[Exhibit 1: Scientific betrayal, witnessed in an illegally inhabited shipping container.]
My stolen satellite reception sputters, but not enough to hide the truth. I would know her face behind the fluttering colors of an ineptly stolen signal; I would know it dirt streaked in the dark over any hundred pilfered graves.
“I started with a firm foundation,” she explains, her voice bright and jarring. Approachable. “It took several years sifting through Oxford Museum's deep storage, but I was eventually able to rediscover the foot of the last stuffed Dodo.”
The camera, as they say, loves her. But I have made a study of our long acquaintance. A lie brackets her false-friendly mouth. Tension pulls at the corner of her masquerade eyes. The newly resurrected dodo—if one can call a bastardization of proper necromancy such a thing—bobbles around the coastal woodland simulation. It bumps twice into Elizabeth’s pant leg. Her nostrils betray her, flaring with each bumbling brush.
Radio Petrichor by E.M. Linden
Inaccurate Necromancy, A Tapestry by Crystal Lynn Hilbert
Drought Mermaids by Lucero Valdovinos
no one can kiss you wrong if you're dead by Temidayo Okun
Soot by Abdulkareem Abdulkareem
After they blasted your home planet to shrapnel by P. H. Low