Category: issue 1

Dear sir, This is a matter of utmost urgency and I do hope you can help me.

The light from the Weaver’s aurora illuminated the dirty smoke rising from Chinatown; the snaps of the dhobis slapping linen against river banks cut through the early morning mist like rifleshots.

Last night you were a great black cat, larger than me, with shining green eyes. You stretched out on the bed and I curled against you, the back of my head against your belly. Your purr of contentment vibrating through me. I fell asleep, so happy that I nearly didn’t think of your former self.

Minako plucked a particularly lucky prime number from her garden to ensure the robot exhibition wouldn’t be too crowded. She had been planning the excursion to Universal Studios Japan for months and everything had to be perfect.

I can’t stay long at the Sea Palace. I have little enough funds, despite having taken a couple of reading jobs. Still, it’s good to have a bed and a door that locks after fleeing the Amber City, so I sit on the deck, eating lightly fried, gently spiced seaweed, feeling the warmth of the rising sun on my skin.

She said she’d come to warn you, but you’ve read enough time travel stories to know that the time stream is mostly self-correcting.

In retrospect, ‘I’m dying’ was a bad pick-up line.

When she is old enough that she’s allowed to use her mother’s tablet, Emma watches old news footage of the first battle between a gargantuan alien monster and Mondo, the monster that protects the Earth.

Corwyn stared down the old man at the hotel’s front desk. He took his sweet time sizing them up, turning his disapproving squint on her, Gwen, and the clockwork driver—who held their trunk on one shoulder—in turn.

The late-afternoon sun hovers above the wall as I kneel on the earth, weeding tomatoes. Beyond the wall, yellow-orange light reflects off the clean sharp lines of the apartment blocks. Boxes for safe people, people who are provided for. People who matter. People who I knew, once upon a time. People who could afford the vaccine before the gates closed. The plague’s gone now, but the wall’s still here.