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Cressida is a medical anthropologist. She studies the history of how medicine has dismissed women's somatic experience—how symptoms that cannot be confirmed by available tools become symptoms that do not exist. She wrote the book on it. Literally. Chapter four of her monograph examines the diagnostic category of hysteria and how it was operationalised to contain the complaints of women whose bodies were doing things the instruments couldn't see. Now she is six weeks postpartum, and her body is doing something the instruments can't see. At her routine checkup, she watches the ECG monitor and sees two waveforms: her own heartbeat, and another. Faster. Lighter. Distinct. When she points it out, her doctor looks at the same screen and sees nothing unusual. The second trace isn't there. Cressida is pointing at normal sinus rhythm, the doctor says. Everything looks fine. But Cressida can feel it. A pulse, slightly lateral to her sternum, beating at 110 beats per minute while her own heart beats at 68. It doesn't vary with her activity, her stress, her sleep. It doesn't respond to anything. It simply beats. *Afterbirth* is literary body horror about what happens when a woman who has spent her career documenting the gap between medical authority and embodied experience falls into that gap herself. It is about vanishing twin syndrome—the absorbed sibling, the surviving twin, the genetic material that persists. It is about pregnancy as occupation, about the body as contested territory, about the question of who gets to live inside a body and who gets to decide. The novel unfolds through Cressida's systematic documentation: audio recordings, spectrograms, daily logs, the careful accumulation of evidence that she knows, from her professional training, will be dismissed until it cannot be dismissed anymore. It is about the particular weight of being a woman who knows exactly how the system fails women, and who watches that failure happen to her in real time. As the secondary hea

The Meridian Fetch is a seven-person long-haul freighter running a standard route between colony systems. Chief Engineer Paz Reyes walks the engine room every morning at 0412, listening to the ship speak in the language of pressure differentials and thermal variance. She knows every tick, every vibration, every subtle departure from normal. On day eighty-seven of the transit, a coolant fault in the secondary manifold leads Paz to a sealed door she has never opened. Hold 4. The manifest says consolidated machine components, Class 7, bonded cargo. What she finds when she opens the door is not machine parts. It's people. Forty thousand of them, in cold suspension. The cooling system is failing. The clock is running. And Paz has to decide what to do about both. CARGO is not a novel about chases or battles. It's a novel about a decision—how it gets made, what it costs, and what happens to the people who make it. The crew of the Meridian Fetch must reckon with what they've been carrying, who put it there, and why. They must also reckon with each other: Captain Sable Vorn's precise authority, Tomás's card games and hydroponics experiments, Wren's annotated books, Callum's efficient silence, Mira's navigation charts, and Rho's elaborate coffee rituals. As the cooling fails and the options narrow, Paz must do what she has always done: think in systems, identify faults, map solutions, calculate costs. But this time the cost is measured in lives she can count, and the solution may require her to become something other than what she has always been. Paz Reyes is a pragmatist. She has never wanted interesting work. She has wanted work that could be depended on. Now she has work that depends entirely on her, and the manifest was always a lie.

Bjorn was hanged on a Thursday for a theft he didn't commit. When the rope broke and he woke on the frozen ground beneath the scaffold, two ravens watched from the crossbeam above. Odin's birds. They had cut him down with methodical beaks and perfect timing, and they had left something behind in his chest: a cold weight, a tone that wasn't sound, a certainty about endings. Now when Bjorn touches someone, he feels their fate. Not the small fates—the daily fortunes and misfortunes—but the final one. The moment where their thread runs out. He feels it as a note in his sternum, an amber-not-amber colour that his mind cannot properly name, and a bone-deep certainty about when and how they will die. He doesn't want this gift. He didn't ask for it. But the ravens chose him, and now he carries the weight of every fate he touches—including his own. *Gallowssong* is a Norse fantasy about fate, weight, and what you do when you can see the ending coming for everyone you love. Set in a world of jarls and völvas, fjords and longships, it explores the Norse understanding of wyrd—not as prophecy to be fulfilled or subverted, but as accumulated consequence. The Norns do not decree. They account. They weave from the material a person gives them, which means fate can change in theory, but by the time most people encounter it clearly enough to consider changing it, the weight has accumulated so thoroughly that the projection is stable. Bjorn encounters fate directly, in everyone he touches, and then has to decide what to do with that encounter. He could isolate himself, touch no one, learn nothing more about the endings waiting for his village. He could warn people, though warnings from a man who was hanged and didn't stay dead are not always welcome. He could use the knowledge—to protect, to manipulate, to prepare. Or he could carry it, the way he carries the cold in his chest and the ravens on his roof, and trust that there is a shape to what he is becoming even if he cannot see it y

Noa Stern has been Archivist of the Ardent for six years. She arrives at the forward section's Sub-Level 3 before the ship's dawn cycle comes fully online, when the archive is quiet in ways that are not just auditory—more itself. She looks at the Hull Ledger with its thousands of names, every person who has been born on the Ardent and died on the Ardent in two hundred years of voyage. She maintains the physical record: four thousand square meters of shelving, cabinet, and sealed-environment vault containing material from the founding generation that has never been fully digitized. The restoration project was commissioned eight weeks earlier by the Council of Stewards: restore all QD-14 format data cartridges before further degradation renders the task impossible. It's not an unusual request. Media deteriorates. Noa has done restoration projects every year since her appointment. Except this one is different. On day three, she finds a palimpsest—a cartridge that contains two layers of writing. The surface layer: official technical records from voyage year one, exactly what the catalog describes. The layer beneath: something else. Not completely different—many passages are identical. But different enough that the differences are not accidents. The founding documents have been deliberately altered. Someone in the founding generation created an official version of the record that differs from an earlier version. And the earlier version has been preserved beneath the surface, in material that would survive long enough to be found by someone who knew what they were looking for. Or by someone who happened to be assigned to a restoration project at the right time. As Noa digs deeper, she discovers references to something called the "Endowment Archive" in Hold 7—a hold officially designated for environmental systems equipment, but which the original inventory listed as containing something else entirely: "cultural endowment, complete. Format: broadband cultural encoding, 12.3