Devon’s wallet yawned in hunger, its leather mouth hungering, almost pleading ‘don’t take what I cannot give’. He would need to be careful—it was all the money he would have for a while. Slowly, as though handling a fragile teacup, he put his wallet away lest the money fly out on its own and poof into nothing. As he finished his own money business with care, Ali came back with an enormous grin plastered on his face. In his hands at least half a dozen shopping bags loaded with toys. “Look!” Devon smiled. “Looks like a good haul, man.” Ali blinked. “ ‘Good haul’ means what?” “Oh…when you get a lot of nice things, we call it a ‘good haul’.” Ali, suddenly a patient and eager student, nodded. “Yes. A good haul for me. And a good haul for you.” Devon shook his head. “No, I didn’t get nothing. I…uh…these things are real expensive, you know? I’ll just…I’ll get my haul another time. But Ali was busy searching through one of his bags. Plastic and cardboard clinked as pleasantly as t

“Are you serious?” Devon put a hand to his mouth. “You don’t like?” Ali’s face suddenly became crestfallen. “No! I mean yes! I mean—“ Devon had become flustered. This was not something that he had expected, and certainly not in front of a crowd of salivating nerds. Here was Ali, a stranger that he had met only today, offering him his pick of a nearly $1800 limited edition collectible action figure. People in New Hudson killed for that kind of money. They killed for far less money, in fact. A good pair of sneakers worth $300 could make an innocent jogger into a juicy target. Life was cheap in Devon’s part of New Hudson—a steady influx of the desperate poor from other parts of the country, and from other countries were things were even worse, kept a steady glut of bodies for the city’s industries. Fast food, low income retail, cheap electronics filled with intrusive advertisements and sneaky fees to leech off the destitute and the outcast. Those $300 sneakers could be resold at a f

It began with a push. Once again, Ali was surrounded by an angry crowd, with someone screaming at him in a language that was not his mother tongue. In Al-Zhabai, nobody would dare speak to him in such a way—even the cousins who looked upon him with contempt would never stoop to such behavior. In the moment, Ali felt the most curious sensation—that his soul was leaving his body, watching it from above. Perhaps the shock of the push had killed him, he thought. Curiously, in this dissociated state, he didn’t seem to have any feelings at all, though his body was nearly convulsing in terror. Time seemed to lose its smooth passing. Suddenly everything became terribly slow, as if the convention and everything in it was moving through thick honey. Down from above his own body, Ali gazed as Tamyra, whose face had become a terrible mask of vindictive rage. She lunged at Ali— to snatch Devon’s gift, he thought. But Tamyra’s dexterity had vanished before the heat of her own anger, and whom m

Zayin’s head throbbed. He wished, more than he’d ever wished for anything in his life, that he could wake up back home, in Al-Zhabaiye. He missed his coffee, he missed his 17th story view of the desert, he missed the smell of the cedar paneling of his building’s elevator. All these little things he missed, many of which he had not appreciated before. His head ached until the pain seeped down into his shoulders. So tense were all his muscles that even the slightest movement ached. And it was well to be tense, because his ward, the PRINCE OF AL-ZHABAIYE HIMSELF, chose to behave like a childish idiot. Now Zayin and his security team occupied the hotel’s Executive Lounge, where they had extradited the Prince from a possible attempt on his life. The Prince sat on the couch with his head in his hands, refusing to look at or speak to anyone. One of his security team had thoughtfully prepared a plate of dried fruit and cheese. The plate sat in front of the Prince, untouched. Good. Maybe the

Since the construction of the New Hudson Convention Center, there had never been a moment quite what Marc Abramov experienced in that Executive Lounge. Since its actual opening some twenty years prior, there had never been so many people silenced all at once with just a few short words. Time seemed to freeze and Marc’s armhairs stood straight on their ends. The VIP…more like the VVIP in fact…was expecting an answer. Why did Marc make the VIP’s brother cry?He clasped his hands and began, “Well—“ Well what? Nothing. The words caught in his throat. Something about the young man’s look—and he barely registered as a man at all—struck him with a sense of absolute terror. The VIP’s gaze encompassed his entire being, utterly and completely, as though he were no more than a fixture of the room. Marc had a sudden, curious idea that there was a sword hanging over his neck. And if he did not speak very, very carefully, that sword would drop and lop his head clean off from his body. There