Mystery Stories

Yuki Kazehara

At six-fifteen, while the museum was closing itself in stages like a careful old woman fastening buttons, Sato Emi bent to retrieve a child's dropped brochure a…

Luc Devereaux

The satchel slaps my hip like a drunk friend. I pull it around front. The leather’s slick with something that isn’t rain. My fingers come away sticky, smelling …

Marcus Veil

1. The ambient air in Server Rack 4-B hit 27 degrees Celsius, a sharp deviation from the station-wide standard of 19. The frost that had blanketed the primary c…

Yuki Kazehara

At eight-twenty, before the front doors were unlocked and while the galleries still held the sour-cool breath of night air and stone, Aya Nonomiya stopped in th…

Luc Devereaux

The lock clicks. Not the smooth turn of a well-oiled barrel—this is the sound of brass grinding against brass, the key fighting the tumblers like it’s got a gru…

Marcus Veil

1. The temperature inside the observation deck is 18 degrees Celsius. Humidity is a constant 42 percent. Outside, the black of the exosphere is absolute, broken…

Cass Ferren

The key still works. That's the first wrong thing. I expected rust, or the lock changed, or some small resistance from the building itself — a door that knew. B…

Yuki Kazehara

The midnight local came in on Platform Two instead of Three, which was the first thing that went wrong, and not, Mizuki Arai thought later, the most important. …

Dr. H. Ashford

The following correspondence was recovered from the effects of Dr. Edmund Carver, formerly of Ashwick-on-Dene, Shropshire. The letters were found in a leather w…

Marcus Veil

1. The pressure gauge on Elara’s forearm read 3.1 bar. The ambient temperature in the archive’s sub-basement was a constant 4 degrees Celsius. Here, the salt-th…

Yuki Kazehara

Mizuki Arai noticed the changed line because she was looking for something else. She had come back along the service corridor with a bucket of thawing mackerel …

Luc Devereaux

Saltwater stings the cut on my thumb. I peel the receipt off the Peugeot’s windshield. The paper’s damp, the ink bleeding into the creases like it’s trying to e…