Dear Reader,
I was a mess as a teenager. Brimming with wishes and wants. Spoiled and grumpy. A misfit loner. Tiny, mad, and full of so many unanswered questions about this weird world. I’d always felt like I’d ended up in the wrong place. The wrong planet. The wrong time. That one day, I’d find my true home.
The only thing that made me happy was reading. I’d hide beneath my grandmother’s mahogany table with a stack of books, a plate of perfect pink-frosted animal cookies, and a glass of sun tea—with the right amount of sugar to suit my taste buds. I found my safe space in stories, away from all the other teens in my school, away from the mirrors, away from the comments.
I fell into fantasy and science fiction books to quench my thirst for other worlds and read as much as I could get my hands on during weekend trips with Dad to the bookstore and the public library.
But after a while, I started to notice that kids who looked like me didn’t get to save the world, didn’t get grand adventures through fantastical landscapes, didn’t get to go to magic camp. My imagination started to shrink. My love of reading dwindled. It felt like a light going out. I was losing the very thing that made me me. All because I was desperately looking for myself in the pages of the stories I craved.
For far too long some of us have been missing from magical worlds. But not any longer. Because the true secret I learned from books is that we all have magic inside us. We all possess the ability to command the failing spaceship, to break the powerful enchantment, and to change our worlds—both fictional and not—for good.
The universe is better because we are here. Because you are here. So let’s get started. Your grand adventure awaits.
Love,
Dhonielle
He had taken to making wishes whenever he could.
At the last morning star, on the edges of tarnished coins, along the cracks of bones that split in fires.
It was never enough. No matter how often or how aggressively he wished, his words were never heard, his pleas went unanswered.
And then one day, he learned why: wishes could not be made on innocent things, innocuous things, like stars and coins and clovers.
Because wishes were granted only by the dead.
* * *
The city of Rastre was pumping like a heart, people moving through its streets as blood flows through veins. It was the end of the day, and the sun burned copper on the horizon, casting long shadows out of the spires and rooftops around him.
Thorn waited in the shadow of a cathedral’s bell tower, crouched on the slanted roof with his arms braced on his knees. The wind blew, and he huddled deeper into his threadbare jacket. He’d have to get a new one soon.
Eventually the door across the street opened, emitting a tall, slender boy who couldn’t be much older than he was. The boy closed the door behind him, locked it, and headed toward the eastern sector.
Thorn waited several minutes to be sure. When the sun had bled fully into the earth, the sky deepening into a two-day bruise, Thorn slid to the edge of the roof. Jade lanterns flickered to life, casting Rastre in a glowing, starry light.
That light didn’t reach the street below. Thorn hopped down into that welcome darkness. Beyond he could hear the sounds of passersby, a child screaming in delight, the tinny first notes of a street musician.
Thorn popped the collar of his jacket and crouched before the door. He tickled the lock with his pick until it gave way and he could slip inside.
His breathing was loud in the silence that greeted him. Thorn swallowed and willed his heart to slow. He usually prowled the cemetery in the western sector, but one too many close calls with the groundskeeper had made him leery enough to try another approach. That, and he was getting tired of constantly washing grave soil out of his clothes and from the beds of his fingernails.
Not like this was much better—but at least it was cleaner.
The building was modest in size, large enough to contain two stories. The ground floor was used for receiving and accommodating customers. Upstairs was a collection of coffins and caskets.
But he knew, after a week of observation and more than his fair share of peeking through the window, that there was actually a third story. It was just underground.
Thorn moved past an open display coffin and a reception desk, around to the back, where a smaller desk sat covered in papers and parchment and pens. And animal figurines, of all things. Beyond that stood a door, and jiggering the lock rewarded him with a waft of cooler air.
A familiar eagerness filled his belly, the taste of magic already on his lips. He licked them and crept down a wooden staircase, feeling his way through the dark until he found a jade lantern at the bottom. It flared to life when he tapped it, illuminating a couple of autopsy tables and a rack of tools that could have doubled as torture devices.
And rows and rows of crystal capsules.
That was what gave off all this cold. Crystals were used for storing perishable goods, or keeping houses cool in the height of summer…or keeping dead bodies fresh.
Thorn approached the nearest capsule. They were built into the wall like drawers. He fumbled with the frozen handle until he could yank it open, pulling out the capsule’s sole occupant.
The man was waxen and stiff. His skin had become a light blue. Thorn had heard people speak of the dead, had heard words like sleeping and peaceful, but this man didn’t fit either of those. He seemed troubled even in death, his thick eyebrows lowered over sunken eyes, his mouth flat and unimpressed.
Thorn paused, looking at the freshly sutured Y-shaped line running down the man’s naked belly. He wasn’t used to this. Touching the dead, yes; digging up bodies, yes. He’d grown accustomed to the smell of earthy ozone and decay, the creeping mold and mulch of graveyards, the chill of stone and nights without moonlight.
This, though, was something altogether different. This was clean and clinical. It was crystal and chalcedony.
It was…wrong.
Thorn took a deep breath. He felt that breathing was somehow disrespectful, standing above a body that was no longer capable of the task. And what a strange concept, for this man to have existed only between the span of two breaths—his first and his last—to become merely a thing.
Well, there was still something inside him. And that was the whole point.
Thorn took out his pocketknife and flipped it open. It gleamed in the jadelight, deceptively clean despite its grisly purpose. He ran the knife over the autopsy incision, popping sutures and unraveling flesh. Much easier than hacking his way through dead tissue and muscle.
He peeled back the man’s skin, exposing a torso that had been hollowed out like a pumpkin. The organs had been detached and taken…somewhere. Thorn didn’t want to know, and didn’t care. Instead, the man’s body was lined with cotton, as if he were being turned into some morbid doll.