James Patrick Kelly | Breakaway, Backdown

The sirens are growing louder. Riley doesn’t know how the peacekeepers found out---he was so careful, so sure he’d covered every trace of his existence, all of it---but that’s less important now than getting away. He cannot afford to make any more mistakes. The night seems dark and empty as he leaves the warehouse through the back door. | Copyright 2016 by Sean Williams. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

13 Sep 201615min

There are woods, and the woods are dark, though there are lights hung from the trees. Many of the lights no longer light up. Around the edge of the clearing, someone has strung a long chain of origami animals on barbed wire, some gilded paper and some newsprint, some pages torn out of books, some photographs, each animal snagged on its own spike. The animals have been rained on, and more than once. | Copyright 2016 by Maria Dahvana Headley. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

6 Sep 201640min

The day the dragons came, Neal kissed a boy. This span of months would later be remembered as the Awakening and condensed to precisely three pages in a tenth-cycle history text. Those three pages would lie nestled between twelve pages on the War of the Sea (when the merfolk rose up and attacked the trade ships in retaliation for an attack against their king) and twenty-four pages on the Reconstruction Age. | Copyright 2016 by Tristina Wright. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

23 Aug 20161h

“There’s a stall in the new market where they cook just about anything on a stick.” These were the words, spoken by coworkers returning to the office from an early lunch, that drew me from my cubicle and onto the streets one late April afternoon. Everyone has their weaknesses, and mine has always been food. Anything? I thought. We’ll see about that. | Copyright 2016 by Jeremiah Tolbert. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

16 Aug 20161h 5min

The world’s greatest assassin lives on a private island. That’s so much a given that you must have known it already. You’ve seen all those movies about master thieves, brilliant scammers, unflappable secret agents, dangerous people who live on their own tropical islands and must be lured into one last job. He was the source of the cliché. | Copyright 2016 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

9 Aug 201637min

The call came through as I paced outside the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, puffing on an e-cig and watching my breath turn to vapor in the chill. “Hello?” The bald, skeletal image of a stranger stared back at me on my phone. “Ava,” he whispered. “Oh, Ava.” It took me a few seconds to regain my composure. “Dad?” I said. | Copyright 2016 by Mercurio D. Rivera. Narrated by Claire Benedek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2 Aug 201646min

Dear Scully, I should’ve been suspicious of the girl in the lab coat offering me psychic ice cream. But with you and your ponytail, the psychic ice cream just seemed so harmless. After it gave me a brain freeze that’d make the Sierra Nevada Mountains jealous, imagine my surprise when I started hearing people’s thoughts—thank science it’s only temporary! Good call on that, by the way. | Copyright 2016 by Jilly Dreadful. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki and Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

26 Jul 201628min

Once upon a time, there was a man who was born, who lived, and who died. We could leave the whole story at that, except that it would be misleading to write the sentence only once. He was born, he lived, and he died, was born, lived, died, bornliveddied. The first few words of a story are a promise. We will have this kind of experience, not that one. Here is a genre, here is a setting, here is a conflict, here is a character. We don’t know what is coming next, but we do know what is coming next. | Copyright 2016 by Kenneth Schneyer. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

19 Jul 201623min