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Ella sat by Nana’s body for two days before she pushed it out the window. She had spent the first half-day realizing what death was, the next half-day grieving, the following morning waking and feeling reverent if somewhat nauseated, and trying to decide what to do. It was three in the morning when she finally did it, and it was almost the season of electric rains.
I wait outside the speaking chamber, where the young Speakers learn to Hear and Speak. The walls and carpeted floor are purest white, the color of this God place and the Speakers who live here walk by, all dressed in white like the walls and the floor, their palms on the shoulders of their guides.
My curse is that I set off alarms. Smoke alarms. Car alarms. House alarms. It doesn’t matter what kind; I set them all off as soon as I get close to them. Close is usually about thirty feet. I don’t know why I set them off. I haven’t always been like this. I used to be fairly normal.
Carefully, with gloved hands, she removed the object from its stone niche, where it had rested for centuries deep underground, inside the dormant volcano where the mysterious Icelandic cult that guarded it made its home. It hardly weighed anything.
In the asteroid belt you either have fast reflexes or you’re a statistic. I slammed into the airlock bulkhead and stopped dead, waiting to see where the laser beam would hit next.
The fox shoulders and wriggles from between her jaws, first the whiskery, pointed muzzle and then all the rest. Finally free, it shakes its sodden coat and shoots Rosa a disgusted look.
The Dandelion lost structural integrity so quickly that I doubt the bridge even had time for a distress call, and this escape pod’s radio is only sub-light.
Lloyds was not willing to insure a phoenix egg, not even of the most impeccable pedigree. Hence the inspection of the purchase became a great deal more important.
Jamie Keller and his partner hadn’t found the shoggoth larva smugglers yet, but his boss, the head of the Bureau of Paranormal Investigation’s southeast hub, had other things on his mind.
It’s getting harder and harder to pretend we aren’t racing along the edge of a knife, one box of flashlights and a fistful of batteries away from the mercy of the things in the darkness.
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