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Playa smelled like old summers and new rot. The waves beat a hollow time against the broken seawall, coughing glass and driftwood out of the surf and spitting them across the sand. We followed Lenore’s spoor not by footsteps—she moved in a way meant to confuse tracks—but by the small things she left: a curl of black ribbon snagged on a rusted lamppost, a smear of violet paint along a stair handrail, the faint, oily scent of pipe-smoke that her people liked to mask themselves

Book cover for the science fiction short story Neon Ashes by Tabz Jones Prologue Neo-Noir City never slept. It pulsed. From the...