Cal had thought he was delivering good news, but Wyn's face told a different story. He forced himself not to look away from her pain, as his mother had taught him, but all his reassuring words stuck in his throat. Max spoke up. "It was the right call. Fair. Measured. Just." Not everyone agreed. The … Continue reading Sentence

"Any last words of advice?" Cal tried to keep his voice light, the words joking, but his mother saw through him. "You don't need advice," she said. "No one can handle this better than you." "You handled it pretty well when it happened to you." "No," Lil shook her head. "It wasn't the same. Val … Continue reading Justice

"Before I talk to him, why don't you tell me what you know?" Cal handed his uncle a cup of tea, surprised by his own calm.  Some of that was due to the message he had just recieved, of course. Wyn had arrived at the med center and was still breathing. The lab had already … Continue reading Motive

"They're really something, aren't they?" The two four-year-olds were focused intently on the village they were building out of their toys, paying no attention to their grandmother who watched with a smile. Dark heads bent down, sturdy legs crouched, quietly working in and around each other. A stack of books for the greenhouse, blocks for … Continue reading Murder

They weren't even really keeping it all that secure. The room was locked, but everyone on the biology teams had access. The ark itself was sealed with a passcode, but it was neither long nor complicated. It was the kind of security you used to keep people from accidentally stumbling onto something. Clearly, they didn't … Continue reading Consequences

Val was bored, which always pissed her off. She picked at the skin next to her thumbnail while the head of the zoology group droned on about the reproduction rates of apex predators and their prey. This was all stuff the previous generation had studied at length, but he "wanted to refresh their memories" as … Continue reading Survival

Lil couldn't remember the last time she had slept. Two weeks had passed since Roon's death, and they still had no idea where this new disease had come from or how to stop it. The medical reasearch team was starting to question whether the strange molecules they'd identified were even to blame for the disease, … Continue reading The Rest