The distress beacon had been pinging for three days before Captain Sera Nakamura finally decided to investigate. In the outer reaches of the Kepler system, distress beacons were usually traps—pirates luring in good Samaritans for easy pickings. But this one was different. The frequency was ...
Read MoreThe email arrived at 11:47 PM on a Thursday.From: Victoria Chen, Senior PartnerTo: James MorrisonSubject: Revision needed on Caldwell briefJames – Need you in my office first thing tomorrow. 6 AM. The brief needs significant work before the morning meeting. Don't be late....
Read MoreThe library closed at midnight, but Iris had learned to ignore the official hours. As a graduate student with a key and a dissertation on medieval manuscripts, she'd made the rare books room her second home. Tonight, she was alone among the leather-bound volumes and the smell of aging paper.O...
Read MoreThe gallery opening was exactly the kind of pretentious affair Elena had learned to navigate with practiced ease. She stood before a massive abstract canvas, champagne flute in hand, nodding thoughtfully at nothing in particular."You're holding it wrong."Elena turned to find a woman...
Read MoreThe velvet curtains of the Midnight Garden theater hung heavy with secrets and smoke. Dr. Cassandra Veil took the stage in her signature crimson coat, her dark hair swept into an elegant twist. The audience leaned forward in anticipation."Ladies and gentlemen," her voice carried t...
Read MoreThe chrome and neon of the lower sectors of Aethelstadt blurred into a throbbing, synaptic pulse. Kaelen moved through the crowds not as a man, but as a vessel of want. His skin, threaded with sub-dermal circuitry, hummed in dissonant sympathy with the city’s core. He was a Conduit, o...
Read MoreThe invitation was a single line of text, glowing on Felix’s screen: “I have a black velvet dress that would look perfect on you. Come over at 8.” It was from Anya. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic bird in a cage of bone and anxiety. For months, their connection ha...
Read MoreThe power didn’t feel like a thunderclap. For David, it was more like noticing a dial in the back of his mind that he’d never seen before, and realizing he could turn it. A slight adjustment of internal pressure, a quiet click of will, and the world softened at the edges, ea...
Read MoreThe air in Maya’s apartment always smelled like sandalwood and rain-soaked earth, a scent that had become, for Elara, the very definition of comfort. But tonight, the comfort was laced with something else, something that crackled in the space between them on the sofa—a charge built fr...
Read MoreThe invitation arrived not as a proposition, but as an atmosphere. It had been woven through months of lazy Sunday mornings in bed, of whispered fantasies shared in the safe, warm dark between them. For Clara and Mateo, their love was a fortress, its walls not built to keep the world out, but to ...
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