Thrust kicked, and Otryadyn Batu stole a glance at his companion. Even fearsome, confident Temujin had to be feeling the stress. But he couldn’t read the other man’s expression through the visor. Batu turned back to the viewport but all he saw was a circle of light-blue Mongolian sky....

Anatoly had delivered the mermaid the previous night, but Celtigar only discovered its existence after he got out of bed and went into the living room, where it had been dropped off. Anatoly must have used the one-time passcode he’d given him—the alarm hadn’t gone off....

I. Origins Fashion moves in a spiral, as demonstrated by the resurgence of the Restoratronist School of art. The school’s principles are a response to the Barbaric Era: art is about destroying it, mourning it, recreating it, interpreting it. And thus the art of the Restoratrons mostly concerns humans....

One I massaged my temples, and looked sideways out the window at the mass of gray buildings. From here on the 28th floor, the ground was invisible. The only green was a few plants dangling out of a window across the way....

Like every person who ever contemplated existence, I’ve wondered if the world was made for me—whole and new—this very morning, along with counterfeit memories of what came before. Recollection is unreliable, as are the records we inherit each day. Even those we made the night before—our jotted notes or formal reports, our memorials carved deep in stone—even they might have been concocted, along with memories of breakfast, by some deity or demon....

They told us we would be heroes. Sounds like a lie, doesn’t it? Sounds like hitting a dented, cracked shell to see if deep inside a pinpoint of light might flicker on. We worked just as well in the dark, but the Plowshares Decommission Initiative kept searching for high-profile jobs to win over the public, and when I signed up for their pilot program for nurses, I had hoped to do my part....