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A curated magazine of original short fiction — read each story, or hear it narrated.
Today's story
The spectrometer said the wine was a forgery, the master of wine agreed, and a man's life was to be ended over a bottle — and not one of them had thought to ask the only question that matters about a fake, which is who it was made to please.
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A nineteen-year-old Cobb is caught with the dock-workers' burial fund and will not say one word in his own defence — and the silence everyone has read as guilt is in fact the only act of love his family has left, and the one thing standing between the boy and the truth.The Burial Fund
The spectrometer said the wine was a forgery, the master of wine agreed, and a man's life was to be ended over a bottle — and not one of them had thought to ask the only question that matters about a fake, which is who it was made to please.A Question of Vintage
They had her on three cameras, her phone, and a swipe card, which in the modern view is the same as having a confession — and which proves only that the machine saw exactly what she did, and understood nothing whatever about why.The Camera Never Asks Why
On the last morning before the war reaches his tower, an old loft-keeper takes the inventory of the birds he was bound to for life — and through them to one far hand across the front he has answered for forty years and never once seen.The Keeper of the Far Loft
There were eight people at the long table the night Aubrey Stint died, and only one of them had spent two years making a perfect little copy of the house — small enough to lie about, too honest to do it.The House That Saw Everything
Everybody in Snowfield knew the morning boom kept the mountain from killing them. Wren just happened to be the only one who thought the mountain was telling her she'd be the next to fire it.The Bang Before the Bang
I have cut nine hundred keys in my life and kept the copy of not one of them, and for thirty years no man in this colony could tell me why a thing so foolish should be holy. Then Caelius Rufus died in his bed with the box still shut, and they came to me, three times, for the key I had sworn I did not have.The Empty Ward
For nine days the sky gave nothing, and Wren sat at the board that decided who in the valley went dark — and quietly, against every rule of the commons, she kept one cord plugged that should have come out.The Grid Will Hold
You will be the third voicer Pelloran has hired and the third it has kept. I am writing this so that you keep it the way it wishes to be kept, and not the way the manual says, because the manual was written by a man who never put his head inside the swell box and held his breath to listen.The Voicer's Handbook
The boy sends a sound file and one line of text. The walk-away's out of sync, he says. Fix it. He has not called his father in nine years.Walk-Away
The living you go in fast for. The dead you go in slow, because the dead have nowhere to be, and the only body the cold can still take is yours.The Cold That Keeps
She was the only person in the parish forbidden to repeat what she knew — which made her the only person Mr. Ashworth could safely tell the truth. The trouble was that the truth she had just swallowed was the one that could clear his name, and her trade forbade her ever to give it back.The Debt of the Table
He'd hired her to give him back the accent he'd spent eleven years burying. The problem was that she'd spent fifteen years teaching people like him how to bury it — and she'd started with herself.The Shape of How You Say It
The reticle is twelve lines of paint I lay down by hand, two microns wide, and the whole observatory measures the sky against them. My hand used to be the most trustworthy instrument on this station. The arithmetic now says otherwise.The Painted Eye
Once in a hundred years the Sillow draws all the way back and lays out everything it ever took, and a daughter of a thin-yeared family may walk out across the mud and keep one returned thing — which is exactly how my grandmother's grandmother damned us, the village says, by being the one who came home empty-handed.The Long Draw
They keep asking how long the search took, because the search is the part with a number that forgives me. I will give them the number. It is the other one I have come to talk about.The Distance in Meters
There were forty-one habitable worlds left in the Reach, and the Empress had quietly erased one of them before the people sailing toward it ever woke. Sefa Brae found that out with her hands, in the dark, reading the wear of a dead ship's heart — and found, too, that the wear would not tell her the one thing she most needed to know.The Stilling of the Saint Wend
There is a law against bending the dead, and I have kept it my whole life, and I am going to tell you how I broke it, because the woman it brought back is still burning in a window across the city and someone ought to know whose hands she was made by.What the Light Remembers
They did not send a soldier to take the organ. They sent me, because I was the only man in the province who could tell them, to the gram, what it was worth.The Front Pipes
The night shift at a body depot is just you, the rain, and a machine that times how long it takes a stranger to get out of someone else's skin. Tonight one of them won't leave.Returned to Spec
The Directorate requires, before a station is closed, a complete inventory. I have kept this one for thirty-one years, and I will keep it correctly to the end, because the record is the last thing here that is still mine to keep.The Last Inventory
They gave me the body because I am the best, and being the best means I can put a creature into a posture it never held in life and make you believe it chose it. I want that on the record before the rest of this.The Attitude of the Specimen
The clocks in Halloran's shop had all stopped at ten to twelve, which made them right twice a day and right about one thing forever, and I stood among them at ten to one being wrong about everything.The Hour I Didn't Have
The nest has been there all summer, and her mother has been describing it on the telephone for all of that summer, so that Cora has come to know it entirely through the voice of a woman afraid of it.The Paper House
The daughter has sent four pages of instructions and will not be coming, and so the woman on the table and the woman who loved her will pass each other today, if they pass at all, only through the two hands of a stranger.A Good Likeness
Nettlecombe had not had a murder in living memory, which was precisely the trouble, because it meant that when one finally arrived nobody recognised it, and they very nearly let it go out with the milk.