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Nebula Award winning novelette.

A Human Stain by Kelly Robson is a disturbing horror novelette about a British expatriate at loose ends who is hired by her friend to temporarily care for his young, orphaned nephew in a remote castle-like structure in Germany.

This story is included in The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Ten (2018), edited by Ellen Datlow and Nebula Awards Showcase 2019, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Lana Baker is Aldgate's finest scribe. She has a sharp pen and an even sharper wit. Gregarious, charming, and ever so eager to please, she agrees to deliver a message for another lovely scribe in exchange for kisses and ends up getting sent to Low Parliament by a temperamental fairy as a result. There, she transcribes the endless circular arguments of Parliament. Due to long-standing tradition, a hung vote will cause Parliament to flood Aldgate, killing every human in Aldgate. Things become especially precarious as corpses begin to pile up. Lana must rely on an unlikely pair of comrades--Bugbite, the curmudgeonly fairy and Eloquentia, the bewitching human deputy--to save humanity (and maybe even woo Eloquentia) come hell or high water.

A professional caregiver's commute takes an unsettling detour when car trouble forces her to pull over on the highway, where she begins receiving distressing phone calls from strangers...

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor.

Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Clarkesworld, Issue 101, February 2015, and can also be found in the anthologies:

• In the Shadow of the Towers: Speculative Fiction in a Post-9/11 World (2015), edited by Douglas Lain
• The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2016, edited by Paula Guran
• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection (2016), edited by Gardner Dozois
• Clarkesworld Year Nine: Volume One (2018), edited by Sean Wallace and Neil Clarke
• Not One of Us: Stories of Aliens on Earth (2018), edited by Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story origianlly appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 2015. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 1 (2016), edited by Neil Clarke.

Nebula-nominated Novella

"Waters of Versailles" is a charming novella of court intrigue in 1738 Versailles as a clever former soldier makes his fortune by introducing a modern water system (and toilets) to the ladies of the palace. He does this with magical help that he may not be able to control.

Read this story for free online at Tor.com.

This short story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 22, May-June 2018.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny.

Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Aurora Award-nominated Novella

In 2267, Earth has just begun to recover from worldwide ecological disasters. Minh is part of the generation that first moved back up to the surface of the Earth from the underground hells, to reclaim humanity's ancestral habitat. She's spent her entire life restoring river ecosystems, but lately the kind of long-term restoration projects Minh works on have been stalled due to the invention of time travel. When she gets the opportunity take a team to 2000 BC to survey the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, she jumps at the chance to uncover the secrets of the shadowy think tank that controls time travel technology.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Infinity's End (2018), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Four (2019), edited by Neil Clarke, The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2019, edited by Rich Horton, and The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume Thirteen (2019), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

This novelette originally appeared in Clarkesworld, Issue 128, May 2017. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3 (2018), edited by Neil Clarke, and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection (2018), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Clakresworld.