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Weekly Contest #358
The stasis drive aboard the Meridian was worth more than the ship that carried it. Men had killed for less.Forty light-minutes away, a man had already decided the ship would not survive the week. Commander Eva Rostova would learn his name the hard way, the way she learned everything. The record never would.At 07:30 ship-time she stopped at the Engineering viewport, the way she did every shift. Inside, Chief Engineer Kaelen Vance bent over the drive, dark hair shoved off his face, three days without sleep. She told herself it was oversight, a...
I was certain he would fail, and I was certain it would be tonight.The candles in the hallway had been burning without diminishing: eleven of them, low along the hallway floor, visible through the gap beneath my door, each holding its original height, as though the wax had made a decision about time that I had not. She must have replaced them while I slept; I never once caught her at it. There are things you stop remarking on when the world has already begun its slow departure from the rules you were raised to trust. The flames did not gutte...
Weekly Contest #357
And it is three nights now, and the boy in the house is wrong.I am Zeus. Fourteen years old, and most of me has quit. My hips have all but given out. The blue of my eyes is going pale, clouding at the rims. One part of me still works clean. My nose. It is how I know. It is why I am the only one under this roof who knows.By morning I am going to die in the doorway of the front room. I can smell it on my own coat, the cold-penny smell that runs out ahead of the end, and I can smell the same end on the thing that walked back wearing the boy. On...
By the time Víctor Salazar told her he trusted her, Maya Reyes had already sold him to the men who would kill him.She had done it at four that morning. A rooftop two districts east. Rain. He slept through it, one arm flung across the cold side of the bed where she had been.A burst of code. Nine hundred milliseconds. His escape route through the old port, gone to her handler before the city woke.Then she had walked home through the wet neon. Climbed back in beside him. Lay there dry-eyed and listened to him breathe until the sky went grey.Now...
Weekly Contest #356
The fish were wrong before Mateo Reyes understood why.For eleven days the spring below the clinic had run clear and full and alive, the one live water in a dead country, and he had gone down to it each morning the way other people went to prayer. On the twelfth the fish were knotted at the far end of the pool in a trembling silver mass, all of them facing one stretch of shallows that none would cross, and a handful had turned belly-up against the spill, small and pale, revolving slowly in the current.Mateo crouched at the edge with the empty...
The air filtration hummed at a frequency too low for language. It sat in the wall like a second heartbeat, salvaged from a decommissioned freight hauler and bolted into the concrete by someone who had lived here before them and left nothing behind except the bolt holes and a faint smell of machine oil.Condensation gathered on the metal walls in slow beads that caught the light from the one overhead panel they kept at quarter-brightness. The water did not fall. It collected, trembled at the edge of its own weight, and held. Maya watched a sin...
Rain hissed against the windshield. The city beyond the glass dissolved into coloured water, and the coloured water into grey, and the grey into nothing worth naming.Inside the stolen patrol car, the air held wet leather, burnt circuitry, old blood, and the cheap synth-cigarettes Víctor Salazar kept crushing into the ashtray without lighting. Maya Reyes sat in the passenger seat with both hands clenched in her lap. She was staring at the pistol on the dashboard, and she had been staring at it for some time.It was old. Too old for Nueva Los Á...
The first customer disappeared from the website at 2:13 a.m.Miriam knew because the website told her.A white box sat on the homepage where the summer sale banner should have been.ONE VISITOR HAS FAILED TO PROVE THEY ARE HUMANBeneath it, a spinning wheel turned, bright and delicate, like a toy carousel.Miriam sat in bed, blue light on her face, and waited for the wheel to stop.It kept turning.At 2:18 a.m., she messaged Elias.Are you awake?I am now.The website says someone failed to prove they are human.Screenshot?She sent it.Three dots appear...
The grandfather clock in the rest-house hall had stood stopped at 2:17 for five years, the hour the flood took her mother. Then the dead clock struck once, its hands never leaving that hour, and the sound came up through the floor and woke her.The room was dark. Outside, the rain came down with the patience of something that had all night. Beyond the window the river moved the way water moves when it is keeping count.In the bathing-room the water in the jar had risen on its own, past the brim and across the floor, clear, then brown, then a t...
Weekly Contest #355
The dead man’s chair remained at the head of the table, although everyone knew he had never allowed anyone to sit comfortably while he was alive.It was a heavy teak chair, broad-backed and too large for the narrow dining room. Haji Rahim had bought it in Makkah in 1998 and shipped it home in a crate that sat for months in the storeroom, square and sullen among sacks of rice and broken fans. Once placed at the table, the chair gathered a dignity greater than most people in the house. Tight geometric patterns ran along its carved frame, palm-p...
Weekly Contest #354
You sit on the toilet for what should have been three minutes of silence.Your spouse is downstairs speaking on the phone in the careful voice used for bills, school matters, and relatives who ask for favours while avoiding the word favour.The bathroom is narrow: damp towel, plastic dinosaur near the bath mat, toothpaste stars on the mirror. You lock the door and lower your head.Privacy in this house has become a unit of measurement. Three minutes. Five, if nobody knocks. Ten, if the children are distracted and your spouse has missed the unpa...
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