasn’t there yet—wherever there was.

“It wasn’t until this paper, though, that we had confirmation that you will bring the right attitude to any time-travel job you get.”

Jacey swallowed. “What’s the right attitude?”

“You’re going to find a way to solve whatever you’re facing without calling attention to yourself and without massive timeline disruption. You will—if you maintain these attitudes—achieve whatever goal you’re given, and you will do it with finesse. I cannot tell you how much we value that.”

“Okay.” Jacey bit her lower lip, caught herself, and made herself stop.

“We would like to offer you a full scholarship to the full training program,” Professor Stephenson said. “You would move to a different part of campus and complete a program of study that you cannot tell your friends about.”

Jacey clutched her hands together so tightly that they hurt. “Who is ‘we’?” she asked.

Professor Stephenson actually laughed. “You know, you are the first person to ask me that question in more than a decade. You’re smart and cautious, Jacey. I like that.”

It wasn’t an answer, and Jacey was about to say so, when Professor Stephenson continued.

“‘We’ is the Academy. The real Academy, the one that was founded a century ago when it became clear that we would never put time travel back into the bottle. We had to find a way to attract worthy students. You are worthy, Miss Cullen.”

Jacey twisted her hands. She had to ignore the flattery and concentrate even more.

“And then what?” she asked. “I graduate and go to work for some corporation? Try to change the world according to their agenda?”

Professor Stephenson’s smile faded. “Are you turning this down?”

Jacey took a deep breath. “No. I’m just asking.”

“Why did you come here in the first place?” Professor Stephenson asked. “Was there a moment in the past you believed needed changing? Or are you on another mission?”

Jacey thought back to that bench near her grandmother’s grave. How could she explain that? That sense of defiance and that peace. Was time travel the family business? Jacey had always assumed so, even though no one in her immediate family time traveled.

And she found it endlessly fascinating—all the disruption, all the learning, all the possibilities. It was for her.

“Do I have to travel?” she asked. “I mean, do I actually have to go back?”

Professor Stephenson frowned at her. “I thought you wanted to.”

“I don’t know,” Jacey said. “I like the way the Academy is set up. I could do research or work in the physics department or—”

“The real Academy is the same,” Professor Stephenson said. “If you’re interested, I will show you the introductory holo. But the clock is ticking.”

“Why?” Jacey asked. “I thought we have all the time in the world.”

Professor Stephenson smiled. “Some opportunities have actual time limits on them. This is one of them.”

“It’s a big decision, isn’t it?” Jacey asked. “How come I have to make it fast?”

“It’s not a big decision,” Professor Stephenson said, with that edge back in her voice. “We’re just opening the doors so you can enter the Academy you thought you were attending.”

It was one of those life-changing moments—a test, really. Rather than the midterm or the upcoming final. Jacey had to ask herself—just like her classmates had asked themselves before dropping the class—one question: Did she really want to work in this field?

“Do I make the decision before or after you show me the holo?” she asked.

“Before,” Professor Stephenson said.

It was secret. People killed for secrets. But they killed for a variety of other things too, including the notion that one person’s death would change the world.

“Okay,” Jacey said, as she stood up and faced the blank wall. “I’m ready to watch.”

“Good,” Professor Stephenson said. “Welcome to your future.”

She didn’t add, I hope you will like it. Maybe that was implied. Or maybe like wasn’t a concept that fit into the new Academy.

Jacey didn’t care. She was ready to take this step, and she wasn’t even sure it scared her.

It was, after all, what she had been preparing for.

She just hadn’t realized it until now.

To save humanity after years of unending war, an international group of humans boards the massive space station Sarafina and head for the planet Hurriya, a journey that will take 400 years. Generations will pass before the crew reaches their destination, but they take solace in two things. One is the hope of bringing their ancestors, preserved in cryosleep in a hidden and heavily fortified deck of the station, into a new future. The other is the Network, an AI-enabled mind link that connects all of the space station’s residents to each other and to the ruling intelligence of the Sarafina herself.

When a generational shift changes the crew’s attitude towards the Network, it’s shut down and forbidden, along with the Sarafina’s AI personification. Under the new analog rules, society changes entirely, leading to a political and cultural system based on language segregation. Administrative matters between communities are brokered by polyglot Translators in English, a language that isn’t native to any of the ship’s inhabitants. Two hundred years later, in the Arabek (once called Arabic) speaking section of the ship, siblings Iskander and Damietta Ezz somehow find themselves connected to a revolution that threatens to not only upend the Sarafina’s social order, but also to destroy its future as well.

This is a complicated book. It’s a highly political, culturally complex space odyssey for about the first hundred pages, which is when a really wild twist swoops in and turns it into a detective thriller, too. There are lots of characters, and as soon as you’ve gotten used to one of their points of view, a side character pops out of the narrative, snatches the plot, and speeds away with it, going in a totally different direction than what was expected. Some of those characters speak and think in a delightfully loopy conlang called Nupol, which may take readers a minute to wrap their eyeballs around properly. Space station culture across all of its different sectors is intricately constructed, augmented by the linguistic divisions that create Sarafinan society and the author’s real-world inspirations and references drawn from places as diverse as the Arab Spring and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.

This is a complex, multi-layered book with some big thoughts and big meaning behind it, aided by watertight world-building, thoughtful cultural commentary, and very precise, deliberate Arabfuturism.

Somehow, it manages to do all of this while also being so much fun. Seriously, this book stays exciting from beginning to end. About 150 pages in, a very surprising character suddenly enters the story and made me sit up straight and say “oh, that’s so cool!” out loud. I did that about ten more times throughout the book. Big, deep, multi-faceted ideas don’t have to be boring, and El Sayed demonstrates this masterfully. The characters aren’t just political creatures; they’re fully fleshed out humans with families, romances, jobs, and deep relationships with each other that sometimes cross over the lines you’d expect language, politics, and class to create. The dialogue is funny, and the world being spoken about is really unique, full of familiar touchpoints and futuristic imagination at the same time.

While the book is Arabfuturism, it doesn’t make a key mistake that a lot of ethnofuturisms do by isolating the futuristic culture it imagines. There are lots of different groups of people on board the Sarafina, but the book is centered on the Arab-descended passengers. The story is viewed unapologetically through their cultural lens. This allows for a lot of nods to the real-world internal diversity of the Arab world, as well as a nuanced, affectionate look at a big Muslim family full of differing levels of devotion and belief. The fact that said family has been on a space station for two hundred years on their way to another planet somehow doesn’t make their moments of shared faith and culture any less genuine. In fact, every culture and belief system—both religious and political—is treated with a rare reverence and empathy in this book, making the characters and their relationships feel all the more real, and the actions they take to express themselves more impactful.

All of that grounds the book well enough to let the plot spin all over the place. The story is full of turns and twists and total surprises, most of which work really well. Everything leads towards a final surprise that made me wonder if the author has any more stories about this world under his belt to share.

This was great fun held up by a strong, complicated scaffolding of political and cultural world-building. If you enjoyed Andrea Hairston’s Mindscape or Neal Asher’s Polity Universe, you might like this, too.

“Ten Unsent Letters to the Dark Lord” originated at Can*Con 2024. There was a masterclass workshop at the convention called “Write a Story in a Weekend,” hosted by Brandon Butler and David Schultz of the Toronto SFF Writers Group. I like writing challenges, and I like deadlines, and I decided that writing the first draft of a whole short story in forty-eight hours while also attending a convention sounded like exactly the kind of bad idea I would enjoy. I went into the workshop without any clear idea what I was going to write; I figured it would be more fun to let the idea come to me on the weekend.

The first inspiration came to me when one of the two presenters was talking about story structure. Stories have a beginning, middle, and end, he said; but you don’t always have to start at the beginning. In fact, you could even start after the end! I liked that idea, and I decided I was going to write a little story about someone whose big epic story had already happened, and who was looking back and trying to process it all.

I don’t remember exactly how I decided that the narrator would be a Dark Lord’s ex-minion, but I think that part of the idea came at the same time. I am a bit of a villain enjoyer, and one of my all-time favorite, bulletproof tropes is when the villain’s minion has a crush on them. I did a lot of work deconstructing and problematizing this trope in my book The Fallen, but then I kept loving it anyway, which I think means it is genuinely bulletproof and engraved into my DNA. So it was an easy trope to draw on when I was looking for ideas. I was also pretty deep in my feelings at the time about an ex-girlfriend who’d ghosted me, so those feelings all leaked into the story and gave it its emotional shape. I was actually really embarrassed because it was so transparent to me what this narrative was really all about, and I worried that it would be transparent in an off-putting way to everyone else too; but with such a limited time there wasn’t much to do but plow ahead anyway.

To my surprise, the story had a pretty charmed and uncomplicated existence after that. Everyone at the workshop loved it and had a lot of helpful feedback which I used in revisions, and then it sold to the first place I sent it, which, obviously, was Lightspeed.

Because of health and work obligations, I wasn’t able to make it to the next workshop in 2025, but I sat down with Brandon over Saturday breakfast that year and he told me that he was telling all that year’s workshop participants about my sale to Lightspeed. I think it is the workshop’s biggest success story! It clearly was a process that worked for me.

What led you to write this as an epistolary story, and what are your thoughts about the format?

I love epistolary stories, found footage stories, and other ways of playing with format. In this case, the epistolary format was mostly a device to support the feeling that the narration is happening after the end of the story. Our narrator isn’t out in the world, doing things, having things happen to them; things have already happened, and they’re now wrestling with different ways of framing what happened.

To me, this story is about a victim of abuse leaving their partner and lacking the tools to come to terms with what they experienced. Was this sort of reading intentional on your part, and was the lack of specific characterization in the service of universalizing the letter-writer’s experience?

That’s a pretty accurate reading, although the abuse in the story mostly comes from the inherent traits of the fantasy tropes that are being employed. I think that the archetypal villain/minion relationship is always abusive in some way or, at the very least, not particularly healthy. This is a narrative I’m drawn to because of my preexisting issues; my actual ex-girlfriend wasn’t as evil as a Dark Lord.

The lack of specific characterization partly comes from the quick way the story was written, but you’re correct that it is also about universalizing the letter-writer’s experience. I wanted the story to feel archetypal, which means a lot of the weight rests on tropes and references that I trust my readers to already understand.

“I tell them that service to the greatest dark power of our generation is its own reward.” This hit me hard for its modern-day relevance. What do you think writers should do in the process of arguing against this kind of urge?

Oof. I mean. I can see that reading. I wasn’t thinking about the modern-day political reading when I wrote the story, but it’s a valid reading and I support readers being able to read things in various ways. To be super clear, I only enjoy villains when they’re fictional.

And, I mean, I’m not going to pretend that I know the magic way to write a story that deradicalizes people. (I’m also, frankly, suspicious of people who think that there’s one single best way for a story to meet the political moment. I think political moments are generally too multifaceted and too complicated for one approach.) But I do think that “Ten Unsent Letters” does two things that are helpful if you are reading the story politically.

First, it makes it clear, without getting too bogged down, that this character’s urges are coming from somewhere. You don’t need a detailed tragic backstory for a character like this, but there is some sense that they come from a place where they were deprived of power, and where “goodness” didn’t do a lot to help them or the people they loved. There are a lot of people in real life who do come from enormous privilege and who turn evil because they want even more privilege, but let’s be real, those aren’t the people we are trying to deradicalize. A lot of the foot soldiers in an evil political movement are people who come from some kind of struggle, and who’ve been sold a lie that says the evil political movement will be able to solve their problems. That doesn’t excuse their choice—it’s still an evil choice—but I think it’s important to note, with some modicum of compassion, that the choice is coming from somewhere. I don’t think it’s possible to reach people where they are without acknowledging that about them.

Second, and even more importantly, I think the story shows joining the bad side did not actually meet this character’s needs. It was a choice that came from somewhere, but it was not a helpful choice—even if it’s looked at, as it is here, through a purely self-interested lens. The narrator here is attached to the Dark Lord because they have been projecting a sort of relationship and care onto the Dark Lord which, in practice, is not there. And the moment when the narrator notices it’s not there—if only because the Dark Lord admits out loud that it isn’t—is when everything starts to unravel.

Is there anything you’re working on that you’d like to talk about? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

Absolutely. An excerpt from my new SF novel, Ignore All Previous Instructions, which I’m so excited to finally get to share with everybody, appears in the April issue of Lightspeed! I didn’t write “Ten Unsent Letters” with real-world politics in mind, but if you want a story that is intentionally political, Ignore is very much an intentional commentary on issues in the real world—not only about generative AI, as the title implies, but also a lot about anti-queer and anti-trans book banning and censorship. It asks all sorts of questions about what happens when human expression is controlled by a big, corporate, profit-making machine instead of by individual humans. Also it’s a fun space adventure with a strong romantic arc! I hope everybody checks it out.

I don’t have anything else lined up after that for sure, but I have a couple of fantasy novels out on submission—one is a New Adult, queer coming-of-age story with dragons, and one is a grimdark epic that happens at the bottom of the sea. I have some pretty fully fleshed out concepts for sequels to Ignore, because I love Ignore’s characters so much that I didn’t want to leave them, but we have to wait for sales numbers before the publisher can decide if sequels are actually going to be a thing. I also have a couple of book-length WIPs I am still chewing on behind the scenes. One is a thing that I hope will end up being a new take on dark academia; the other is cosmic horrors showing up in Silicon Valley. I would like to write all sorts of books in all sorts of speculative genres, ideally.