Emily Wilson
Stories
6
Chapters
1,139
Words
357.3 K
Comments
0
Reading
1 d, 5 h
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The Number Man swept one finger over the touchscreen display. Two point six billion dollars here, a hundred thousand dollars there. Money was the blood of civilized society, its currents running through everything and everyone. Where money was insufficient, things withered. People starved, sickened and died, constructions eroded, even ideas perished. Where funds were plentiful, the same things blossomed with new life. And money was, in the end, little more than the product of collective imagination. A…-
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I eased the door closed, then paused to let my eyes adjust. Every window had the blinds closed and curtains shut over it. The room was dusty, and needle-thin rays of light caught the flurries of specks, making them glow. I grew aware of my surroundings, distinguishing dark gray shapes from an oppressive darkness. A desk sat in the middle of the room, shaped like a ‘c’, with a cushy computer chair in the middle. Four monitors were arranged at even intervals across the desk. Beyond them, three…
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One more step forward. One more phase in the plan. The wind was worse than the rain. I had to wonder how much of it was the aftermath of the Leviathan attack. The city had been flooded, and those same floodwaters had evaporated into the air, trapped within Brockton Bay by the surrounding trees and hills… how wide-reaching were the effects of that one incident? The downpour was steady, moderate. The wind was what turned it into a barrage, a persistent pelting of droplets that moved horizontally as much…
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The rain had softened to a light drizzle by the time we finished. My sundress was lying on the floor, a little worse for wear where I’d thrown it to the ground and used it to sweep much of the grit, plaster and sawdust from the spot where we’d laid down. I shook it, then called my swarm, let my bugs crawl up my body to sweep and brush my skin clean. The bugs made their way up the sides and back of my neck to my hair, then weaved through it as a mass, their bodies and mandibles helping to set it in…
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Had Tagg done me a favor, by getting me to think along these lines? For what felt like too long, I’d been overly focused on the Odd, to be taking someone’s words to heart, when I had so very little respect for them. I was in plainclothes, and they were clothes I wouldn’t normally have worn, which was sort of the point. The idea was to be hidden in plain sight, as I walked in the midst of the crowds downtown. I’d removed my glasses and regretfully donned contact lenses, slathered on sunscreen and…
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Regent’s base was in the midst of renovations. The exterior was tame, unassuming, but the interior was becoming something else entirely. The floor and walls were being covered in stone tile, suits of armor stood on either side of the doorway, and I could see ornate chandeliers at one side of the room, each individual segment separated from the others by extensive bubble wrap. There was a dais at the far end of the room, almost a stage, with a throne laying on its side on top. Four people were working in…
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Atlas started to falter. Compared to humans and other animals, bugs didn’t quite have the same ability to push themselves past the breaking point. Most bugs were small, and their bodies were hyperefficient, condensed down to the essential elements. If a bug needed to be able to leap, to lunge or to fly, it maintained a certain capacity and it didn’t generally go beyond that. It wasn’t absolute, but I’d found it was a definite trend. In brief, there wasn’t really a hundred-and-ten-percent. When…
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Tattletale stood at the very edge of the floor, with a twenty-five story drop just in front of her. The wind whipped her hair around her, and she didn’t even have a handhold available. Shatterbird had cleared out all of the window panes, long ago. She lowered her binoculars. “He’s gone. If he was going to pull something off, he’d want to watch and make sure everything went off without a hitch.” “I could have gone with them,” Imp said. “Listened in.” “Not without us knowing their full…
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If Accord didn’t know better, he might have thought this little soiree was located here with the sole purpose of irritating him. Wait, he The Forsberg Gallery. The building had once been a pristine, albeit distressingly asymmetrical construction of glass and steel. Now it was a shattered ruin. There was little rhyme or reason to the design, and navigating was something of a chore. To his right, as he ascended a staircase, there was a wing that jutted out from the side of the building, six stories up,…
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“Park there,” Stan said, pointing to a space off the side of the road. “We’ll be facing uphill, and we still have to unload the equipment,” Nipper piped up, from the back seat. “There’s a method to my madness. Park, Marshall. I’ll even deign to help unload and carry this time.” He got a glimpse of Marshall rolling his eyes, but the boy steered the van to a parking spot. True to his word, Stan was out the door, rolling up his sleeves. Didn’t hurt: the humidity was brutal outside the…
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