Desperation was the worst thing you could bring to the Emporium, but there was nowhere else to go. The Emporium was the only place that would have what I was looking for. It always had what I was looking for. So I brought my desperation with me, like an albatross around my neck, like a black spot.

You could get it all at the Emporium. But not for money; Mr. Handlesropes didn’t operate that way. Sometimes, one of the art addicts who dealt in the alley would come in and offer huge sums of stolen cash for one of his items — a piece of cured human skin bearing a rare tattoo, or the shell of a dodo egg hand-painted by a prisoner on the day before his execution — but Mr. Handlesropes would just laugh.

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The Christmas Abomination from Beyond the Back of the Stars

By Heather Shaw and Tim Pratt

“Mele Kalikimaka!” Uncle Ray shouted as Trish rushed down the steps from the little plane, sucking in great gasps of island air. The plane smelled like the trapped farts of three boys (maybe four; she wasn’t sure if the pilot had farted or not). The air here was humid and smelled of salt, which was better, but weird. Trish squinted around: palm trees, blue skies, the distant engulfing ocean. It was the opposite of a winter wonderland.

“That’s how you say ‘Merry Christmas’ in Hawaiian,” Ray added helpfully.

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Six Jobs

By Tim Pratt

1.   Exterminator’s Helper

I was eleven when a little man with watery eyes who blinked and sniffed all the time shuffled into my classroom, moving carefully, not brushing up against any desks or people. My teacher stood frozen with her hand pointed at a map of Africa, and the kids all around me were unnaturally still, too, stuck in whatever moment they’d been caught in when time stopped: note-passing, nose-picking, empty-space-gazing.

I held my breath at first, hoping this strange person in the gray suit looking at a scrap of paper in his hand wouldn’t realize I was still conscious, still capable of movement. I didn’t know what he was, or what was happening, but I’d read a lot of books and seen a lot of shows about fairies and monsters and magic, and being in the middle of a story like that was so scary I was afraid I’d wet myself.

He squinted around, peered in my direction, and bustled over. “You’re . . .” A glance at the paper. “Makayla?”

“Kayla,” I whispered.

A brisk nod. “Never saw the point of nicknames, but whatever makes you happy. I’m Sigmund. I need your help. Actually, all your friends and . . . so on . . . here at school need your help.” He rubbed at his nose and sniffled more. I wondered if he had a cold. “It’s not quite a save-the-world thing, but you can save this little part of your world. Won’t that be, um, fun?”

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All of the Cuddles With None of the Pain

By J. J. Roth

The Chaos Village – Part 2

By M.K. Hutchins

Sarsa was cooking some kind of coarse flatbread — it appeared to be made of wild roots and ground wild seeds — on a griddle slanted up toward the storage pit. Her hut was mostly empty otherwise, packed up into neat baskets still sitting outside the door. When she flipped a flatbread, it fell slightly sideways, hitting the tilted griddle squarely. The smoke didn’t rise straight up, but at an angle away from the storage pit and out the narrow window. That explained the lack of soot stains on the ceiling.

She didn’t look up as Rob stepped off the ladder. “Are you ready to apologize, young lady?”

“I’m not a young lady.”

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The Chaos Village — Part 1

By M.K. Hutchins

The ground under Rob’s feet shifted from sand to jagged shale and back again. The mountains folded into valleys, then spiked into cliffs. The green clouds turned into triangles and tried to stab him in the back, but crumpled and fell off.

Rob turned another page in his notebook, skimming his research notes. Thanks to the natural Order present in all humans, his own body and the things he held didn’t randomly transform in the Chaos. But despite pages and pages of lovely charts and neatly-labeled columns, he couldn’t say much more about Chaos than that.

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The Thirty-Seven Faces of Tokh-Bathon

by Effie Seiberg

I’ve counted eleven thousand, six hundred and fifty-two tiny soldiers carved in marble relief on the outer walls that ring the temple, though I’ve only named seventeen of them. Each one has a pointed headpiece, a carved cloth sampot, and at least one weapon. In preparation for the Reason Ritual I must polish them all, Baaun Oupom had said, and I cannot afford to anger him again.

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