I returned to the apartment building where Daro and Anzali and I had lived before we went down to the sea.  It had not changed in the way buildings change-- its paint was the same color, it seemed no more or less weatherbeaten than before.  The railing on the 3rd floor balcony still sagged.  But it had changed in the way homes change, because it ( Read more... )

When their guard patrol passed the building where the psychics sat or laid on their mats, deep in their meditations, Soffrees snorted. “Look at that,” he said, pointing a thumb behind him at the windows of the battery. “We go out on the front lines and risk our lives. They sit in an air-conditioned room, or they nap in it, and they get served their ( Read more... )

They called him Alyn Ysmai, the White-Haired Boy.  In the village he came from, it was said he had fallen from the sky as a child, carried on a shooting star.  His skin was white as the clouds, and his hair as white as the Moon, and his eyes the golden color of wild animals.  From earliest days, it was said that the Lady of the Moon had marked him ( Read more... )

But I don’t think so. Stella wasn’t the kind of girl who stuck her fingers in her ears and went “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” when things were bad. She confronted bad stuff. She tried to solve problems. So I don’t think she would have told me some weird made up story and then by total coincidence her dad killed her the day after, and I don’t think ( Read more... )

Stepping down from a two-man ship, which is a shuttle from the starship Rhiannon, are the captain of Rhiannon and his best friend, Rhiannon's computer engineer. Matt Pison, human, terratype, Martian, is the captain. He is tall, blond, muscular from his life in the Martian colonies but pale from little sunlight, brown-eyed. Next to him is D'mir ( Read more... )

While the discordant, warlike humans had many separate tribes that they called “nations”, and had no unity in the governance of their world, there did appear to be one nation that dominated all the others, producing the majority of the radio transmissions that contained visual information. Radio transmissions emanating from the other nations ( Read more... )

When Triala was twelve, a transmute spoke to her.

She'd never told anyone else the ( Read more... )

All I wanted to do was buy a gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, and ham. But I’d been to four cash registers already, and no one had been willing to ring me up yet.

The first cashier - a girl with dyed black hair, a tattoo of ( Read more... )

Teal waited silently in her cell, trying to control the vicious excitement that coursed through her. Today is my final exam. I'll see Essell again. They had promised her that if she survived today, she would see her brother again, for the first time in five years-- for the first time since both their lives had been destroyed. Of course, one could ( Read more... )