The week had been one of the longest ones in recent memory. Ellie had spent a good part of it wandering about the clinic, keeping an eye on Samara's progress as she got better. And she was getting better - it was apparent she was getting back to normal day by day, physically, anyway. It was obvious not she was past the point of real danger, and ( Read more... )

I’ll never truly understand the concept of a bikini. I mean, when you stop and think about it, a bikini is really just underwear. People actually walk around in their underwear. In like, public. The beach is the one place you can do this and not get arrested ( Read more... )

One of these days, Kira expected someone to offer up complaint about the smell of it all. She supposed it was unfair to her downwind neighbours who got the worst of it, especially when she opened the lids to batches that had been settling for days, but the wind here didn't settle right, so those neighbours were always changing ( Read more... )

Somewhere, buried deep under years of darkness, layers of memories of nothing, Tommy Walker remembered snow. He'd seen it at least once as a child, before things had changed; he had to have, really. Waking up to the changed weather had been a surprise, of course, but he was coming to like the new cold. He'd long since discovered that it rendered ( Read more... )

You live a life like mine and you pick up things. Russian in Moscow. Hairstyling in San Francisco. Zen Buddhism in the Shaolin Monastery at Song Shan. Some of it even comes in handy on Craphole Island. Most recently the last two; I haven't met any Russians here. Yet. Of course, the last time I met Russians they were planning to kill me, so here's ( Read more... )

Despite the damages of Halloween, Tommy's pinball machine had survived ( Read more... )

Sometimes when the air smelled right, and the sky was blending into golds and roses and indigo and blues, Kira wished she could dance. It wasn't the same, it wasn't really dancing, but the idea of floating away, of picking up, and moving, swaying with no purpose struck her as a remarkable thing ( Read more... )

It's weird how…when you want things to change, it takes forever. Something like a month can feel like a year, and you look back and realize that you haven't really gone anywhere. But when you don't want things to change, it can happen overnight.

Yesterday, I was ready for the boiler room."So leave." Jordan said, like he didn't even care if she did ( Read more... )

It was different, somehow, the sensations he'd become accustomed to, the feel of the ground and the smell of the air, the temperature warmer than he was accustomed to London being. Maybe they were going somewhere new, he thought, rather than the room he'd become accustomed to, the one that always felt stuffy and full of people too tightly packed ( Read more... )

A fortnight and nothing stopped the lurking doubt in her mind ( Read more... )