Lianne

“Talk to me.”

“About what?”

Lianne looks at Derek, at the clouds, anywhere but down.

“Something.  Anything.  I need a distraction.”

“Topic?”

“Puppies, cookies, I don’t know, whatever.”

“Gravity?  Long falls?  Wile E Coyote?”

“Oh fuck off.”

A cloud floats by to the left, a little below them.  “That one looks like a donkey.”

“Really?  I think it looks like splattered human remains.”

“You’re loving this, aren’t you?  How often do you do this?”

The cliff is way behind them now.  Lianne feels strangely calm, and doesn’t even have to try not to think about it.

“More than you’d think.”

Preliminary

You adjust your shirt and comb through your resume for the twenty-fourth time. Then the secretary looks over her glasses and tells you to go in.

There’re three of them, and they’re nice enough – there’s some banter, a question about your volunteer experience in Ghana. When they get to the meat of the thing, you’re feeling pretty good.

“Mostly,” says the woman, her legs folded to the side, “we’re wondering how you deal with the unexpected.”

You’re about to tell her something about the deadlines at your last job, and then the floor drops out from under your chair.

Spade

He flips through the dossier idly, driving the Aston Martin with his knee, weaving against traffic because, hey, why not?

Wildcard’s been busy, but not so you’d notice – car accidents, heart attacks, a typhoon touching ground in Cambodia.  Diamond’s sending him to Prague, but neither of them could come up with a solid why. There’s probably an equation running through the Array or something.  He wonders if they should try the Probability Drive again.

He wonders where Heart is going, but, then, he’s always wondering.

His flight leaves at 2:00, but he realizes he’s going to be late when the Martin explodes.

Vesper

Chaos is wearing an expensive suit, and his hair is perfect.  He’s not what she expected.

“You were thinking I’d have a beard, yeah?”

“At least.”

Everyone is frozen, halfway to where they were going.  The station is unnervingly silent.  There’s a gout of steam hanging like ice above one of the trains.  She can hear his heels clicking on the platform.

“I’m not about getting rid of order,” says Chaos, half to himself.  “It’s where the order fails, breaks down, corrupts, that’s the sweetest bit.”

They walk past a man whose briefcase has flown open.  Papers hang like leaves.

Spellbound

Magic is a sex thing.

People don’t get that.  They think it’s power, religion, arcane and eldritch whatevers throwing sparklies around a room.  And yeah, ok, sometimes it’s like that.  But it’s all basically sex in the end.

There’s a binary to it.  Aggressive, destructive male forces, and healing, creative females.  And yes, I know that’s some regressive thinking, but give me a minute.

See, magic is a fusion of those forces.  It’s creating and destroying at once.  Copulation on a basic and a cosmic scale.  Crudely: magic is just getting the universe to fuck the way you want it.

Jay

A buzz of static.  “Jay, are we cool?”

“Gogogogo.”

Alpha drops on zip wires, upside down, and come through the window in a hail of bullets and glass.  The tango drops in less than ten seconds.  “Listen,” says Ramirez, “me and Liz, that’s not like -”

“We’re not talking about this,” says Jay.

Ramirez blows the door and Jay takes point.  A flashbang goes off.  “I don’t want this to be a thing.”

“It’s not.  Alright?  Leave it.”

Some fucker goes crazy on full auto.  They hunker behind a chipped wall.

“Are we cool, though?”

Jay sighs.  “We’re cool, bro.”

Merrick

Merrick is bigger than he looks, and he does not look small.  His cloak is made of dozens of pelts, bound by fine gut.  It smells like a bunch of dead things, which it is.  His axe is rough, heavy and scary as hell.

He stalks them in the woods, caving skulls and ignoring the endless moans.  Sometimes they claw at him with their cold, damp hands, and then things get interesting.

Merrick’s used to being alone, and killing the company that calls.  So he isn’t sure what to think when he sees Helen through the trees, building a fire.

Awakenings

Erika woke in a sweat, blind with the dream, and she waited until the world came into focus.

When she went downstairs, wrapped in a silk robe, the Doctor was hunched over it, tools in hand, steady as steel.  Nearly all of the workshop lights had been re-angled, and the scene glowed like a theatre.

“Almost done?” she asked.

“Not almost,” he said, muffled by the rag over his mouth.

He shut the panel, and the thing began to tick, slowly, rhythmically, and then faster and faster until the sound became a whir.  With a lurch, the Tinkertoy stood.

Foster

Every morning, Foster draws her face in one of the notebooks he keeps on his bedside table, from memory.  It is the same picture, over and over again.  It helps him hold her in his mind – it staves off the fear that she is breaking into mist.

He never looks back.  Every picture’s fresh.  The stack of books grows and grows.

One morning he wakes, half-dreaming, and in a haze knocks over the pile of little black books.  One falls open near the wall.  Foster picks it up.  He stops breathing.

He doesn’t recognize the woman on the page.

Cardamom

There is the smell of cardamom on the air, and a dry, warm night breeze that rushes past her ears.  The petals of the trees glow and sway, and where they drop they leave trails of thin mist in a thousand colours.  It is the most beautiful place she has ever been, and she moves through it as quickly and quietly as her training has made her capable.

A chill is chasing her, licking at her neck.  Her wounded leg has started to throb, distantly.  Eventually, the wolf will catch up to her.  It’s time to start thinking of alternatives.