I looked up from my coffee. Through the steam coming off the cup, I could almost make out her face. What a cruel trick of the mind to place her across the table from me again.

Had it been days? Months? I couldn't recall.

There were things left unsaid th…

It wasn't fair. Not at all. She mulled over in her mind how mission control could make such a decision and not even consult her. The audacity of it boggled her mind.

Taylor had been assigned to this mission on accident essentially, but her contributions …

“You can’t go out there,” Pockets hissed as he caught up with her by the fire escape: she was remarkebly fast for a girl. “The guard’ll kill you. There’s a reason the lights go out.”

Juliet’s eyes flitted back and forth within her head as if they were sh…

Juliet stopped running. She had no idea where she was. The GPS navigation system in her head was gone, almost. It was like her head could only store so much information, whereas before she had uploaded everything to the Skyy, the United Corp's cloud servi…

The chubby bellied brown pup kept climbing out of its cardboard box cage. I watched from across the street as the woman selling the puppies would continuously put the pup back in the box only to have it flop out again.

The pup was smart. It knew that it …

Raf had always been a quick thinker. By my count it was not quite ten seconds before klaxons and warning lights went off.

"Lieutenant?"

I made a show of looking back and forth to waste a few seconds. Raised my handheld and blinked a few commands erroneo…

Summer. It was hot. It was sticky. It was gross. It was also the happiest time of my life. Despite the fact that I was currently melting into the faux leather seats of my father's land yacht of an automobile as it puttered down a forested road in what fel…

Twin-twin explosions sounded close beside us, explosive charges sending the secondary airtight hatch slamming closed. The three-ton heavy vehicle took a step back on automatic stabilisers while the air pressure equalised, then set us gently down.

I check…

The makeshift hospital room was stark. I gazed down at him, waiting for him to wake. There were surprisingly few wires connected. I bent over him to disconnect them. His eyes fluttered open and met mine. He began to stir.

"Don't move too fast."

"I.. I f…

Watching from a distance, Cornflap studied the perplexed deerling, not even a yearling yet. With their many years of experience, Rnfl was no nearer an understanding of what had happened than the fawn, but they felt sure that the sphere from a few installm…

There's a creature that lives somewhere between my ribs. Small, wild, a lover of the moon. Shaped like a lily and glowing like the warmth of a single lit match.

It was born when we met. A spark amongst tinder.

It stumbled onto its feet like a newborn la…

Nara ran over, body slamming an off-white girl, before jumping back and blasting her with inky black balls of magic. "Stay away from them!"

Rima blocked it the best she could before getting back up, a little worse for wear. "If you'd keep those foul thi…

Devynne had broken up with Carl a few weeks back, and had decided to rearrange her furniture. Startled, she stared at the fork. Her surprise quickly turned to rage. She wasn't going to clean up a single more fucking mess that that asshole made!

Devynne g…

The day, like the night, was cold and dark. After breakfast, I took two mugs of steaming coffee out to the bridge and shared one with the officer on bridge watch. Thick cloud gathered threateningly in the skies above us, and the barometer was still fallin…

There was a few times when the lights would flare up again, the embers would be stirred by a passing breeze. But nothing lasted. And the creature began to accept its cruel fate and give up hope. It grew dim and thin and it laid down on the floor to die wi…

Time went on and the creature grew stronger and more brazen and it reveled in the delicacies of its new life with sweet nothings being offered as ambrosia and subtle flirtations the drink of choice.

It danced on top of my racing heart, playing the drums…

And then one day, the door to my rib cage slammed shut with a reverberating clang that made everything inside freeze. The creature's light shifted, like a candle on the brink of being extinguished due to a violent windstorm.

The creature began to starve.…

Story is marked as mature

Struggling with a new sense of purpose, Tam struggled to attain a precarious upright stance. She had no notion if she could talk with them, and she had no voice to use now. She doubted she could even communicate with the tiny turtles. Instead, she took a …

They're getting closer. I hear them in the alleys and in the shadows that are getting longer. They're bolder in the city. Not as scared of the light although it blazes on their sensitive skin. I didn't even have to worry about them back home, there weren…

I watched the message go out and switched into a wider communications view, scrolling through the new options afforded by military-grade clearance. One of them was Nyquist's command channel.

"Loading dock secure. Commencing fuel and munitions load."

"OPs…

"It's only a scratch." Mia waved it off although she knew she had gotten hit hard with the metal bars as they had swung into place over the doors. But she had more important matters to deal with at the moment than herself.

She stumbed towards the figure …

"Brush him off, I don't have the time. I need to go and talk to Edwards from Bay Three. They were meant to be finished months ago and I'm taking hard questions about where their destroyer is."

I dropped the call and pulled a jacket over my jumpsuit, smoo…

Basil finished the first circle of words.

The chant wasn't fast. It couldn't be rushed or muttered. The pronunciations had to be precise.

When he finished the second circle, the base of his neck seemed to grow hot,

He stood up straighter and began the …

The moment was bright and golden, like summer sunlight. We pulled off caps, wiping foreheads and setting wooden bats aside to sit down. There was the popping of bottle caps, toasts declared, bottles raised. We chatted animatedly, full of vigour at our suc…