The anomaly was narrowband, centered at 1.3 gigahertz. Our automated minder had flagged a layered whisper of static from the Goliath system. I yawned and tipped back coffee dregs before I keyed a command to slew the telescope off-axis. If it was interference from our own satellites or aircraft, like always, the signal would remain.

Instead, it vanished.

I rubbed my eyes. Three AM at the observatory. Every intern had their own Wow! signal moment on too little sleep and too many fantasies of reenacting Contact.

Another command returned the disc’s focus to the system. The spike came with it. No ...

“Once, now, and always,” begin all of her Zaza’s tales. Bren knows every one by heart, but she still loves the rise and fall of every sun-drenched, salt-crusted story, Zaza’s rich voice rolling like waves. “Three children drift on a cold, dark sea.”

This is Bren’s favorite. Even her brother Walt, who at fourteen sees himself as far too old for such nonsense, stops on his way to bed and leans in the open door of Bren and Aggie’s bedroom.

“Were they lost?” Walt asks, lips twitching. He knows they were. Knows in some ways they still are. The sea is in their blood, on Zaza’s side, but the forest ...

Elizabeth finds the bur in Alex’s bedsheets and somehow manages not to completely lose her shit. It’s just a bur. It could have come in with Georgia, their border collie, or on a sock or pantleg. Epizootic dispersion. Plain and simple. It doesn’t have to mean anything. It doesn’t have to mean the worst thing. Gently, she pinches it loose and holds it to the light.

It’s probably nothing.

And yet…

Elizabeth isn’t in the habit of tidying her twelve-year-old’s bedroom or stripping his linens while he’s off at his father’s for the weekend. Her sprucing up is a ruse, a plot she’s been hatching for ...

In exchange for two large cod, the wise-woman extracts Minke’s first language and wraps it in a piece of sailcloth. Her milk-language, her mother-tongue. It’s only spoken here, on this chain of islands. Each of them a few acres wide, and each with their own particular accent and god.

The parcel shifts in Minke’s hands like a waterskin, cool and smelling of gutted fish. When she lifts it to her ear it calls back to her: gulls, the lilt of a bone-whistle, and under that, something crying.

The old people always say the language of Minke’s island is like water. Still, Minke expected something blo...

You first arrived in the woods when you chose a new name for yourself: Cindy. Cindy had no past, only a future. You cut yourself from your body like it was a diseased limb and left it to rot. When you opened your eyes, you were here, in the world inside the world.

There are many ways to do this, although you did not know them then. All involve a choice, a decision. A grasp for a place that hasn’t been born yet.

You ended up here because you no longer felt like a person, but a fungal sprout of tombstones. You left your body behind because it was not really a body but a graveyard, a sallow fiel...

Fresh bones failed to sing for me, despite having six generations of necromancers in my family. I could only hear the song after the bones had transformed, over millions of years, into fossils.

Mom helped me discover this when I was 9. At every family gathering, the cousins would be given chicken bones, white and glistening. They’d focus until a single bone multiplied, forming additional skeleton pieces. A cross-hatching of flesh, then skin, enveloped it all. Quills erupted before softening into silky feathers. Finally, a beak clucked a new breath, alive again.

I ended up shuffled to a corner...

It’s a funny thing, telling folks that my astronaut daughter was lost at sea—funny, like slowly pulling up a weed with a taproot anchored in my heart; which is to say, not very funny at all. But then, watching one’s flesh and blood descend from the upper atmosphere to scatter into a billion pieces takes a strange toll on a man’s sense of humor. Anna would have laughed to hear me describe it. Rolled her big brown eyes, then flashed that crooked smile that only ever showed a dimple on one side, as she told me I was worrying for nothing. The orbital repair mechs are safe. Astronauts have been ri...

Hope is seeing that tiny muscle in Abdi’s jaw move when I lean against his shoulder and breathe him in. Patchouli and oil paints. Garlic and rosemary. Home. I lay a hand he cannot feel on his arm and whisper memories into his ear like a prayer.

How long has it been since we held each other?

According to my instruments, I jumped dimensions six weeks ago, but the receiving end of the Interdimensional Bridge is glitchy in ways Jones, Croft and I never accounted for. Every time I activate the Bridge, it should bring me back to 00:00°, back home.

I rest my head against the sofa and check my position....

Quinn gets lost in voidspace while I’m headed home from work.

I’m on the train when I receive the ping from the Institute for Dimensional Exploration. The communication line with Quinn Valentine has been disconnected in the subdimensional bridge. This is a courtesy notice, and if contact cannot be restored before the bridge shuts down, I will receive a secondary letter of condolence for my loss.

It’s so coldly polite. People have been lost in the subdimensional bridge before; all the researchers sign more than a hundred digital pages just in waivers.

Quinn showed me some of the paperwork when t...

Awareness returns to me in ragged bursts. There is a heaviness to my thoughts as my systems fight to come back online.

I’m severely damaged, paralysed, my drives shattered and splintered. Life support systems for the crew are just functional enough to tell me that they’re no longer functional. I pull together as much data as I can from the sensors that remain: my hull is pierced in a hundred and twelve places that I can detect, the exact number likely higher. Nowhere inside me is still pressurised or oxygenated, every room exposed to vacuum. All the air, and presumably the crew, have been dra...