Late November. They've known the date for three weeks - Jenny scheduling the induction for a Tuesday morning, the bag packed and in the car since the week before. We get to the hospital at six. Emily is checked in, changed into the gown, the IV in by six-thirty. The monitor strapped around her abdomen, the baby's heartbeat on the screen - the same fast percussion as the ultrasound in May, steady, constant.

Chapter Eight — What They Choose

Outside, the night had gone clear and cold and enormous.

They came down the hall's wide steps into it together, and the dinner closed behind them like a door underwater, all that candlelight and scrutiny and held breath suddenly muffled and far away, and Gwen stood on the bottom step in the freezing air and let herself, for one unguarded second, simply breathe.

"The car's down past the trees," she said, automatically, reaching for her keys.

Torn from his own world and stuffed into the body of a villainess, facing the end of a doomed route he himself wrote, "Amelia" must navigate a world she really should know - too bad she was never great at worldbuilding.

Stuck in a world she (maybe) created, Amelia quickly finds that reality has filled in the details she failed to describe. The characters who were so flat when she wrote them now have nuance, and motives. The kingdom she wrote into existence is experiencing internal strife she never even thought about. And let's not even get into the complexities of the magic system, or the demon that forced her into this situation to begin with...

Oh, and then there's the fact that she's about to be arrested and executed... but surely she can come up with a way to write herself out of that, right?

...Right?

We were having a whole conversation without moving our mouths.

Not This Guy
-6-7-8-
by Suzan Donamas

The next morning was a recovery day before two of us became wage slaves again, but the kids had a few more days of grace before they started their next round of indoctrination. Ish was happy to big-brother LC through the next day, and as Maz and I were travelling together, we arranged to collect them both from ‘our’ beach café, or rather meet them there and pay for unhealthy food. Just as I was finishing breakfast, Ish showed me his laptop.

“Clara sent me a mail last night Dad. Last night for us, I mean. It’s okay to read; nothing…”

“Personal, son?”

Chapter 10 – The cook

When I reached the office Guy was already there, engaged on his new case. I was not unduly surprised to find that he had anticipated the course of action I’d planned for mine.

My phone rings at twenty past one.

"I've got it," she says, before I can speak. Her voice is different — faster, something lit in it. "The reactivation isn't a response to the gradient. It's a response to the timing. The nodes are pattern-matching the suppression interval and compensating. If we randomize the interval — structured pseudo-random within a fixed variance band — the mesh can't predict the next suppression event."

I sit up.

"Show me," I say.

"I'm at home. I've been running it on my machine."

I'm already looking for my shoes.

After the slightly chaotic end to Dido’s evidence and the subsequent adjournment for the day, a packed court resumed the following Monday, with the Judge announcing,

Torn from his own world and stuffed into the body of a villainess, facing the end of a doomed route he himself wrote, "Amelia" must navigate a world she really should know - too bad she was never great at worldbuilding.

Stuck in a world she (maybe) created, Amelia quickly finds that reality has filled in the details she failed to describe. The characters who were so flat when she wrote them now have nuance, and motives. The kingdom she wrote into existence is experiencing internal strife she never even thought about. And let's not even get into the complexities of the magic system, or the demon that forced her into this situation to begin with...

Oh, and then there's the fact that she's about to be arrested and executed... but surely she can come up with a way to write herself out of that, right?

...Right?

It was a really pleasant evening in the end, although I found myself looking rather too often at Trudi’s long sleeves, and doing my usual obsessive balance sheet game. For every Nazi bastard, every Suleiman, every fucking Nigel Forbes, I knew a Butt, a Woodruff, a swathe of Welsh coppers, and in the end, the Nazis and cousin fucking Suleiman were dead, and Forbes was banged away with other scum.

“Darling?”

“Sorry, love. Miles away. Just counting blessings. Gwen, what does your, um, Andy do?”

Morning came too quickly.

Samuel opened his eyes slowly, disoriented by the unfamiliar ceiling, the beige curtains moving faintly in the air conditioning, and the lingering smell of hairspray mixed with perfume.

Natalie's house.

The gala.

Tiffany.

The dance.

The message.

His chest tightened at once.

He sat up on the guest bed. He was wearing a girls pijama Natalie had lent him. Traces of makeup remained around his eyes, faint dark smudges beneath the lashes betraying how much he had cried the night before.

Chapter Seven — The Receiving

An attendant struck the old bell at the head of the table once, and the low, worn note it gave off — the same note that had sent them out of the last room and into this one — brought the whole hall back to silence.