I had offered Cherie a variant on her solitaire adventure game and she had turned me down twice already. Watching her do the exact same thing every playthrough—all to get to the payoff scene where her avatar romanced the sorceress—made me want to shoot myself, which would require some interesting physics. That was pretty much how this voyage had been going so far.

A few words need to be said about the apple at this point.

It had no fragrance of fruit, or even flowers, or worm-rot. It smelled of diesel hearts and drudgery and overcrowded colonies; of battery acid gone bad and bromides and foundered courtships. Intoxicating, yes, but in the way of verses etched unwanted upon the spirit’s cracked windows. The smell was so everywhere-pervasive that, once the apple showed up in the room, it was hard to imagine life without it. Not inaccurate, really.

Fantasy flash in Not One of Us #54. Dedicated to Chrysoula and Claire Alcock.

Your realm is a vast one: worlds upon worlds you’ve never heard of. Some have more strategic value than others. The Taurags care a great deal about what they call honor. They make a point of sparing civilian targets. But your people are still losing.

At the end of the world, your grave is written not in bitter libations or raven words or elegies breathed across broken glass. Under the dusk of a dreary sun you gather your bones close; across the husk of a weary world you leave behind shadows, but no footfalls. And in the meantime, the foxes come.

I had not entered the parched lands entirely unprepared. I had an excellent pair of boots—good boots are underrated everywhere—and I was almost glad the ferryman would not accept them in exchange for passage. I had the Apiarist’s Gun, made to fit my hand. And as for nourishment, that took care of itself, even here.

Magician Tepwe Kodai and her aide, Rao Nawong, had not been on the hillside for long. The sky threatened rain on and off, and the air smelled of river poetry, of lakes with their scarves of reeds. Water would make Kodai’s mission here, in the distant shadow of the Spiders’ fortress, more difficult, if not outright impossible. The Empire’s defeat of the upstart Spiders, whose rebellion had sparked a general conflagration in the southwest provinces, depended on the mission’s success. At the moment, Nawong found it hard to care.

Kodai was scowling at the sky as she drew a roll of silk out of a brass tube. She had clever hands, precise in every motion, as good with a brush as she was with the pliers and hammers and snippers that she used for the gadgets that were her hobby. “I still think it’s going to rain,” she muttered. “But this has to be done.”

Nawong hesitated for a long time before he said what he said next. “Does it?” he asked at last.

The princess was born beneath owl-stars and sickle-moon, to the cries of the palace ravens.

Your character sheet has holes in it again. You feel them like a trickle, as of snow or ashdrift, down your spine. On the backs of your hands in their mittens.