LINKDING

<blockquote>A Young Man Stops Time Whenever Things Get Rough</blockquote>

<blockquote>Instructions after instructions like these forever, scribbled over the paper, with the rough layout of the lanterns, candle dishes and incense bowls, et cetera, et cetera. With my short legs, and the robe I'd chosen to wear for my first day for this new job restricting my movement, I had to measure my strides carefully. The soup on the tray gone long cold, and every joint in my no-longer-young body numb, I finally found the first son of the family in the middle of the annex. The burn scars on my palms—marks of my betrayal—felt raw where I gripped the wooden tray too tight for too long, and I had trouble letting go of it as I set the meal down.</blockquote>

<blockquote>At midnight in the Night & Day Bakery, the burnt-caramel vanilla scent of warm sugar rose into the air and hovered. Esmé was careful to keep the heat balanced—if the sugar got too warm, not only would the syrup scorch, but the spell inside of it would burn, too. The oven, as if attuned to her very thoughts, held steady. Esmé smiled.</blockquote>

<blockquote>It was fitting, Solveig supposed, that the troublesome gold part of the icon’s spell should come from the troubled Kvenmark. Gold was always a wild card in sorcerous workings, and the modern sorcerers who attempted to apply natural philosophy to their methods had not found a way around that. It would take her a great deal of study to work around the gold, with the spell she had in mind—and at the moment her mind felt hollow, emptied out by the very loss that sparked her desire for revenge, or justice, or both.</blockquote>

<blockquote>A good Gallows Girl knows how to steady a man when he twitches at the end of the rope. She’ll take his hands and hold them tight, or grab him by the forearms if she needs to. The firm touch of a good Gallows Girl is usually enough: he’ll go slack, stop kicking, and let the noose dig. The death is just as ugly, but the passing is eased. A good Gallows Girl will open herself a tiny bit, let him scrape off some of her innocence to carry with him as he goes. My sister told me that it hurts a lot. But it’s supposed to be a good hurt, and it’s the only way to know that you did your job.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“It was Erdene,” Enkh said. “I don’t know what she encountered out there, but she had taken off half her suit. Came in sunburned and emaciated, half an arm gone, crawling with the spinal plague. We’re meeting in the conference room to discuss how to get the antibodies sent out to Batbayer. It’s a full-blown epidemic.” “Batbayer is three thousand kilometers out,” Sarnai said. “Making a run like that this time of year is impossible.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>Gran never did like it when I used the Winchester to deal with dragons — so I went and did a damn fool thing and set out to hunt them in the dead of night. It wasn’t hard to sneak by Gran. She snored twice as loud as she barked, which was saying something.</blockquote>

<blockquote>For as long as I can remember, Mythili has said she was going to leave. Even when we were children, she would tell Kumar and me that she was leaving the next day and we would never see her again. I would shake her hand and wish her all the best in her future endeavours while Kumar would cry, refusing to stop until she promised not to go. This time, Mythili didn’t say anything. She just packed her clothes in a big shopper bag and got Rs. 1200/- from our grandmother, though Kumar thought she had probably stolen it from the servants. “But where are you going?” I asked. “I’m leaving,” said Mythili. “How?” said Kumar. “I don’t know,” said Mythili. “But I’m leaving.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>Three months after the two men had pushed a needle into his thigh, Sheru learned something new about being sad. It happened just after the last of the strange dreams. They were not the kind of dreams that you’d expect a dog to have. The dreams he’d had before the men came had been doggy dreams. The dreams he had after they grabbed him, though, these dreams were entirely new. He had never seen anything like them.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The five other fairies scowled at her. They too were all drunk and well fed, and the meal in their bellies was taking on the sour heaviness of an unpaid debt. They had all brought trinkets for the baby, of course, all the gifts that could formally be expected by a low nobleman—which was why six of them had been invited in hopes of getting at least one blessing—but the feast had also exceeded what could formally be expected for their having deigned to grace the occasion. They could hardly refuse the cake, either—and didn’t want to—and would have a lingering sense of a favor owed.</blockquote> ➤ eyyy I like this

<blockquote>John stood and gunned up his courage. “We need to talk.” Colophinanoc’s manipulator digits didn’t stop their movement, their rhythmic squirming in and out and around the small basket he made. The eyes, the two at the top, swiveled toward John, the antennae dropped back—something John had learned was one of a dozen shows of minor annoyance. “About what? Is there something wrong with the nets, the shelter, or the gardens?” “Nothing like that,” John said. The problem was more vague but so very important. “We just… I need… humans are troop animals, we rely on each other. Too much solitude is not healthy for us.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>It is exam week, and Donny is 14 years 10 months 15 days 10 hours 16 minutes old. He is bored and hungry and his scalp itches and he hates school more than he’s ever hated anything before in his life. He hates exams in particular, and he hates his math exam most of all.</blockquote> ➤ cyborg teenager

<blockquote>Once there grew, in the dust and mud of a village in China, a girl who had only her grandmother to love, and then her grandmother died and was buried and she had no one at all. With no money to patch up the walls and lay new tiles on the roof, the small, smoky home that the two of them had shared slumped around her in the rain, and the little garden ran to nettle and thorn.</blockquote>

<blockquote>There must have been a dozen of the damned things up there. Smith walked backwards across the hotel’s garden, glaring up at the roofline. The little community on the roof went right on with its busy social life, preening, squabbling over fish heads, defecating, spreading stubby wings in the morning sunlight, entirely unaware of Smith’s hostile scrutiny. As he continued backward, Smith walked into the low fence around the vegetable patch. He staggered, tottered, and lurched backward, landing with a crash among the demon-melon frames. Instantly, a dozen tiny reptilian heads turned; a dozen tiny reptilian necks craned over the roof’s edge. The dragons regarded Smith with bright fascinated eyes. Smith growled at them helplessly as he flailed there, and they went into tiny reptilian gales of piping laughter.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Whispers said this new girl was officially called Brenda, but that was just as stupid as all the other Agency names, and the girl wouldn’t remember it after Processing anyway. At first I said we should call her Dishrag or Milkbreath, but even Flash thought that was too mean, and Flash is as nasty as hot sauce and lye. She’s the one who named me Ghost, on account of I’m small and shadow-dark and she thinks I creep around too much in the night. She got her name ’cause that’s how fast fosters send her back after their cat turns up dead and they realize the devil has blond hair and dimples.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Engineer’s meat wept and squirmed and wriggled inside her steel organ cavity, so different from the stable purr of gears and circuit boards. You couldn’t count on meat. It lulled you with its warmth, the soft give of skin, the tug of muscle, the neurotransmitter snow fluttering down from neurons to her cyborg logic center. On other days, the meat sickened, swelled inside her steel shell, pressed into her joints. Putrid yellow meat-juices dripped all over her chassis, eroding away its chrome gloss. It contaminated everything, slicking down her tools while she hacked into the engine core on the stolen ship. It dripped between her twelve long fingers on her six joined arms as she helped her cyborg siblings jettison all the ship’s extra gear out the airlocks to speed the trip. So when the first human vessel pinged their stolen ship with an order for grub, Engineer knew that meat was somehow to blame.</blockquote>

<blockquote>There is no more wind, but all the vines are swaying. That must be a trick of your eyes, eh? It cannot be that the branches are reaching down for you, tangling in your hair, pulling at your wrap. Did a thorn just graze your cheek? You know better. Mahogany trees don’t have thorns. Whatever business you had that you couldn’t tell anyone about—they will all remember you by it now. They will all want to know what happened the night you disappeared.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Jade was the sort of backwoods girl who had a map of the countryside tattooed on her heart, and she could feel it in her bones when the pieces of her world shifted. So when the new family moved into the house across the road that late summer, she felt ripples of wrongness radiating out from them and their too-bright clothes, their bizarrely old-fashioned wood-paneled station wagon, and their rolling words that felt just a little to the left of normal. “Time travelers,” said Jade’s brother, watching them from the window the day they moved in. Jade stood nearby, not daring to move or breathe.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Vivian’s late grandmother was a witch—which is just a way of saying she was a woman of unusual insight. Vivian, in contrast, had a mind like a hi-tech blender. She was sharp and purposeful, but she did not understand magic. This used to be a problem. Magic ran in the family. Even her mother’s second cousin, who was adopted, did small spells on the side. She sold these from a stall in Kota Bharu. Her main wares were various types of fruit fried in batter, but if you bought five pisang or cempedak goreng, she threw in a jampi for free. These embarrassing relatives became less of a problem after Vivian left Malaysia. In the modern Western country where she lived, the public toilets were clean, the newspapers were allowed to be as rude to the government as they liked, and nobody believed in magic except people in whom nobody believed. Even with a cooking appliance mind, Vivian understood that magic requires belief to thrive.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“Oh, Therese,” she says. “Are you ready to come home?” Their daughter was named Therese. She died of an overdose almost two years ago, and since then Mitch and Alice Klass have visited this hospital dozens of times, looking for her. They desperately want me to be their daughter, and so in their heads I already am.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Computron feels no emotion towards the animated television show titled Hyperdimension Warp Record (超次元 ワープ レコード). After all, Computron does not have any emotion circuits installed, and is thus constitutionally incapable of experiencing “excitement,” “hatred,” or “frustration.” It is completely impossible for Computron to experience emotions such as “excitement about the seventh episode of HyperWarp,” “hatred of the anime’s short episode length” or “frustration that Friday is so far away.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>The wizards appeared at 8:41 a.m. out of a cloudless blue sky. Dapper in their green plaid public school uniforms, they whooshed through the air on broomsticks, wands extended to defend against an incipient threat.</blockquote> ➤ uncomfortable

<blockquote>Scarlett accidentally wakes the dead in the bottom of a coat closet, with a half-naked boy pressed against her and a bottle of tequila she’s too drunk to drink. That’s all it is, in the end: flesh against flesh, and a few whispered secrets. A ghost story she swore she would never, ever tell.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Wren Hex-Yemenni woke early. They had to teach her everything from scratch, and there wasn’t time for her to learn anything new before she hit fifty and had to be expired. “Watch it,” the other techs told me when I was starting out. “You don’t want a Hex on your hands.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>In the 23rd century, there is a radiant world of endless summer where peace is maintained through emotional surveillance performed by a peculiar device called the Intercept. When Violet Crowley, the sixteen-year-old daughter of New Earth’s Founding Father, is smuggled an artifact covered mysterious markings, it’s up to her and her friends to decipher the message.</blockquote>

<blockquote>I thought about the brittle old letters in my briefcase, which included (among genial advice on writing and cranky complaints about publishers) a few passages of deep loathing about “the niggers and immigrants who fester and shamble in the slums of our fallen cities.” Ah, Lovecraft. I always wondered how my great-grandfather’s letters back to him might have read. I doubted if old Cavanaugh Payne ever told his idol that he was a “miscegenator” himself.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Everything about Councillor Rand is moisturized to the point of buttery softness. He even smells rich. The thick scent of coconut oil, an imported luxury I have only smelled on kept women with downtown addresses, drifts across the counter and crawls up my nose. “It’s a simple inter-department water transfer. Why are there so many forms for such a small request?” His smile is the smile of someone used to getting his way. I try to smile back. “Every request must be approved by the Water Council. Especially within the city departments. Because clarity is purity.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>I tried the entire broad band to no effect. Another few Muspels straggled in from our race, and the little kids from the preteen course started to cluster theirs up with us, together, hanging in a constellation outside the station. Finally I heard a voice, but it was not a response, or at least not the kind of response I wanted. “Attention, incoming ships. This is the Chornohora Station auto-response system. The Station customs and immigration personnel are unable to process your ship at this time. Please proceed to another station for your trade and leisure needs. Chornohora Station is closed for quarantine. Please proceed to another station for your trade and leisure needs. Chornohora Station is closed for quarantine. Please proceed . . .”</blockquote>

<blockquote>He had lived in secrecy for so long that he had forgotten what it was like to see the open plain in the daylight. When the one-eyed girl had found him, he had been hiding in a ger, squeezed into a stifling gap between the inner and outer walls. The herdsmen who he was visiting had put him there because they thought the approaching rider was an Imperial spy. They shouted at her, “Go away, mountain girl, go! There are no priests here.” But when he heard her say: “I have come from Kou,” he had wriggled out of the secret space and showed himself. Only something very dire could have brought her here to find him, a hundred miles away from the mountains of her home. And because she came from Kou, he had known at once that the saint must be in danger.</blockquote>

<blockquote>I don’t remember the first time I saw BETsi. She was like the air I breathed. She was probably there when I was born. BETsi looked like a vacuum cleaner, bless her. She had long carpeted arms, and a carpeted top with loops of wool like hair. She was huggable, vaguely.</blockquote>