Ivy and Bat LLC

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

We dropped into the monorail bunk like ghosts. The entrance was a shredded seam in the old LAX overpass—an angry, jagged rent where...

The briefing was a map of bones. Serah's files gave me coordinates over a honeycomb of shipping lanes and ghostly transit lines. Pod-3's...

The long table filled the room like a sacrament. The holographic city in its center blinked and breathed under the hands of several...