01 - Mirrorfall
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06 – The Beginning
Stef stared down at the man’s hand, then shook it, doing her best to make it as professional as possible. One of the few skills that her family had passed onto her was the ability to give a handshake so trustworthy your clients had no problem handing over their money or their fates to you. There were a hundred questions to ask, from the simple “don’t you have a fucking vetting process?” to “what’s the pay like?”, but for now, the man in the suit had answered all the questions that had been burning holes in her brain. Well. Almost all. Death hadn’t been brought up yet, but fair was…
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05 – The Third Path
Ryan watched as ghosts drifted past the window-wall of his office. They weren’t ghosts in the traditional sense, these weren’t the less-than-cogent spectres that inhabited the in between and lost spaces of the world; these ghosts were echoes of memories. A mirrorfall’s parade of ghosts, one of the events that preceded the fall of the dying planet’s heart, seemed to him to be the most bittersweet – in the way of a wake, rather than a funeral. The ghosts, images of those swallowed by their dying planet, were always of the strongest memory that an individual had. It was always amazing to see how beautifully mundane some of those strong…
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04 – The Last Moment
Stef stood in front of her assigned dorm room, looking at her wonky reflection in the brass number five that adorned the door. Go inside. Going inside was probably the thing to do. She fumbled with the handle, walked inside, and locked the door behind her. The lock was small, nothing that would withstand more than a solid kick from the average person, but the illusion of safety comforted her. And comfort was what she needed. ‘He said- He said-’ Inside voice, Spyder. ‘Why, no one can-’ Spyder. He said magic was real. Well, may as well have said it. He’s- And- She stared at the wall. Nothing was anything…
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03 – Keeping Time, Losing Time
‘You should come out of your room.’ ‘Huh?’ Stef looked up at Dorian, playing the part of doorway lurker again, for the umpteenth million time since her arrival at the mansion. She looked back down at the pages of code spread in a messy, haphazard circle on the floor around her. ‘No thanks.’ ‘The rest of the team think you’re entirely more mysterious and interesting than they are.’ ‘I’m always a disappointment,’ she said as she circled a large section of gibberish with a red marker. ‘Let them live with the mystery for a while.’ ‘You’re reusing ideas they’ve already rejected,’ he said as he took a step into the…
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02 – The Best of Stories, The Worst of Stories
The world around Stef had ceased to exist. The only things still tangible in the smoky limbo were her screen and her keyboard. The latter was less real, existing only as an abstract, a tool through which algorithms and codes took shape. From somewhere in the smoke, a beep reminded her to breathe. Stef took a breath but didn’t dare to blink, lest the fragile connection she had to her task be lost. Losing concentration would mean losing the battle with consciousness, and she’d only been awake for twenty-three hours. ‘I’m awake,’ she said, unconvinced. ‘I am awake.’ A knock from somewhere out in the smoke made her hands slip…
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01 – Broken Doll
A child screamed. Ryan swore as he lost his footing on the uneven carpet and only regained his balance two steps into the room. It was a pastel-painted nursery so perfect it could have been featured in a magazine. A silenced shot—deafening in the confined space—hit the wall beside his head. He didn’t need to worry—the criminal had seemingly run out any weapon that could hurt him. Ordinary bullets were no threat to him—but they were to the crying child, the little girl, struggling against the Solstice operative holding a gun to her head. Ryan raised his own gun. It raised the stakes, especially now that it was a hostage…
