A Stick Of Clay, In The Hands Of God, Is Infinite Potential

Clarkesworld, May 2020. 10,700 words

To the pilot, Phoenix smells like blood. Or at least the mech smells like the pilot’s mouth tastes every time it bites down and the copper floods in, so that’s close enough. It’ll have to do. The pilot likes it better in here than out there anyway, because outside the pilot has a troublesome body that bleeds when cut and won’t listen to what it wants, but in here the pilot has no body and no shape, only Phoenix-shape, and Phoenix is shaped like a knife, or a missile, or a swift punch, something meant to rend and destroy. Phoenix bends the shape of the universe to its will. 

Gender, God, and giant robots. Stick is a lab-grown soldier who knows nothing but life as the pilot of Phoenix, a deadly weapon in a holy war. But Stick is also devoted to Versus, the young woman who forms the mech’s living heart. When Versus pushes their team to do the unthinkable, Stick must choose between duty & obedience, or following her into rebellion.

Circus Girl, the hunter, and Mirror Boy

Tor.com, January 2019. 9,800 words

“Fuck off,” I said, to which Shane went, “Uh, what?”

“Nothing.” I shuffled away from the mirror and flounced down next to the dining table, trying not to breathe too harshly. After ten years spread over the tumult of late adolescence and early adulthood, I had thoroughly convinced myself that my year with Mirror Boy was all made up, an artifact of a traumatized mind. A coping mechanism. But I was better now. The broken girl I used to be had grown up into a functional adult. Why had he come back?

A finalist for Best Novelette in the inaugural Ignyte awards. As an orphaned sixteen-year-old, Lynette was haunted by the ghost of Mirror Boy, the drowned child who replaced her reflection. Ten years later, she’s built herself a new life, but all that is threatened when Mirror Boy returns, warning of danger. A hunter has come for both of them, and unless Lynette can figure out what’s going on, they will both perish.