The Library

A night-shift bakery, four people who cannot sleep, and the year they spent keeping each other company between two and five in the morning. Nothing much happens. That turns out to be the point.

Trieste, 1919. A translator for the boundary commission is asked to render the same village's name four different ways in four different treaties, and to keep quiet about which one the villagers use.

A cancelled flight, a rented car, and eleven hundred kilometres of motorway between two people who agreed to share the petrol and nothing else.

Six years after the ceasefire, the man who ordered the Kesteven strike is a mid-level compliance officer with a pension and a parking space. Nnamdi Obi has a forged badge, ninety minutes of building access, and no intention of killing anyone.

The orbital foundry has run itself for ninety years without a single human aboard. When maintenance finally arrives, it has redecorated.

The glassmakers of Ard Rhun blow their vessels from seawater and grief. When a merchant commissions a bottle that will hold a memory whole, apprentice Oisín discovers the guild has been selling the same one for sixty years.

Interstellar salvage law is clear: a derelict belongs to whoever boards it first and survives the boarding. The Tessellate has been drifting for two centuries, and three crews have already claimed her.

Every summer for nine years they worked the same stretch of coast and never once exchanged surnames. The tenth summer the lifeboat station closes, and neither of them has anywhere to be at six in the morning.

The village of Thornfield has no mobile signal, no broadband, and one radio mast that has been decommissioned since 1998. It is still broadcasting. Sound engineer Del Achebe drives up to find out what, and the recording she makes is the last clean one anybody gets.

A surveyor freezes to death two hundred metres from a heated cabin with the key in his pocket. Constable Ida Brekke has eleven days before the pass reopens and the case leaves her jurisdiction, and everyone in the valley would rather she spent them somewhere else.

Every autumn the lamplighters walk the pass from Veiro to Sunder Falls, and every autumn one of them does not come back. Wick has carried the oil-can for three seasons without asking why. The year the road starts lighting itself, she finally does.