"So, let me get this straight.” Petronius glared at the two Roman soldiers sitting across from him. “There was a bright light, and you were knocked to the ground, and when you got up, the seal was broken, the two-ton stone was rolled away, and the body was gone?” . “There was also a roaring [...]

"Glad that business is over,” Lucius said as he tapped the base of his spear against the huge stone in front of the tomb. . Justin nodded in agreement. “I just hope it doesn't cause a revolt or something,” he said quietly so the other guards stationed nearby wouldn't overhear. . “Nah,” Lucius replied. “Did [...]

By day, the town of Goshen was like any other. People went to work, children went to school, and families gathered to share a meal at suppertime. But after dark, everything changed. Doors were locked and drapes were pulled tight over windows. Because here, the dead ruled the night. They came from the ground and [...]

“Jax!” Celine pointed eagerly to her microscope. “Come look at this.” Jax put down the test tube he was holding and walked over to her. Thanks to the artificial gravity in the station, he could move quickly. Outside, where there were no magnetized floors tugging at the flecks of iron embedded in his uniform and [...]

As Celine peered through the window of her submersible, she could see the edge of Saturn's rings looming through the gap in the ice above her. “I'm approaching the fissure, Jax,” she said into her headpiece. “Ready to surface.” Jax's voice crackled in response. “I see you, Tiger Three. Come on up, Celine.” As the [...]

Every morning the people of the village would gather for the reading of the scrolls. They were called the doom scrolls because they always contained bad news. Though no one much liked the morning routine, they couldn't bear to stay away. They'd watch silently as the village reader carefully unrolled a scroll and read what [...]

All his life, Devon had been surrounded by walls. He had been born on the spaceship, just like countless generations before him. There were stories of a place humans had come from long ago called Earth, where there was open air and water that stretched as far as the eye could see. But that's all [...]

Aurelia looked at the tattered map in her hand, then up at the mountain. This was it. The place she had been searching for all her life, ever since she had heard the tales of the lost treasure of Cordoro as a little girl. According to the legend, the inhabitants of Cordoro had traveled far [...]

"There's no time,” the voice on the radio says. “You must come now.” I look around the cockpit of the spaceship—my spaceship. The control station, the thick, curved glass of the windows, the sleek engines quietly humming in the hull below—all of it is my design. I spent years building this spacecraft, painstakingly attending to [...]

For as long as Sapphira could remember, the world had been at war. For years she had defended her small kingdom against the fierce advances of the Hadyssian empire, and so far they had remained free, as had her sisters' kingdoms to the north and to the south. But every time her armies returned from [...]