“An Incubus. Or a Changeling. Yes, a Changeling! You can alter yourself to fit my current class. Carl, wouldn’t that be great?”

I’d never played it in real life, though I’d known a senior chief who had something similar designed to lob tennis balls great distances. The thing was really for dogs, but he’d used it to toss cherry bombs off the side of the cutter out onto the glacial ice of the Arctic Ocean. He’d let me do it once, and I remembered how far it’d flown. And at th

She’s not real, I thought. She’s a prop, an extra in a high-stakes game show. But that wasn’t true, was it? She was a real, biological creature. What she believed to be real was fake, an illusion. But she was still flesh and blood, an innocent. And she was dead simply because it was part of the story. Just like with all those prostitutes.

vaudeville

dexterity

“Don’t mess with the guards,” Mordecai said. “Don’t attack the NPCs. Don’t try to rob the stores. Don’t get drunk and pass out in the streets. There is no jail here. Only the death penalty. If you run afoul of the guards, don’t try to fight them. They are slow, but there are a lot of them. Run from them and into the ruins. They won’t follow you the

“This sounds much better,” Donut said. She did that little neck bob before she jumped up on my shoulder, and I knew she was overly excited.

“Don’t mess with the guards,” Mordecai said. “Don’t attack the NPCs. Don’t try to rob the stores. Don’t get drunk and pass out in the streets. There is no jail here. Only the death penalty. If you run afoul of the guards, don’t try to fight them. They are slow, but there are a lot of them. Run from them and into the ruins. They won’t follow you the

“There are saferooms in the ruins? We don’t have to rely on the villages? And do the villages have names?”