Recent content by Tabelle
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All From a Bean?
The cat was already looking at her when she managed to lift her head. He was small. That was the first thing, and the second was that he was white, entirely white, with fur that looked like it had been brushed recently by someone who cared about that kind of thing. He stood on two legs at the... -
All From a Bean?
The grip tape on her left hand came off in a single piece somewhere around what she guessed was the four hundredth step after the landing, curling away from her palm like a bandage that had given up on the wound. Her right hand's tape had been gone longer. The stone under her bare fingers was so... -
All From a Bean?
The staircase widened without warning. One step was the same narrow spiral she'd been climbing for hours and the next opened into a landing, a real one, a flat stone platform maybe eight feet across where the inner wall pulled back and the outer wall did the same and there was room to stand... -
All From a Bean?
The rest had helped and then it had stopped helping and now she was climbing again and the difference between rested and not rested was getting smaller with every flight of stairs. Her thighs had joined the list. They'd been reliable for so long that she'd stopped thinking about them, the way... -
All From a Bean?
The tower didn't look like something that had been built. It rose from the center of the mesa in a single pale column, smooth-sided and slightly tapered, and it went up and up and up past the point where perspective should have started shrinking it and just kept going, into the low cloud cover... -
All From a Bean?
The northern highlands started where the roads stopped being paved. Tabelle had flown most of it, low and fast over the canopy with the weighted clothing pulling at her shoulders and her pack strapped tight across her back, and she'd felt the temperature drop by degrees as the green below her... -
Just Scenery
One year. Tabelle's thumb pressed against the scouter frame. The number was big and small at the same time, the way distances always were when you'd spent your whole life measuring them against roads you could drive in a day. One year was four seasons of freight routes. One year was three... -
All From a Bean?
The Quartz City Library had a basement that smelled like paper dust and old binding glue and something faintly mineral, like the air itself had been sitting in the dark so long it had started to calcify. Cool down here, too, the kind of cool that crept in through the floor and settled in your... -
Just Scenery
I can bring you the universe. The words hit her somewhere behind the ribs, in the place where ki lived, that warm full room she'd found at sixteen and never closed the door on. Her hand dropped from the scouter to the table and stayed there, flat, pressed against the wood like she needed to... -
Just Scenery
The question landed and Tabelle's hand dropped from the scouter to the table. Both hands flat now, palms down. He knew. Or Buck knew and told him, which amounted to the same thing. Four digits. She didn't know what a power reading looked like from the outside, whether there was a way to feel it... -
Just Scenery
Tabelle's whole body angled toward the voice in her ear. Her coffee had gone cold ten minutes ago and she hadn't touched it since the scouter went on. One hand stayed near the earpiece, fingers resting against the frame. The other lay flat on the table, thumb pressed to the surface. Mid-range... -
Just Scenery
The static came first, and Tabelle almost pulled the scouter off her ear because she thought she'd done something wrong. Then the click, and then a voice, warm and a little tired, speaking to her like he already knew who she was. Tabelle glanced at Buck across the table. "The one I told to... -
Just Scenery
Age 899 The manifest said four crates of drill bits and two replacement filters for a water recycler, which meant Tabelle had been in the GPM courtyard for the better part of twenty minutes, checking serial numbers against the delivery order while the afternoon sky sagged low and grey over...
