There’s only so much you can bring back, and some of the things I’ve had to leave behind haunt me. Dusty glassware from the university lab, too fragile to take over broken roads. Books that spilled their pages like a deck of cards or (once) whose ink charred in the light, leaving lacework pages. And the thing with Melly, and Pattermead’s pack. It was after the first long winter, and it was my third time out since Pattermead.

From: Issue 3 | Subscribe | Buy The dirigible’s takeoff from the top of the pyramid was accompanied by the same pomp as an Imperial bloodfeast. Everyone in attendance had shined their carapaces, and some had gone so far as to paint themselves as on a high holy day. The mateless filtered through the crowd, sacs of spume mounded on their backs so any who wished for food could have it.

From: Issue 2 | Subscribe | Buy Kahina Deschamps felt her sixty years in the reverberations of the coring machine thrumming up into her bones. Above her, the sky churned with hydrocarbon clouds, but for a bronze patch that suggested the sun, hovering at the horizon for the duration of Titan’s polar summer. Saturn itself was an unseen presence lurking behind those clouds. And ten meters away, a methane sea lapped at a shore of rounded ice pebbles, black-silver in the UV night-vision provided by her visor.

From: Issue 2 | Subscribe | Buy “Unfortunately, we’re unable to offer you a position at this time…” Emony stopped paying attention after that. She’d heard it a hundred times before. But the alchemist’s mouth just kept moving so she reached out, grabbed the glass retort off his desk and smashed it into his fat face. Well, she fantasized about it anyway. Instead she nodded and muttered, “Thank you for your time and kind consideration,” through gritted teeth.

From: Issue 2 | Subscribe | Buy I always sleep like a rock when weightless, but some alarms will wake an asteroid. The alarms in my ship, The Hard Quarry, work admirably. I jerk alert with my arms flailing and my heart rate cresting 150—which triggers another, quieter alarm. “Calm down, Hollie,” my comp says, playing soothing sounds. “Fuck you, too.” I shout back. Until I focus on which light blinks.

From: Issue 2 | Subscribe | Buy Mickie found the Doombot5000 at an estate sale purely by accident. Well, that and a tracking app she’d installed on her phone. But really, when the address popped up, it wasn’t as if she could have known it was the estate if her former nemesis, Sandron the Unstoppable. Poor Sandy. He’d been a decent antagonist back in the day. She didn’t remember any invite to his funeral.

From: Issue 2 | Subscribe | Buy My mother used to say: “No lie ever suffered from too much information.” She fancied herself a philosopher, inasmuch as any in the Floodlands could lay claim to the title. She also claimed to be able to decipher the Harthram script on the sunken ships that speckled the hard, gray waters west of Scythe Bay. It wasn’t true, of course, but none of the other captains would venture near enough to those echo-cursed wrecks to verify her dubious translations.

From: Issue 1 | Subscribe | Buy Rebecca hated her father for what he’d done, refusing to help him dig the grave, arms crossed, tears running down her face, the body under the tarp no longer Grandpa, no more secret conversations when they were alone, just the two of them now—her father the killer, her father and his constant worries, her father convinced that the old man had finally fallen sick.

From: Issue 1 | Subscribe | Buy “He’s back again,” Mom whispers. “That man.” “Honestly.” Miss Yue lays aside her Peaceday wreath, takes her by the shoulders and leads her away from the window. “Someone should call the lancers.” “Call the Altassians?” Mom’s other friend says. “On an old man?” “He knows what’ll happen if they find him here. We have children here.” “Jian?” Mom turns and sees me standing in the door, one foot in my shoe, stuffing the last of a fried dough stick in my mouth.