From: Issue 4 | Subscribe | Buy “I wanted to be darker,” I said in Korean. My grandfather let the unlit cigarette in his lips droop as he squinted at me. I remember him sitting on the cement steps outside of the Kalihi house, tucking the cigarette behind his ear while he looked me over. My skin was raw from lying out in the sun all morning, my face already glowing like a tomato.

From: Issue 4 | Subscribe | Buy I see the green and lilac ribbon braided tight and tucked under the brim of your hat. Thanks for the confirmation—you could call it an installment payment. My part of our bargain is this story. My story begins on a lovely night, one of those clear crisp early-summer evenings where the sun lingers well into working hours but the cool air begs for a silken wrap or a shot of vodka.

From: Issue 4 | Subscribe | Buy My child, this is my promise to you: I will teach you magic. We will find snatches of time together, on sunless mornings before you make your way down the outside staircase to the school that does not want you, and in the evenings as I brush out and braid your hair, hair I already know will be dark and thick like your father’s.

From: Issue 3 | Subscribe | Buy The instant she heard the door swing open, Vira grabbed the table’s edge and pulled herself up. The table shook, slopping cold coffee onto her best embroidered tablecloth, but she only had eyes for her daughter. Not that she could read anything other than fear etched into Kateryna’s middle-aged face as she emerged from the bathroom. “What does it say?” Vira said, clutching the edge so hard her fingers went numb.

From: Issue 3 | Subscribe | Buy  — North Texas Frontier, The Banks of the Trinity River, 1866 — Dead Throat Dalila cast a protective circle with her pistol. She moved deosil—clockwise with the movement of the sun and watched it set low over the Trinity River. Her coven surrounded her, hats and bandannas removed out of respect, but she could hear the impatient crack of their knuckles. She stopped and holstered her weapon.

From: Issue 3 | Subscribe | Buy George called out, “Mrs. Whitman, you have a visitor.” Mrs. Whitman strode from her workroom, her white hair skipping out of its hairpins. She straightened her work skirt, massaged her bad knee, then hurried down the hall. “George, what’s happened to the lamp with the blue shade?” “To which lamp are you referring?” George smoothed down a cravat embroidered with tiny trombones. Improper attire for a butler, but George had never been entirely proper.

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.