Search Worlds Without End

Hugo Award-nominated Short Story

An alternate history short story looking at decisions and consequences, and what it takes to pull the trigger.

This story was originally published at Tor.com on October 23, 2019.

Readd this story for free at Tor.com.

Rosa, also known as Red Riding Hood, is done with wolves and woods.

Hou Yi the Archer is tired, and knows she's past her prime.

They would both rather just be retired, but that's not what the world has ready for them.

When deadly sunbirds begin to ravage the countryside, threatening everything they've both grown to love, the two must join forces. Now blessed and burdened with the hindsight of middle age, they begin a quest that's a reckoning of sacrifices made and mistakes mourned, of choices and family and the quest for immortality.

This short story originally appeared on Strange Horizons, 18 May 2015, and was reprinted in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September - October 2018. It can also be found in the anthology The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, edited by Karen Joy Fowler and John Joseph Adams.

Read the full story for free at Strange Horizons or Uncanny.

A dark retelling of The Little Mermaid from the author of HUNTING MONSTERS

I suppose if this is going to be recorded somewhere for posterity, I should set the record straight. The ghostwriter will probably cut it all, but hey, it's the principle of the thing.

Dr. Cadence Mbella is the world's most celebrated scholar of the atargati: sentient, intelligent deep-water beings who are most definitely not mermaids. When Cadence decides to release a captive atargati from scientific experimentation and interrogation, she knows her career and her life is forfeit. But she still yearns for the atargati--there is still so much to know about their physiology, their society, their culture. And Cadence would do anything to more fully understand the atargati... no matter what the cost.

This short story originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November-December 2017. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2018, edited by Rich Horton.

Cas Russell is good at math. Scary good.

The vector calculus blazing through her head lets her smash through armed men twice her size and dodge every bullet in a gunfight. She can take any job for the right price and shoot anyone who gets in her way.

As far as she knows, she's the only person around with a superpower... but then Cas discovers someone with a power even more dangerous than her own. Someone who can reach directly into people's minds and twist their brains into Moebius strips. Someone intent on becoming the world's puppet master.

Someone who's already warped Cas's thoughts once before, with her none the wiser.

Cas should run. Going up against a psychic with a god complex isn't exactly a rational move, and saving the world from a power-hungry telepath isn't her responsibility. But she isn't about to let anyone get away with violating her brain -- and besides, she's got a small arsenal and some deadly mathematics on her side. There's only one problem...

She doesn't know which of her thoughts are her own anymore.

Cas Russell is back -- and so is her deadly supermath.

Cas may be an antisocial mercenary who uses her instant calculating skills to mow down enemies, but she's trying hard to build up a handful of morals. So when she's hired by an anguished father to rescue his kid from an evil tech conglomerate, it seems like the perfect job to use for ethics practice.

Then she finds her client's daughter... who is a robot.

The researchers who own the 'bot will stop at nothing to get it back, but the kid's just real enough for Cas to want to protect her -- even though she knows she's risking everything for a collection of metal and wires. But when the case blows up in her face, it plunges Cas into the crossfire of a massive, decades-long corporate espionage war.

Cas knows logically that she isn't saving a child. She's stealing a piece of technology, one expensive and high-stakes enough that spiriting it away is going to get innocent people killed. But she has a distraught father on one hand and a robot programmed to act like a distraught daughter on the other, and she's never been able to sit by when a kid is in trouble -- even a fake one.

Screw morals and ethics. All Cas wants to do is save one little girl.

Cas Russell has always used her superpowered mathematical skills to dodge snipers or take down enemies. Oh, yeah, and make as much money as possible on whatever unsavory gigs people will hire her for. But then one of her few friends asks a favor: help him track down a stolen math proof. One that, in the wrong hands, could crumble encryption protocols worldwide and utterly collapse global commerce.

Cas is immediately ducking car bombs and men with AKs -- this is the type of math people are willing to kill for, and the U.S. government wants it as much as the bad guys do. But all that pales compared to what Cas learns from delving into the proof. Because the more she works on the case, the more she realizes something is very, very wrong... with her.

For the first time, Cas questions her own bizarre mathematical abilities. How far they reach. How they tie into the pieces of herself that are broken -- or missing.

How the new proof might knit her brain back together... while making her more powerful than she's ever imagined.

Desperate to fix her fractured self, Cas dives into the tangled layers of higher mathematics, frantic for numerical power that might not even be possible -- and willing to do anything, betray anyone, to get it.

Cas Russell, antisocial mercenary, has decided to Fight Crime. With capital letters, like in one of her friend's comic books.

After all, she has a real-life superpower: with her instantaneous mathematical ability, she can neuter bombs or out-shoot an army. And it's Cas's own fault violence has been spiking in the world's cities lately -- she's the one who crushed the organization of telepaths that had been keeping the world's worst offenders under control. Now every drive-by or gang shooting reminds Cas how she's failed, and taking out these scumbags one at a time is never going to be enough.

She needs to find a way to stop all the violence. At once.

But Cas's own power has a history, one she can't remember -- or control. A history that's creeping into the cracks in her mind and fracturing her sanity... just when she's gotten herself on the hit list of every crime lord on the West Coast.

Cas isn't going to be able to save the world. She might not even be able to save herself.

In this prequel novelette to the critically acclaimed THE WATER OUTLAWS, nine-year-old Li Li is introduced to a web of community secrets and family intrigue when she helps her mother...

Read the full story for free at Tor.com

In the jianghu, you break the law to make it your own.

Lin Chong is an expert arms instructor, training the Emperor's soldiers in sword and truncheon, battle axe and spear, lance and crossbow. Unlike bolder friends who flirt with challenging the unequal hierarchies and values of Imperial society, she believes in keeping her head down and doing her job.

Until a powerful man with a vendetta rips that carefully-built life away.

Disgraced, tattooed as a criminal, and on the run from an Imperial Marshall who will stop at nothing to see her dead, Lin Chong is recruited by the Bandits of Liangshan. Mountain outlaws on the margins of society, the Liangshan Bandits proclaim a belief in justice?for women, for the downtrodden, for progressive thinkers a corrupt Empire would imprison or destroy. They're also murderers, thieves, smugglers, and cutthroats.

Apart, they love like demons and fight like tigers. Together, they could bring down an empire.