A year of living in the ground had not accustomed Moyer to the smell. He wondered how the French, who’d been at this business so much longer, could stand it. But if the officers who had trained his unit in the intricacies of trench life were any indication, they were so weary and battered as to scarcely notice the world around them any longer.

The most surprising thing about my journey (well, the first most surprising thing) is that the dream I experienced while traveling lasted a thousand years, a single dream stretching all the way to the Iota star in the Gemini constellation. I dreamt of Bindi, my childhood dog, a heeler and pointer mix who used to follow me everywhere; now it seems, she’s even followed me to this distant star.

Advanced Temporal Disruption

Timed Midterm

Instructions:

• Time Allotted: 130 minutes
• No Breaks Allowed
• No Outside Devices Allowed

Everyone knows the Walls around the cities fell. What some people don’t remember is that the first one fell because of a laugh. It sounded like a ringing bell. Not like it came out of a baby at all. That was the first thing I told the scholar boy. He was a grown man, a researcher. He looked it, too. Big round glasses, chubby cheeks, curly hair.

The typewriter proved, at first glance, to be a poor investment for a daring aerial escape. Kallista had been drawn to the typewriter from the moment she viewed it languishing in a Museum of Curioddities, a pun that 3% of Pennon City’s citizens might appreciate, if one rounded to the nearest human. The jury was out as to whether the placard’s sententious overview of Strange Olde Anti-Fae Percussive Instruments was someone’s idea of trolling or, equally likely, an exercise in mellifluous snake oil.

On a wooded hillside outside Pittsburgh, where the rivers braid together and the bridges flash yellow in the sun, there stands an old private school no one ever remembers enrolling in. Ivy grips its cracked bricks. Moss blurs the leaded windows. To almost anyone looking, it appears abandoned. Unless they are the newly dead. If that is the case, it is more of an inevitability.