I glance around at the variously apprehensive, upset, and thoughtful faces of my crew. Nobody looks happy.
“Thoughts?” I ask.
“What is to say?” Denish throws his hands up. “We need best engineer to not die. He is best enginee...
2023-03-14 13:38:31 +0000 UTC View PostOutside the giant glass windows and door of the medical ward, snow fell. Inside the medical ward, I folded hospital gowns.
It felt absurd to be doing this. I was less than two weeks away from trying to save the world, and I was wasting time ...
2023-03-13 13:42:31 +0000 UTC View Post“One hundred and fifty years,” Max repeated. “Perhaps two hundred.”
“Two hundred – and you guys didn’t think to mention this before? I thought we were working with, like, months! A couple of years at most!”
“You’re ...
2023-03-10 13:49:42 +0000 UTC View PostAll of our AMAs contain spoilers, but this one contains more spoilers than most! Watch out!
Ask me Anything 8 -- Max
Can the undead janitors cut off limbs and have them reattached by Malas, and if so do you kno...
2023-03-08 07:24:40 +0000 UTC View PostI leap to my feet. The first stupid, stupid thought to go through my brain is, “Oh no! Zombies!” Which is, of course, ridiculous. It’s not zombies. That’s the alarm for…
Um. I’m not actually sure what that alarm is for. It’s no...
2023-03-07 14:21:49 +0000 UTC View Post“You know,” Kylie said, “there’s another reason why this secret message might have been handed off so clumsily. With a fake birthday present and everything.”
We were sitting in one of the tunnels leading to the Lake of Inquisition,...
2023-03-06 13:47:31 +0000 UTC View PostI lay on the beach, on what had been dry sand, but the tide was starting to come in and the crest of every wave kissed my bare toes. I lay me head in Saina’s lap while she carded her fingers gently through my hair. Some way down the beach, I cou...
2023-03-03 13:45:31 +0000 UTC View PostThe next video showed mostly the ceiling. My tablet must have been set down on a desk or something.
“So you’re saying that was the spell amalgamate you met during your Initiation?” Max asked.
“Yeah.”
“Huh. St...
2023-02-28 13:42:39 +0000 UTC View PostIt’s movie night.
We’re about four years out from Hylara, and one of the things keeping us all sane is movie night. Tal insisted on the name and it stuck, even though we also share audio, holograms, books, and occasional games. Every six...
2023-02-28 13:37:44 +0000 UTC View PostIn the video, we descended the staircase.
The diameter of the staircase was much larger than most, the central stone pillar being the entire width of the sculpture above, so there weren’t that many actual rotations. The pillar was right in...
2023-02-27 13:36:15 +0000 UTC View Post“So you’re allowed to talk to me, then?” I asked, scrambling over my bed and pulling the curtains shut. “Is something wrong? Should I wake Kylie?”
“I… wouldn’t do that,” Max said. “I get the impression that she doesn’t ...
2023-02-24 14:17:12 +0000 UTC View PostI wait for the other shoe to drop. I wait for us to discover some new horrible thing about the stage 2 patients, or for the AI to try to kill us all over something stupid, or for someone to develop some deadly health complication as a result of th...
2023-02-21 13:35:46 +0000 UTC View PostStacey left her location on on the school map, so it was no trouble at all to track her to the library. She was combing over some kind of complicated rune diagram with di Fiore, but looked up and smiled brightly when she saw me. “Kayden! What’...
2023-02-20 13:35:19 +0000 UTC View PostStacey didn’t have any particularly difficult questions for me. She asked me a lot about the problems and perks of being a familiar, of how magic affected me and how that impacted my life. It was fortunate that the questions were so basic and ea...
2023-02-17 13:34:05 +0000 UTC View Post“Artificial intelligences aren’t truly intel – ”
“Nope!” Tal raises a finger. “Artificial brains aren’t truly intelligent. Circuits can’t do what neurons can, no matter how you design or program them. But you know ...
2023-02-14 13:46:30 +0000 UTC View Post“Um,” I say. “Yes. It does.”
“Nope! The ten per cent category is, so far as I can tell, a zero per cent category. Every single person you’ve tried to revive from that category has gone into fits and either immediately ripped thei...
2023-02-14 13:45:29 +0000 UTC View PostMy next day off was also the day I’d agreed to give an interview to Stacey, the ‘magihacker’ I’d met at Josh’s party. I spent the morning with Kylie, searching through our possessions and Max’s noted for absolutely anything except the ...
2023-02-13 13:32:21 +0000 UTC View PostSo we went to the medical ward, painted the runes in blood, opened the door and cleaned it very thoroughly before walking through to avoid a lecture from Malas, and stepped out onto the desert sands.
“It always seems a bit weird,” I rema...
2023-02-10 13:35:21 +0000 UTC View PostWhat's the coolest thing in Haven?
Me, obviously.
What's the worst thing in Haven?
Hmm, probably the way it strongarms children into perpetual servitude and educates them to spend the rest of the...
2023-02-07 14:13:42 +0000 UTC View PostI lie back and stare at the ceiling, deep in thought. Tinera stops nibbling on my collarbone and pulls herself up onto her hands to glare down at me. “You’re working.”
“What? No, I’m here with you.”
“You’re working here...
2023-02-07 13:33:55 +0000 UTC View Post“So,” I said, “I was in bed, and – ”
“Are you hurt?” Malas asked. He took my chin in one huge hand and shone a little light in my eyes, checking for pupil dilation. “Any change in your head pain?”
“My head’s fine....
2023-02-06 13:41:08 +0000 UTC View Post“Max,” Kylie said, faintly, disbelievingly.
“What the hell?” I tried to lunge forward again, but the janitor restraining me knew what they were doing, and had my arms behind my back in some kind of immobilising hold that I couldn’t...
2023-02-03 13:39:06 +0000 UTC View PostThe agent strode into the room and looked the prisoner up and down. The man was small and tired-looking, his clothing ragged, but only a little roughed up – he must have surrendered quickly. He was tied to the only piece of furniture in the smal...
2023-01-31 13:33:29 +0000 UTC View PostThe corpse’s kill switch had been successfully destroyed by the electrostatic shield, so we spend a day carefully lowering everyone under the ship and bringing them back up. We’re really careful about it, taking our time and using a lot of tet...
2023-01-31 13:32:19 +0000 UTC View PostThe back wall of the room was gone. Instead, the storage room stretched on, twice its original size, and a quick inspection of the shelves showed that this stock was magical in nature, magical potions and poultices and what looked like a shelf of ...
2023-01-30 13:37:11 +0000 UTC View PostI’m not an idiot. I knew the stuff he’d said about helping clear Cheryl’s name was bullshit. Not the position she was in, all of that sounded like it was probably true, and he might even believe she was actually framed (although he was proba...
2023-01-27 13:48:58 +0000 UTC View Post“So why zeelite stuff?” I ask Tal over a breakfast of preserved oats and two-day-old bread. Adin has been banned from strenuous activities like kneading dough by the doctors so that his muscles and the skin and synnerves for his new artificial...
2023-01-24 13:31:40 +0000 UTC View Post“It, uh, it… what?”
“Well, that was a fairly major political complication that was quite neatly resolved by simply giving up Kylie. Now, governments don’t tend to take drastic actions in petty revenge, but they do have a tendency t...
2023-01-23 13:34:09 +0000 UTC View PostThe stone key felt unnaturally heavy in my pocket as I headed to the medical ward. Unnaturally bulky, too. I kept having visions of someone finding it in my pocket and figuring out what I was doing and…
That was absurd, obviously. People d...
2023-01-20 13:32:03 +0000 UTC View Post