Nobody noticed the first few. They walked. One by one, in the beginning. Isolated instances. On every continent, mid-meal, mid-shower, mid-work, mid-fuck, right out the door of a pulled-up car in the middle of a freeway—ordinary people turned their backs on their ordinary lives and walked. They walked, shedding their hair in clumps along the way, sloughing their skin in translucent sheets to reveal pale grey beneath. On bleeding feet they walked down highways and lanes and trails, unerringly taking the path of least resistance to the nearest coast. They crossed the sand. The sea cooled their aching calves. Still, they walked.

“This is a disaster!” “What?” “This is an absolute disaster!”  “Did you say something?” Jessica Martin closed her laptop and put her head in her hands. Her old friend Todd, who was in her big bean chair in the corner, watching a movie on his phone, took out his earbuds. “What is it, dude? It’s not working?” “Oh, it’s working,” she said. She stared angrily at her invention, which stood in the middle of her room, the size and shape of a refrigerator. It was, in fact, her family’s old refrigerator, which she had stripped down and rebuilt. “It is working, Todd. It’s working perfectly. That is the problem.”

When she melts, it’s like a balloon collapsing, but fast. Her body turns to an inky puddle, a pool of shadow. Then, in a snap, she goes clear. Shimmering. When all the other children are asleep, when the guard is looking at something else, when the camera eye is on something else. That’s when this happens. When she becomes a shadow, then a shimmer, and slithers out from under her thin silver blanket, onto the ground. She can slide, fast fast, between gray sleep mats with kids snoring, gray sleep mats with kids crying, she can slide past a gray sleep mat where one boy pulls up the corner to bang his head on the concrete floor.

I’ve got a mother that wants to get in on a long-term financing agreement to change her son’s race for a trial, Ecstasy pings you. His court date is coming up; the hearing for the random race generator is next Thursday. Thursday. That doesn’t leave a lot of time. But, then, that’s why E is pinging you. They’re paying in cryptocurrency, Ecstasy says. My commission is the usual 10 percent. They’ve already set up the chain; you just need to agree to be on the other side. Local judicial computer systems have shit security. It’s always been the case.

A boy traveling alone was beset by bandits on the outskirts of a strange town at sunset. They left him stripped and bloody in a ditch by the side of the road in the deepening dusk, as a bright full moon appeared over the trees. The boy watched it moving across the sky, his pain and shame a kind of trance. For a long time nothing happened. When he heard footsteps on the road, he was afraid, but something was broken inside him and he dared not disturb it by moving. Still he looked up at the moon, filling himself with its light. He felt a distance growing between himself and his body. The traveler’s steps paused.

Rao Nawong, aide to Magician Tepwe Kodai, had not been on the hillside for long with her. The sky threatened rain on and off, and the air smelled of river poetry, of lakes with their scarves of reeds. Water would make their mission here, in the distant shadow of the Spiders’ fortress, more difficult, if not outright impossible. The Empire’s defeat of the upstart Spiders, whose rebellion had sparked a general conflagration in the southwest provinces, depended on the mission’s success. At the moment, Nawong found it hard to care. His world had narrowed to Kodai’s immediate needs, politics be damned.