It’s only after Cloud’s funeral that we realise none of us can remember why we followed her in the first place. No-one, that is, except for Robbie. He stowed away, he claims, and kept a clear head. The rest of us? A drink, maybe two; compelling blue eyes; and the next thing we knew, we were on the ship. Contract signed. Memories hazy. Cloud renamed us, gave us each a job, and that was it. We were crew.
“And none of you wondered how Cloud did that?” Robbie doesn’t try to keep the disgust out of his voice, even in a monochrome room of monochrome mourners in a fancy hotel in Lilypad Eleven.
“It was Cloud’s incredible charisma,” I say. That’s what we’ve always told each other. Excusing ourselves, and her. But Robbie says no. It was straight out, exploitative hypnotism. He followed her anyway because he wanted to become rich. Cloud–commanding loyalty everywhere she went, literally hypnotic, and ruthless–seemed like a sure bet.
And now Cloud’s dead.
“So I was press-ganged?” Starfish asks. They’re our fixer: they can speak seven languages, pick two pockets at once, and forge rare book importers’ licences for almost any world. Now they just look bewildered.
Robbie rolls his eyes. He’s the sort of person who knows words like “exploitative” and “hypnotism” even though he’s never been to school. He’s scornful of anyone who can’t keep up, i.e., everyone else on the ship, if not the universe.
“You were all press-ganged.”
Starfish sighs. Knife fidgets. Dragon stares glumly at the scars on his massive hands.
Cloud chose us, but Robbie holds us collectively in low esteem. Except for Dragon, cook and former mercenary, who’s bribed his way into Robbie’s heart with cheese toasties and dumplings. And me, of course. Robbie’s fond of me. (Robbie would like me to add for the record that he disputes this.)
“Listen,” I say. “None of us are in the mood for this, right?” I gesture around the room, where an elderly woman with the same blue eyes as Cloud has just broken into loud, fake sobs over a plate of star-lobster sandwiches. I’ve been numb ever since Cloud died—I think we all have—but I’m feeling something now. The faint but growing realisation that I’m not sorry she’s gone. “Let’s scarper; talk this out on the ship.”
“Whatever you say, Stitch.” Robbie throws me a mock-salute. We scoot, clutching drinks or snacks. If there’s one thing we’re good at, it’s making a speedy exit.
None of us, not even Robbie, knew what we were signing up for at first. If Cloud had said (and this is the short version): Listen, do you want a job on my time-ship? We’ll mostly be stealing books from folk, then selling them back a few years later at an eye-watering, economy-melting profit, and by the way, we’ll kill anyone who tries to stop us? Well, maybe I’d have said yes and maybe no, but at least I’d have had the choice.
Once we were crew, we couldn’t quit. Nobody crossed Cloud. Her criminal record was longer than the Ahalina Starchase and bloodier than the Astra-Pelagic Wars. The Diabolical Liberty was the target of a shoot-on-sight warning in three worlds. Like it or not, we were associated with her.
Back on the Diabolical Liberty, I run my fingers over the ship’s scarred wooden deck and gaze up at the masts and rigging. It’s been home for so long, but my stomach still lurches when I step on board. The sails are silk, embroidered with constellations from seven universes. Purely for show. Cloud liked the old-fashioned look, but we don’t need the wind to sail.
“Maybe we should sell up,” Dragon suggests. “Go home.” He doesn’t sound convinced. Time-ships are rarer than sky-rubies, and this is how we make our living. All of us loot. Robbie navigates. Dragon cooks. I’m our mechanic, fixing anything that needs fixing; Knife plans the raids and Ruth does the violence.
Thanks to Cloud, most of us don’t know where home is anymore.
And then, of course, there’s Robbie.
“I don’t want to leave the ship,” Robbie says, his voice much quieter than usual. We all look at him. He flushes. “Where else could I do calculations on the nature of time itself? Spend all day on five-dimensional maths? Where else could I be hired as a navigator? It’s not like Cloud’s around to give me a reference.”
In his normal voice, he adds, “And, obviously, I want to become rich.”
We don’t need to meet each other’s eyes; we all know what Robbie’s not saying.
“Well,” says Starfish, to break the stretching silence. “In that case, where to next?”
This is the long version.
We saunter into a place that’s on a bad trajectory. We arrive just before it hits the point of no return, the tipping point, the descent into the rotting heap of fascism or totalitarianism or whatever horrible -ism the planet or country or city-state is giving a whirl. And we steal all their books.
A victimless crime. The books would be burnt or pulped, if we didn’t take them. It’s practically charity.
Often we’ll sell the books on the black market. Entire libraries’ worth. But sometimes there are more lucrative options. We blip ahead a few years to totalitarian’s inevitable demise, and the society that’s remerging always looks for answers. Truth-telling and reconciliation, sure. First, they always open the prisons and find out where the bodies are buried. But then they turn to the other things they’ve lost. They turn to books.
They want their knowledge back. Their history. Their paper souls. Their stories. And they want to make sure that it never happens again.
And what a fabulous coincidence that is, because here we are, the Diabolical Liberty, sailing into view with a cargo-hold of very familiar books.
For a price.
Cloud never let us take shore-leave in case we didn’t come back. Or remembered our lives before the Diabolical Liberty, I guess. For years we only saw the Chronocean, the Ocean of Time, its seas, estuaries and skies; the time-docks and waterfronts of the Lilypad worlds; and the places we raided: libraries, universities, courts, museums, schools, homes and bookstores.
Mostly we were stuck on board. Even me, and I really don’t like the sea. Not the Chronocean, although it’s beautiful; its starry depths as iridescent as magpie feathers, its five dimensions kaleidoscoping into each other. Not the wet, salty, sea-weedy sea that sloshes around the surface of the Pond world series, either.
I’m even allergic to seafood.
“Thalassophobic,” Robbie says. Like that’s even a real word.
After years on board, there’s time-grit embedded in our knuckles and frown-lines, infiltrating our lungs and the capillaries of our eyeballs. It’s in our blood. It’s mingled with the ink of our tattoos.
(Robbie reminds me that time-grit makes you sick. The whole crew is overdue for a de-contam. That’s what got Cloud, in the end. Acting as if she were immortal.)
Before, when Cloud was still Captain, I’d steal books for Robbie. Cloud never let us keep any of the books we raided. Said it ate into our profit margin. She didn’t bother to check whether I’d nicked any, though.
Robbie was never grateful.
“What the hell are these?”
“Books.”
“Hiring Practices for Cryptobotic Employees, Vol. III.” Robbie would read out loud, disgusted. “Parrot-Mite Breeding for Fun and Profit.” He’d hold the books away from him, the full length of his short, skinny arm. “Great choices. Great choices.”
“Look, do you want them or not?” The cover of the book on parrot-mites was emblazoned with a glorious rainbow bird, and the other a deep navy suede with gilt-edged pages. I’d thought they looked important.
“Thanks, Stitch,” he’d say, grudgingly.
Once or twice (the ripples of the Chronocean blazing in the light of the libraries burning behind us) I’d say to Cloud, “What if there’s more to it than this?”
And she’d say, “What do you mean?”
And I’d say, “How do we know? How can we tell which worlds are about to go full blown, book-burning evil dictator? How do we know when the worst-case scenario is inevitable?”
And Cloud would say, “Burning books is a pretty clear sign.”
And I’d say, “But what if us taking the books… what if it’s…”
And then Cloud would look at me with her dreamy blue eyes, and I’d forget everything, and I’d be floating away on, well, a cloud.
(The thing that some people struggle to understand is this: Cloud loved books, but she was a very bad person.)
We finish the funeral snacks, and Robbie gets out the star-map. “Lilypad Nine. Newspapers shutting down, civil rights being dismantled, list of banned books as long as Dragon’s arm.” He grins. “Let’s swoop in and grab a few.”
Lilypad Nine is beautiful, I think out of nowhere. Mountains. Sweet water, not brackish, miraculous after so many years of salt. Cloud forests leavened by the silence of snow-leopards. There’s no flat land on the whole northern continent, not like the soul-sucking horizons of the sea and the plains. The air’s bracing, although lowland planeteers would call it thin. The stars are clear. I’m from Lilypad Nine.
I’m from Lilypad Nine. I’d forgotten. Cloud had made me forget.
We swoop in. I quell my longing for home. We take the books.
Right on schedule, Lilypad Nine descends into a bloody and chaotic civil war. A quick scan of the near-future shows that our gamble was correct. The triumphant warlord spends the next eleven years brutally silencing anyone who questions her, before she’s overthrown by quite a small mob. Same old story. Same old trope. The new lot takes a while to sort itself out, and then some bright spark says, “Didn’t we used to have books around here? Hey, didn’t we used to have libraries?”
And Lilypad Nine rediscovers an urgent need for books. For knowledge. Stories. Poetry. History.
Later, after we’ve counted the profits and the homesickness is biting, I say to Robbie, “What if there’s more to it than this?”
And Robbie says, “What do you mean?”
“What if the worlds we visit are near a tipping point, but they haven’t tipped yet? What if they could still wobble back? What if we unbalance them? What if us flying in and stealing all their books is like…” I scrabble for the right words. “Like a good hard push in the wrong direction?”
Just before Cloud died, we got a radio. That’s how I learned that the whole crew pronounces words incorrectly. Hype-No-Tick. Irideskent. Charisma, with the tch sound of cheese. Our own little on-board shibboleth (another one of Robbie’s words). We’d learned a lot from Robbie, and he learnt by reading.
It’s not that the crew can’t read. Apart from me, that is. Dragon’s tottering cookbook pile is a genuine on-board hazard. Starfish reads novels and travel guides; Ruth loves a good romantic tear-jerker, and Knife has a subscription to Cosy Detective Stories Interdimensional.
Robbie reads everything. He reads dictionaries for fun. He comes out with words we’ve never heard of, and he uses them all the time until we use them, too.
But even Robbie doesn’t always get it right.
That’s what the radio made me realise. We could rely on Robbie, and on his books, but only up to a point. After all, Robbie was only twelve.
(“Eighteen,” Robbie says, like he has any idea. “I was twelve when I joined the crew. That was years ago.”)
Sometimes I have this queasy sense that we’ve been controlled by Cloud for so long, we’d forgotten how to think for ourselves.
Not anymore.
We can’t expect Robbie to be everything for us, just because he’s a tiny, bossy genius. We can’t make him our conscience as well as our dictionary and logistician, our navigator and mathematician, our First Mate and default Captain.
Nobody should be the centre of our lives the way Cloud was.
Before Robbie joined the crew, we visited a desert world. Star-scarred and tri-lunar, I was expecting bleakness, but there was life everywhere: iridescent birds and lizards.
We don’t usually stray from the Pond, the alternate solar systems of green-blue worlds we call the Lilypads, just a hop from each other. Cloud had high hopes for this dry place. The book we stole here would fetch exorbitant prices.
Books were already burning. Everything pointed to a worst-case scenario, just like we’d seen in so many other worlds. But people took their books into their own hands. Even Cloud couldn’t find their hidden libraries, or the smuggling routes that were the life-blood of that country.
We never found their treasures: symphonic notations, encyclopaedias, works of healing, astronomy, chemistry, holy texts. Poetry that felt like the rush of first love; fairy-tales that made you weep.
Cloud flew into a gnashing rage, a tantrum so great that she couldn’t even use her hypnosis to get what she wanted. Everyone saw the truth of her.
(I wonder if anyone else remembers).
We left. And that world recovered. It got its balance back.
Without, you know, having to go through hell first.
The worst-case scenario wasn’t guaranteed.
“What if, like, if not stealing the books would have helped the worlds to… not tip?” I ask Robbie.
“But Cloud did the calculations,” Robbie says. “The worlds’ trajectories were irreversible. Whatever else she was, Cloud was a maths genius; she never made mistakes…”
And Robbie falls silent.
“Interesting,” he says, eventually. “Interesting.”
His gaze becomes distant. He mutters to himself. He empties the cupboards until he finds Cloud’s old cosmic calculator.
I tiptoe away. I find Dragon, tell him that Robbie needs three cheese-and-pickle scones and a mug of cocoa. I leave the cocoa and one scone outside Robbie’s door and knock softly. Then, mouth full, I leave him to it.
The longer since Cloud’s funeral, the more space we have to think and feel. Some mornings I wake up shaking with rage. Dragon cries into the scrambled eggs. Knife, of all people, starts keeping a journal.
We buried stuff while Cloud was in charge. Now it’s all surfacing. Anger at how she treated us. For the things she took and used without asking. Our consciences, our thoughts, our emotions. Grief, for the things we might never get back: names and memories, families, homes.
Things always felt lovely in Cloud’s presence, like the first mouthful of champagne or the second bite of syrupy baklava. But when Cloud left the room? That was when you felt it. The cloying third bite. The warm dregs coating your tongue, when all you want is water.
“See? Hypnotism,” Robbie says.
But whatever else she did, Cloud changed all of our lives. Most of us are from worlds where time-travel isn’t a known possibility, especially not how Cloud did it: looping and charting the Chronocean as easily as walking round a garden. If–like Cloud and Robbie–you can do five-dimensional algebra in your head, and have access to a time-ship, you can go exactly where, and when, you want.
(Robbie frowns “It’s more complicated than that,” he says. “We can’t go just anywhere.”
“Why not?”
“Once you’ve changed things, you can’t skip back to before, or you’ll be along again five minutes later and change them back. Because you already did. Understand?”
“No.”
Robbie sighs. “If you try to fix timelines you’ve already broken you end up trapped in an endless cycle of meddling. You risk destabilising whole worlds. It’s like running into a five-dimensional brick wall. At best, it’s a real headache. At worst, the house falls down. Nobody knows why.” His eyes light up. “But one day, I will find out.”)
We never worried when Cloud was Captain. She didn’t let us have inconvenient emotions like guilt or regret. Not caring was easy when we had nothing to care about, and Cloud tried to make sure we had nothing.
But she failed. She gave us each other.
It was great–is great–when it’s just the crew. Playing Eat Your Neighbour’s Boot, Knife shuffling the cards in and out of her sleeves like a magic trick. Dragon’s famous mushroom pie. Starfish’s smug look when the rest of us get star-sick. And Robbie, teaching me slowly and patiently how to spell my name. The alphabet. And then sentences.
She’d do her thing, storming or sugar-coating. We’d catch each other’s eyes, and we’d half-smile, half-grimace.
That was enough.
Cloud never erased Robbie’s memories. Maybe she couldn’t; maybe she didn’t need to. If Robbie doesn’t want to leave the ship, it’s because he knows—not just fears or suspects, but knows—that he has nowhere and no-one else to go. The rest of us can hope for a home and a family out there somewhere, for our memories to come back. Robbie has no hope.
We don’t say anything to Robbie. But the rest of us decided years ago: we’re not leaving him on his own.
Far too early the next morning, Robbie bounces up. (“I don’t bounce,” Robbie says, sickened. But he does when he’s done something really exciting with numbers.) He’s talking before I can even open my cabin door.
“Our book-stealing is helping precipitate these worst-case scenarios,” he says.
“Precipitate?”
“It’s unethical to profit.”
“So,” I say. “I’m right?”
Robbie rolls his eyes. “Are you listening? Cloud wasn’t just choosing timelines heading for disaster.”
“She was causing them.” My heart sinks. It’s what I was expecting, but my stomach still feels like I swallowed lead. “So what are we going to do about it?”
“I’m explaining,” Robbie says. His freckles are sharper when he’s annoyed. And his curly hair stands on end. Right now, he looks like an angry scribble. “Cloud was always right. There was always a worst-case scenario.”
“Because we caused them,” I repeat. “We caused them, didn’t we?”
He nods, deflated. “We threw worlds off-balance. Sent them reeling down bad timelines. The loss of the books was enough, in some cases, to disrupt history. We were the tipping point.”
Over the years, I’ve seen and heard things–even smelled things–in the worlds that tipped. The worst-case-scenario worlds. Many will never leave me. They’re scored into the deepest part of my memory; that part of your brain that you feel in your gut. A small girl wailing for her fathers. Protestors crushed by horses. Fear as thick as smog. People disappearing. And worse. Worse that we didn’t see, because we were safely on the ship, moving on, our attention already elsewhere. Eyes always on the flat horizon.
Maybe Robbie’s thinking of it too. His shoulders hunch. His hair wilts. His eyes track the dirt on the floor. It’s easy to forget he’s only twelve. (“Eighteen,” Robbie says.)
Of course, in many of these worlds the worst-case scenario would have happened anyway. And in many worlds it never happens at all. Nothing is simple. Books don’t always help.
But sometimes they do.
“We have to change,” I say. “Take responsibility.”
Robbie nods. “Let me run some numbers.”
Robbie disappears into his room with a five-dimensional map, the calculator, a whole rainbow of marker pens, and a pot of hyper-coffee, even though he can’t handle that level of caffeine. (“Can so,” says Robbie.) We hear shoutings and thumpings at strange hours of the night. At dawn, day three, he bursts out. With a plan.
The short version is, we’re giving all the books back.
The long version is that timelines are really complicated.
Ruth interrupts as soon as Robbie starts explaining, to claim she wants to rob people, preferably violently. We all know she’s bluffing. She’s been having bad dreams about what she did when Cloud was Captain. Knife argues that we should be saving people, not books. Robbie says grandly that they’re one and the same thing. Knife goes silent and suspicious. Robbie’s grand statements don’t always make sense, but no-one, not even Starfish, ever calls him out on it. We just assume we’re not clever enough to understand him.
“That… doesn’t make sense?” I say.
Robbie glares. “We can’t save everyone. But if we save books, maybe we can help them save themselves.”
He’s replaced his usual over-excited, know-it-all tone with something that he probably thinks is inspirational. Knife pretends to vomit off the side of the ship. Even Dragon rolls his eyes.
“Okay, okay, got it,” I say. “Proceed.”
Every year, Robbie explains, we go to Port Stanza for the winter book-fair. Every year a million tiny things change. The titles and colours of the books, the ages and faces of the book-sellers. The timing of the neap tide and the angle of the sunset. The clusters of people in the tavern, the way their conversation flows. Even the flavour and temperature of the beer.
(“Tavern beer always tastes like piss,” Dragon offers up.
“Yes, but…” Robbie says. He has never tasted beer. “Different piss.”)
“The point is,” says Robbie, “the real world is too complicated. All these tiny changes, all accumulating and reacting to each other. If we go back to before we took the books; we’ll just be along again to redo what we’ve just undone. If we replace them after, we’ve changed the timelines already. Either way those changes will accumulate.” He looks at our confused faces. “No matter how carefully you sail, there’ll always be ripples.”
Knife frowns. “So we can’t put the books back?”
“I was hoping someone would ask that.” Robbie bounces on his heels and clears his throat. “If we can’t erase the changes, why not make more? Hell, why not change everything?”
“Broken timelines stay broken,” I say. “The changes would metastasise until whole timelines implode.” Time-travellers are like radical free agents, Robbie told me once, and I thought that sounded cool until he explained that’s what causes cancer.
Robbie grins. “Only if we can’t control them.”
“But we can’t,” I say. “Nobody can.”
Robbie nods grandly and struts past us as if he’s on stage. “Nobody’s achieved that level of precision in their time-travel calculations before.” He pauses. “Until now.”
Dragon whistles “wow” under his breath.
“We don’t need to replace the books,” Robbie says gleefully. “We can put them anywhere we like. We can position them exactly where and when they’re needed.”
He unrolls a large piece of paper and pins it to the wall. The multicoloured diagrams and tiny numbers hurt my eyes.
“I’ve done the maths.” Robbie’s eyes almost glow with excitement. “The possibilities are amazing. We can smuggle books so that they end up in front of exactly the right person at the right time. We can change history. People will read what we choose!”
“Great,” Starfish says. “Everyone in favour?”
The rest of the crew are already raising their hands.
“Aye.”
“Aye.”
“Aye.”
Robbie beams.
He’s so proud of himself. I’m proud of him. He’s done all this incredible math, worked round the clock to try and fix this mess we’ve all made.
I wish I could agree with him.
Robbie can’t be our everything, I remind myself.
“Stitch?” he asks, all hopeful. “All in favour?”
“Why do you want to do this?” I ask. “To control what people read?”
Robbie blinks at me.
“So that they—” he trails off. “Er, they..”
I wait.
“So that they do what we want,” he says, as if hearing himself for the first time. “And think what we want them to think.”
I hate hurting Robbie’s feelings. Part of me wants to say, great, let’s do it, but I can’t.
Instead, I say, “Do you have any idea how creepy that sounds?”
Robbie opens and shuts his mouth. The silence stretches.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, though,” I say hopefully.
He doesn’t.
I look at the rest of the crew. Not certain if I want to convince them, or for them to convince me. The whole cowardly lot of them are silent as graves.
Then Robbie shrugs. “Of course it’s creepy. The idea was purely theoretical. A test. It was a test. Stitch passed.” He glares around the crew. “Well done, Stitch. The rest of you need more moral education.”
I breathe out. But this isn’t over. “So, no time travel?”
“Do you know how hard returning the books would be without time-travel?” His inspirational voice wobbles. “Calculating the exact moment to jump worlds; no wriggle-room to over or under-shoot. Waiting it out in real-time if it’s too dangerous. No going back; only sideways. No guarantee we’d help things in the future, and no way to undo the damage in the past.” He rubs his hands through his hair, making it stand on end. “No room for mistakes.”
“Like doing your forgeries in ink, rather than pencilling them in first,” Starfish says.
“Indelible ink,” Robbie adds.
“With your eyes closed.”
“We can hop between words,” I say. “We can smuggle books like that. But we can’t erase what’s happened. And we can’t control what people think.”
“It’s next to impossible.” Robbie’s not looking at me, not looking at any of us. He’s looking at his feet. But he sounds thoughtful.
I swallow an apology before it gets out. “If it’s too hard—”
“Are you kidding?” He looks up and I see it: the glitter in his eyes. “Stitch,” he commands. “Pass me my calculator. Dragon, I need snacks. Starfish, more graph paper. Now, will you lot be quiet for once? I have maths to do!”
“So,” Dragon says slowly. “We’re returning the books?”
Robbie strides down the corridor, calculator tucked under one arm. “We’ll need to do more than that,” he calls back over his shoulder, the fireworks of five-dimensional algebra already shining in his eyes.
So that’s how we became librarians.
We scour dimensions for books that are in danger, and we swoop in and keep them safe. Strictly no time-travel. We take them with permission, and return them when asked. We’ve made the ship into an inter-dimensional library. A library that returns books to other people. We’re still wanted in five worlds, feted in three.
Robbie’s in his element. There are always new problems to solve, the maths is more complicated than anything he’s had to deal with before, and he gets to boss people around all day. He’s dispatched the crew all over the place; poured Cloud’s savings into hiring linguists, poets, archivists, historians, and children’s librarians from several worlds and timelines. (The historians argue with each other constantly. I’ve never seen a group of people enjoy themselves more.)
We deliver books, borrow books, lend books, and buy books. Sometimes we smuggle writers out of sticky situations. Starfish restores damaged books. We distribute banned books to people who need them, or just because we think they’d enjoy them. (Robbie’s even suggested I write a book. About him, naturally.)
But we’ve destroyed so much. If life is a book—as Robbie keeps saying—our earlier chapters are blood-soaked and unreadable. Maybe we can’t write a happy ending, but we can change the story.
“Stitch,” Robbie says. “You should be Captain.”
“Me?” I spit out a mouthful of cheese-and-pickle scone. My thoughts race: Robbie is the genius around here; the crew listens to him. Only Robbie knows how to re-braid the timelines and navigate interdimensionally. I burst out, “I can’t even read.”
“You’re learning fast. And I have bad ideas.” Robbie scuffs his shoe over the deck. “I want to be in charge, like Cloud was. So… I probably shouldn’t be.”
“What are you talking about? You and Cloud are completely different.” I cast around for something reassuring to say, any fundamental differences between them. I think of Robbie’s ink-stained fingers. His yawns when he’s been up all night calculating possibilities for fun. The way he goes quiet when he’s worried or upset. It boils down to this: Robbie’s my friend. Cloud was never really friends with anyone.
But all my big mouth comes up with is: “You can’t actually hypnotise anyone.”
Robbie gives me a pitying look. “With you lot? Please. I wouldn’t have to.”
I guess it’s not so bad, captaining the Diabolical Liberty. The sick feeling I get when the Chronocean roils—perhaps it was never the ocean that bothered me. Perhaps it’s the guilt I couldn’t examine while Cloud was alive. My gut telling me something was wrong. It’s easier, now we’ve changed course.
I still miss the mountains, but I can’t go home to Lilypad Nine yet. I have work to do first.
Ruth’s gone home: turns out she’s got a niece and nephew who love her to bits. Knife’s visiting her parents over on Lilypad Three, but she says she misses the Liberty and I think she’ll be back. I haven’t recovered any more of my own memories, yet. Nor have Starfish or Dragon. But I hope.
Robbie still claims he’s only here to get rich. We still pretend to believe him.
And I’m getting pretty good at reading
E.M. Linden (she/her) is a speculative fiction writer from Aotearoa New Zealand who likes coffee, books, owls, and the sea. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, The Deadlands, Podcastle, the Locus Recommended Reading List, and in various other magazines and anthologies. She is online at emlinden.blog or @emlinden.bsky.social
Translunar Travelers Lounge 